The Teach a Child School; standardize opportunity not exams

The Teach a Child School, Lahore, video was being shared around yesterday.

Much like the 1 Rupee school profiled in Karachi last year, this school also aims to empower its students, charging an honorific Rs 5 a month, so that students claim ownership over their experiences.

A more detailed profile of the school from its website:

Support:TAC: Teach A Child School System, Lahore, Pakistan (low-res version)

A lot of the points that come up in these sort of interventions and efforts has a lot to do with motivating students, building aspirations, involving teachers and parents in learning and developing an enabling environment. It really pulls the rug from beneath the single point agenda of all political debate on education; the now ubiquitous goal to "standardize" education.

One comment that is notable from the profile is above is about giving students from vulnerable backgrounds, similar opportunities as those from affluent backgrounds.

Now, we should do what we can to support such organizations. The students that come out of these schools will definitely have advantages amongst their peers who attend public schools. However, when we talk about doing our best to help students from poorer backgrounds in general, standardizing education and exams is the last of what should be our concern. This school may be offering better opportunities within its four walls, but what happens once they leave the school?

Whenever one profiles successful interventions in education, you see children accommodated, their needs analysed and provided for and their unique circumstances considered. If we had a standardized curriculum, that would ignore individual circumstances which would do more harm than good.

Supporting campaigns and NGOs is well and good. Granted these help, but actual change of any nature wont come until the children profiled above are not only able to access the same education as their affluent peers, but are able to access support such as tutoring, admission test preparation, work placements and internships, guidance for university application etc.

Its the inequality in opportunity that needs to be reduced, and access to opportunity "standardised". 

In the mean time, we should all support the Teach a Child School and similar initiatives. But also remember that putting kids in brick and mortar schools, and giving them uniforms to wear will help, however, wider society is very unequal; while these kids make their way through school, those at the top are increasing the gap at an accelerating rate.

And just to be clear dumbing everyone down in the name of equality is not the solution either! 

UPDATED: Tested to limits: Why testing is overrated in schooling

One of the favoured opinions in Pakistan nowadays is that education should be about merit. Of course merit is well and good, however, that in itself is not good enough. Students from different, social, linguistic, geographical and economic backgrounds have various advantages and disadvantages that a pure meritocracy cannot account for. This allows a certain, often narrow, social elite to monopolize areas of influence dominated by certain educational qualifications and backgrounds. That is, in cases where educational achievement actually contributes to professional success. 

Further, the arguments surrounding merits and achievement comes down to testing. Now its the emphasis on testing that I want to deal with in this post. 

Gaining good grades and scoring high marks acts as a proxy to judge intellectual and academic ability. That does not mean that good marks is always equal to academic success. 

The following Al Jazeera report from Hong Kong illustrates the unbelievable pressure students have to face during their schooling. Many in Pakistan would argue that this is a system that we should emulate. "Disciplined" students spending their days studying and carefully managing their times. As a teacher and someone who has studied in Hong Kong and currently teach some Hong Kong students, the cost of this system far out way its benefits. Thankfully, the Hong Kong authorities have also come to the same conclusion and changes and reforms have become. If you ever wanted to see the direction in which education should not progress towards, have a look below:

The same emphasis on textbook and syllabus based learning, uni dimensional and focused on passing exams is a common feature across East Asia. We see it in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China. In Japan, parents pay upto $5000 to get into what are essentially tutorial centres which focus on drilling in facts and figures, with no emphasis on critical evaluation or independent thought. 

The Economist recently published a detailed article on education in South Korea, where the government has finally begun reforming the system to emphasise values that will help students in the global economy of the year 2040, rather than 1900. A bit of a long read but you can access it here: http://www.economist.com/node/21541713

Testing has its place in any educational system. Life is full of tests and there is no point sugar coating schooling so that students are unprepared for adulthood and professional challenges. However, the emphasise on testing is misplaced. 

Education has also become a rallying cry for political figures in Pakistan, who are using access to education and its reform as a transformative, egalitarian process that will help provide justice to the majority of have nots. That's all well and good, however, I hope we don't follow the examples of the cases mentioned above!

Much, much more on education in Pakistan in future posts!

----------------------------------------------------------Update---------------------------------------------------------------
Just to build on the arguments above, let me take this as a shameless opportunity to plug my recent post at the Express Tribune blogs. The arguments in that particular piece nicely round up the discussion above.

However, the fact that for most people who will be reading this blog, the privatisation of education in Pakistan means that there is very little incentive to actually do anything about it. Education is a very nice talking point, but from a distance.

But even more worrying is my, ever cynical belief that, there is actually an incentive not to do anything about education in Pakistan. People love to talk about abolishing O and A level and giving their servants kids a chance at sitting the same exams as their own children, but is that really the case? Would you really want O and A levels abolished? Or only after your kids have sat their exams?

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is to consider education as an end in itself rather than a means to an end (employment). I also realise that  in a country like Pakistan that sort of thinking is neither rational, economic or pragmatic. That is why, private schooling is limited as a provider of "education", for it will provide what the market demands, and at the moment the market demands grades! Whether those "grades" actually translate to better future financial security and income opportunities is debatable.

A few people wrote in asking me what I mean by "creativity" in education and what should happen. Below is a an RSA animation of Sir Ken Robinson's talk on the need for greater personalization in education and the importance of creativity.

Perhaps the greatest misconception about "creativity" is that its not limited in application to "arts" subjects, as if that was somehow how a bad thing. More on that though later.....