What lies behind Singaporean educational success?

Interesting news from the educational realm in Singapore. Singapore’s educational system is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and its students routinely outclass other nations in test results on standardised international assessment tools like the PISA exams.

Intriguingly, Singapore has ceased standardised testing entirely for primary 1 and primary 2 students, and also switched to giving whole-point test scores and GPAs for students in older grades in order to de-emphasise competition. Singapore’s Minister of Education (now Minister of Health), Ong Ye Kung, has even stated that ‘learning is not a competition’ and therefore the system should not encourage students to think of it as such.

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it’s a surprising volte-face for a country whose education system has, until fairly recently, been incredibly keen on high-stakes standardised testing. And Singapore’s education system, despite its high outcomes, is not to be considered perfect. Students in Singapore’s school system often report high levels of stress, and mental illness sometimes results from this stress. But there are still a number of other things that Singapore’s educational system does well that we could stand to learn from.

For one thing, greater attention has been paid to the STEM subjects in Singapore than in many other countries. From an early age students are trained to think mathematically and approach problems from a practical point of view. Students are encouraged to retain their curiosity about the natural world by gaining experience in hands-on experiments and projects. This actually helps them to think more creatively across the board. I don’t agree with the late lamented Carl Sagan on everything (to put it mildly), but I do agree with him on this, which he was saying back in 1994: unfortunately, this retention and encouragement of curiosity and wonder in students is something that is being neglected in Western educational systems.

I will also note, to anticipate a possible objection to this, that Singaporean classrooms are infamous for their strictness, marked by demanding uniform codes, emphasis on teacher talking time, lots of drills and memorisation, and even corporal punishment in schools. Now, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment – or of learning-by-rote, for that matter. However, it is worth remembering that strictness, per se, is not incompatible with cultivating curiosity. In order for experiments to yield results worth observing, a highly-regimented formal procedure and cautious painstaking observations, often iterated over a considerable period of time, are necessary. Curiosity requires, and thrives off of, discipline. The two are not necessarily at odds.

In Singapore, all teachers employed by the Ministry of Education are represented by the Singapore Teachers’ Union. The unionisation rate for teachers in Singapore is virtually 100%: a proud distinction they share with that other high achiever in international education metrics, Finland. The median income for teachers in Singapore is about $8,000 a year higher than in the US, despite American GDP per capita being $4,000 per year more than Singapore’s. In general, teachers who are unionised are better-compensated, better-supported and happier, which leads to higher achievement and more consistent outcomes for students.

The other thing that Singapore does well – and the thing which seems to receive the least attention in English-language media on Singapore’s education system – is the fact that there has been a sustained, decades-long push for collaborative educational models in Singapore. The recently-voiced sentiment of Mr Ong Ye Kung that education should not be a competition actually has long standing and precedent in the city-state, as the collaborative model was first introduced around 1985 and has been elaborated upon ever since. Students are encouraged to work together in groups to solve problems rather than compete against each other or hide their results from each other.

The cohort of kids that took the test this past year were raised from primary 1 in an environment that encourages teamwork, collaborative problem-solving, and the understanding that ‘I do well when we all do well’. This is important because the PISA exam, as well as having questions formatted to gauge individual performance, also has a collaborative problem-solving section. But the results would seem to indicate that even on the individual questions, the collaborative problem-solving model of approaching science, engineering and math enhances the results. Human beings are social creatures – and children are no exception! We are often at our best when we are able to learn and discover together, as part of a team. And our experiences with team learning can often help us frame or approach questions creatively even when we’re left on our own to answer them.

To reiterate: Singapore’s school system has definite problems. However: the cultivation of scientific curiosity; the insistence on student discipline; the high unionisation rate and strong collective bargaining stance of teachers; and the strong emphasis on collaborative problem-solving – these are all things that the American school system should learn from and try (within reasonable boundaries) to emulate. Particularly the latter two: strong teachers’ unions and collaborative learning.

Realism and the pelvic issues, part 7: bodies, chains, sets and means

So I recently finished reading the Timæus and Critias, and I’ve needed some time to digest them both because there’s a lot there that I’m sure that I just didn’t get. Moreover, I’m still bent on going back to the Avesta when I’m done with the Laws, because I really want to understand where Plato’s mythopœic sensibilities come from, and also to understand how radical they are when compared to other, more mainstream Classical Greek thinkers. I still think Aristotle was wrong about Persia, and Plato was – if not wholly right about Persia, then at least less wrong. Indeed, if we look at Plato’s placing of the myth of Atlantis into the mouth of Critias (who was one of the Thirty Tyrants of whose crimes Socrates was considered guilty-by-association), it becomes a little clearer (if it wasn’t already from the Funeral Oration) that Plato is not altogether a fan of the Athenian tendency to juxtapose its virtues against both Persia’s vices and her might.

