There are teachers that I still remember as if it were only yesterday. Mr Lim, my English and Geography teacher, taught me to aspire for the lofty heights. "The higher you aim, the higher you climb," he would say, "and the higher up you will be even when you fall. Aim low, and when you fall, you fall right to the bottom. So, always aim high." There was also my Malay language tutor Encik Ahmad who made learning fun and taught me that there was nothing too difficult if you only set your heart on it – not even learning what was then our first go at Bahasa Kebangsaan.
There are, unfortunately, teachers that I don’t really care to remember. Mr Thigarajan, my History teacher, used to walk into the class in his woollen sweater in our Malaysian heat only to proclaim that it was too hot to teach, and then summarily ordered us to take turns reading aloud from our history textbook, one paragraph per student until the bell rang.
Then there was also my Additional Maths teacher, a graduate from the University of Queensland, who declared that dy/dx is zero. I remember his response when I asked him why dy/dx should be equal to zero. His curt reply was, "When I say ‘jeelo,’ I mean ‘jeelo’!" To this day, I cannot remember his name.
I thank God for the laughs I still get out of my many school memories, and most of all for the Mr Lims and the Encik Ahmads who instilled in me the spirit to learn, and to learn some more. Yet, we didn’t make stars out of them. All that was almost forty years ago.
The unsung heroes
Zoom ahead to the 21 st century and little has changed that is good in the way that we treat our teachers. We live in the age of the ‘stars’. Day in and day out, the media focuses on the stars of entertainment, sports, politics, and the arts. There is, however, hardly any focus on the true unsung heroes of the 20th and 21st centuries – our teachers. As the Royal Bank of Canada notes in one of its 1989 newsletter, "Nobody ever got a Nobel Prize for teaching achievements." Yet, good teachers have become even more important in the 21st century than in the 20th.
We are now living in an evermore-uncertain world, particularly for the young. The emerging global economic order is making it more difficult for young people to make successful transitions from school to work. We are, some argue, heading for a global catastrophe of youth unemployment.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that if youths are to avoid falling into repeated cycles of unemployment and even poverty, we must equip them with the ability to thrive in high-productivity work organisations and the flexibility to respond rapidly to an ever changing economic environment.
In particular, we need to equip our children with the traditional three Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) plus Reasoning and Relationship skills, according to reports from the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President; and the International Labour Organisation.
Effective teaching and effective teachers
There are two important questions here:
1) How should we then teach our children? and 2) What kind of teachers do we need? The keys to effective teaching and effective teachers are to be found in the way God instructed Israel to teach its people. Deut. 11:18–21 states:
"So commit yourselves completely to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that as long as the sky remains above the earth, you and your children may flourish in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors."
To escape false worship and find prosperity in the Promised Land, Israel needed an effective and wholistic education programme. Important as they may be, the key educational inputs are not the quantitative inputs such as pupil-teacher ratios, class size and the availability of pedagogical materials. An effective and wholistic education programme calls for the best of human values because education is essentially about human values and interactions. In particular, Deut. 11:18–20 tells us that an effective education calls for:
1. A Clear and Shared Vision – God shared with Israel the vision of its children flourishing in the Promised Land;
2. High Expectations – Israel had to set high standards for all its children for they were required to know God’s word in all aspects of their lives;
3. Effective Leadership – for Israel’s education to be effective, they needed effective leadership on the part of the leaders and the entire adult community in ensuring that God’s words would be in their hearts, and in the hearts of their children, whether they were awake or asleep, going in or going out;
4. A High Level of Cooperation – the entire community had to work to ensure that God’s words were tied to their hands and foreheads, written on their doorposts and gates, and they were to always talk about God’s word; and
5. Complete Commitment – God expected them to commit themselves completely to His words.
In addition, a wholistic education calls for an emphasis on:
6. Religious Knowledge – knowing God’s word, and knowing it well.
We can sum up the keys to effective education as: a common vision, high expectations, effective leadership, community involvement, and commitment. Recent students of successful transformations of high-poverty, low-performing schools into high-poverty, high-performing schools have found these same key elements.
However, as Deut. 11 tells us, a wholistic education programme also calls for the teaching of the sixth R – Religious Knowledge; not in the sense of rules and regulations, but in the sense of wisdom to make the right choices in life, particularly in the post-modern age of relative values. Interestingly, in the world of formal education these keys are in fact not of recent origin.
Looking back, we find these same key elements at work in the early Christian mission schools in Malaysia and Singapore. In a tribute to these mission schools, the Malaysian Government states, "The Missions were also pioneers in education for girls and fought resolutely against conservative opposition and prejudice...
"It is a striking tribute to the selfless service of those men and women that they should have gained the ready confidence and affection of both parents and children despite differences in religion and culture", as cited in Rev. Loh Soon Choy’s 1993 paper, "Past Christian Contributions to Malaysian Education".
Similarly, Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew remarked in a 1980 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, "The missionaries did a good job in producing leaders... Christianity brought mission schools and they laid the foundation for an elite class of administrators who still carry the burden of the bureaucracy." More recently, the honourable Defence Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak paid tribute to the La Salle Brothers for their "deep commitment and tireless efforts of the La Sallian brothers, especially during the formative years of the country..." (The Star, December 29, 2002).
Rekindling the pioneering spirit of the early mission schools
How did the pioneering missionaries accomplish so much? Rev. Loh, in his same paper, argues, "What made them special was the fact that they were not just people out to ‘do a job’. These pioneers of Malaysia’s modern educational system also had a transforming vision…
They taught ‘the Three Rs’ (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic). But they also gave more by their examples of wholistic living, morals, work ethics, reverence for God, life, and sex; and respect for people of any race or creed, transforming values which no book education can give."
Rev. Robert Hunt in his 1993 paper, "Past Christian Contributions to Malaysian Education: A Response", argues that it was the ability to forge a critical spirit that was the greatest contribution of the missionary schools to modern Malaysia. In short, the early missionaries had:
1. A transforming vision for those they sought to educate;
2. High expectations as they sought to forge a critical spirit in the boys and girls under their charge;
3. Effective leadership by men and women who set themselves out as examples for their pupils and students to follow;
4. High levels of cooperation as they worked with the local communities to gain their confidence;
5. Commitment; and
6. Sound religious values.
A catastrophe of youth unemployment will be particularly severe in developing countries because "changes in the global economic architecture, including capital market liberalisation, have enhanced risks, beyond the coping ability of many developing countries (our emphasis)", as noted by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his keynote speech to the ILO Global Employment Forum in Geneva last November.
We can however minimise, if not avoid, the pain of dislocation by teaching our children the six Rs. To do so effectively, we need teachers of high calibre. We need teachers with transforming visions; high expectations for those under their charge; effective leadership by example; the ability to work with children, youths, parents and other teachers; commitment to carry through the task; and strong religious values to equip our children and youths with the sixth R.
This is a call to the Christian community to steer increasing numbers of our young people into the teaching profession so that they, and the Church as a whole, can rekindle the pioneering spirit of the mission schools and play a major role in transforming the lives of young Malaysians in the 21st century.
There are no stars here, and we cannot promise that the world will ever make stars of our teachers. But the reward in participating in the effective and wholistic education of all our children is seeing each of them shine as stars, as mature and responsible citizens contributing to the overall growth and development of a caring, and even prosperous Malaysia.
Who else better to teach the six Rs to our children, regardless of class, colour and creed, than those with strong religious values whose God is love!
(Dr Lee was a Professor of Economics at Universiti Malaya. He is temporarily residing in Washington, D.C. and working as a consultant to the World Bank.) |
