The Challenges of Education and 10 Rules for Thriving (Part 2)
It seems like the challenges confronting education today are the same as they have always been: there will always be a need for highly skilled, expertly trained teachers (notice I did not use the word professional); funding of schools and school programmes; and student achievement. These are only the issues from within. There is also having to deal with the increasing demands of parents who increasingly foist upon educators the responsibility of raising their children and growing them into a world that seemingly outruns anything that traditional education can offer; the class ceiling—where kids from lower-class backgrounds often lack the necessary access to prestigious educational institutions, which become key stepping stones to elite careers; and the encroachment of technology, or what I like to call ‘device deluge’ in the classroom (though my colleagues at EdTech will disagree). It is equal parts dystopia and incredulity that there are now camps set up to teach kids how to be influencers.
These external pressures often mask another equally pressing issue—the modern malaise of Mental Health for both students and teachers: the introduction of hybrid and remote learning in the past few years as a result of COVID-19 has made it easier for students to become socially isolated, doubling down on academic anxiety, a reliance on technology to mediate communication and socialisation, and removing valuable opportunities for student development. Because these are student-centric, they tend to foreground most of the conversations happening in schools.
What’s lacking from these conversations are often the additional burdens on teachers who frequently have to juggle enjoy classroom teaching, marking assignments, CCA matters, both student and parent administration, and many other varied school duties—here’s looking at you, Science Practical (True story: I once had a colleague who exclaimed to me, “I can’t believe I got my doctorate to watch students break their burettes.”). Moments like these may seem trivial, but they highlight the often unacknowledged, tedious burdens teachers face on top of their academic duties.
I neither have the capacity nor the expertise to provide solutions for many of the challenges listed above. I do take comfort that they are not New Problems. Since the 1600s, issues regarding class, social status, and even resistant to new technologies have plagued schools. In particular, those run by religious institutions were often resistant to educational reforms and innovation; ideas like scientific inquiry and humanism were especially seen as threats to the established authority at that time (usually the Catholic Church). Better that teachers are quietly exited with little fanfare today than to be put to the sword in Galileo’s time.
The 10 Rules for Thriving
What I do offer my students then, is a broad-based set of rules to thriving in a society that is increasingly shifting all manners of public and social life online. The rules are not wholly original—some of them I have obviously appropriated from elsewhere. An old mentor told me: good artists copy; great artists steal, and for the longest time, I struggled to understand what that meant. Today, I am fortunate enough to be in the largesse of far wiser and better humans than me, and most of the rules stem from their years of wisdom and lessons. The rest, are derived from my journey through life in this short time on this rock. The rules are also often at odds with each other, which I think is a feature and not a bug. The discernment to which rule applies when is an important part of the process (along with the friends we make along the way). I typically start from the last Rule (Rule #10) and conclude with the first. In between, rules are inserted at context- and schema-appropriate instances, to leverage Teachable Moments.
Before I introduce them, allow me to give a Singaporean context: Real-world Third Places are becoming much and more irrelevant to human flourishing, and in some areas, even under threat. The pandemic certainly did no favours to this (cf. see above), but I would also contest that as schools—at least in Singapore—increasingly become catch-all venues for all forms of student life, the experience of schooling dwarfs the entire horizon of their formative years. This warrants both cheer and caution—on the one hand, we as teachers now have both oversight and insight into the internal lives of our students: a healthy 87% of students in Singapore report that their teachers are interested in their well-being, a significant 12 percentage-point above the OECD average. While teachers generally don’t and shouldn’t aspire to replace parents in students’ upbringing, it necessitates that they are one of the most important figures in their lives growing up. On the other hand, this data can also be interpreted through another lens—have we created too safe a space that students now become too ensconced in a bubble vastly different from the harsh vagaries of the society they will eventually graduate into? I think that generally, this is the case. And this brings me to the first Rule I usually show my students:
Rule #10: You can do Everything Right, and still Lose
This is taken from one of my favourite franchises: Star Trek. It came from Picard, who said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: students who in a bid to outperform their peers in the Education Game, feel compelled to:
stack Co-curricular Activities (CCAs; or in the more common tongue, Clubs, Sports, and Performing Arts groups);
pile on volunteering activities which they either source for or scarier yet, create their own imagined, marginalised category to do so;
look for holiday jobs and summer programs (it is perpetually Summer in Singapore) for exposure and experience; and
participate in various STEM competitions at both the local and regional levels.
They do this all for the sake of their CV to improve their chances of getting into a Choice University, which to be fair, is the nature of the Education Game today. Note that I am not against competition, and Meritocracy is perhaps the best and fairest way of playing this game. But it is also worth noting that its biggest myth: that Hard Work=Rewards. I have witnessed students who honestly believe that they are entitled to greatness because they have invested in the work. Some do so with genuine intentions, others do so performatively because they know that that is how the game is played.
The fallout from such extreme competition is naturally severe. Ranging from a swathe of self-victimisation and externalising blame—It’s not my fault I did so poorly, it’s the schools/parents/teachers not preparing me enough, or the paper was too difficult, or the air-conditioning was too cold (yes, this was a Real Reason)—to frequent bouts of Imposter Syndrome, I frequently tell my students that theirs is an unenviable position to be in today. In my conversations with them, they often relate how many expectations were placed on them by others, how they’ve lived narratives not of their own writing, and how they’ve meandered through life engaged in the act of effortless perfection, where it is no longer enough to be good simply at academics, but to be seen as being sociable and having a demure and mindful personality, as well.
Of course, it takes real scuffles, cuts, and falls to realise that there is no blueprint to a successful and thriving life, something which in systems-oriented and efficient Singapore, is a hard pill to swallow. In their perpetual race to optimise everything, to become model students, they often reduce themselves to being perfect products instead. Rule #10 tells them to relinquish control over the outcomes and instead opt to focus on the process of arriving at those decisions, instead.
What next? Many of these challenges stem from how everyone has had the opportunity to receive some degree of formal education (Yes, I am aware that education access is still very unequal globally). The narratives students bring into schools are deeply personal, often shaped by their own trauma or experiences. When asked, most of my students wouldn’t wish to replicate the education they’ve endured. And this is what informed the genesis of these rules: how is it that with such strong school teacher-student relationships, and supposedly positive school experiences, there is still an upward trend of serious mental health issues? Rule #10 is also a reminder, then, to me in my teaching endeavours that teachers are also limited in their capacity to grow their students. Another colleague puts it succinctly: “We might not be the lesson they need to learn.” In my next post, I’ll explore how we can reshape these experiences through the other rules.
Till then, thank you for reading this far, and keep being the brightest star for others.