But that’s very far from the most interesting or frustrating aspect of the Timæus, which at times reads like a tract on traditional Chinese medicine. The descriptions of the human body would find a number of places of agreement with the modern practitioners of TCM: the importance of the bodily fluids, the impact of the five (in Plato’s case, four) elements on each of the major organs, the hierarchical orientation of the parts of the body to each other. But the Timæus is not only a medical tract, just as TCM itself is not solely about medicine as it’s understood in the modern West. The Timæus presents us with a series of ‘pictures’ of the human being, going down to the level of the human being’s ‘constituent elements’ – or even past that, to the level of certain axiomatic geometric truths.

I still really don’t know what Plato was getting at here, and I fear to get something dangerously and egregiously wrong. So, if you’ll take the word of one such as me, struggling to get a clearer ‘picture’ myself and feeling at times a bit like a blind man groping around in the dark, it seems like Plato’s Timæus was putting forward, as I was saying above, a series of images of the human ‘form’ (with the full depth and range of meaning of the word implied): the idea that the human being is made up of irreducible constituent elements; the idea that the human being is a living biological unity of the elements and functions only when the organs retain a balance between the four (without excess or dearth); and then the idea that the human being also has a reasoning soul which abides within (but at the same time transcends) the material elements. I think this may be where we get the idea of a ‘chain of being’: each of the higher levels participates completely in the levels below it. It’s a mathematical set, in other words, which includes everything in the set beneath. And it’s only by a transcendental ‘effort’ (note how man is biologically-oriented to ‘face forward’, and the effort to overcome the gap between the matters of biology and the matters of the soul is likened to the effort needed to turn ourselves around physically!) that the lower levels are able to perceive or participate in the higher ones.

At any rate, I was discussing this Dialogue with another member of my church over coffee hour yesterday, and he directed me – wisely, I think – to examine the Timæus in reference to the Republic and especially the Phædrus. Each of the human ‘forms’ in the Timæus seems to correspond with one segment of Plato’s ‘divided line’ in the Republic, which corresponds in perfect ratio to the ones beneath it in the same way the Golden Mean (1 : 1.618) would do; and they also seem to correspond with the different elements present in Plato’s cave. Sense-impression has less reality than the object of that sense-impression; which in turn has less reality than the mathematical ‘solids’ from which they are composed and formed; which in turn have less reality than the form of the good.

Despite the presence in the Timæus of a demiurge, this is one of the reasons why I’m increasingly convinced that a ‘Gnostic’ reading of Plato doesn’t make much sense at all. Yes, Plato’s Socrates has us try to ‘forget the body’ temporarily, in the Republic – to get us to escape, momentarily, the biological demands of sex. He also has us try to ‘forget the body’ temporarily in the Phædo to reconcile us philosophically to the death of the body. But he is far from demanding of us that we ‘forget the body’ permanently! Even in the Phædrus, note, the virtuous philosophers who fall in love cannot escape the demands of the flesh; they merely understand the need to tame it, moderate it, harmonise the needs of belly and mating organs with the rede of head and heart. It’s worth noting also that in the Timæus the concern with sex (and at that, an ambiguous treatment) only comes about when the ‘picture’ of the human soul is presented.

Erōs, the divine madness, is indeed one of the few drives in the human spirit that can rightly ‘turn us around’ to an awareness of a higher ‘link’ in the chain of being. Or, alternatively, if left unharnessed, it can degrade us to the point where we’re no longer aware of anything in that chain, but instead ‘broken down’ past bestiality to our constituent triangles and atoms and elements. That’s one of the things that Socrates keeps bringing us back to in those three books, the Phædrus, the Symposium and the Republic. It’s the erotic drive in Glaucon that is seen to ‘save’ him from the fate of Gyges, but only by Socrates directing the desires of his soul toward something other than glamour, earthly splendour, mastery of others, libido dominandi, the ‘lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ (as the Gospel of Saint John would have it). We have to erotically desire ‘the good’ (justice, in Glaucon’s case) in order to really see it for what it is. And that is not an apology for licentiousness. It is instead a call to treat erōs with the care and respect it deserves, and to somehow aim the (natural, present) wants of the body toward higher things, whether through fasting or through some other discipline.

Talking about the Timæus with someone who actually understood what to look for and where the really meaningful references lay, did indeed help me sort out a couple of things about it. Even so, I am well aware that there’s a lot there I didn’t get on first read.