Pertinent Education For All

More thoughts cross my mind.

Technical and vocational education teach the skills one has to master to perform a task or job. Laboratorial techniques and retail services management are but examples.

Apart from the English language and the humanities (English literature which usually explores a whole range of human emotions and motivation) ,the social sciences (History and Geography) , basic Science and Maths (for example, computing the four basic operations) academic skills are not very relevant save for those who go on to become engineers and scientists.

Let me focus on just one aspect today, primarily that of the English language essay-writing topics.

Story telling or narrative subjects are sometimes not geared towards more personalised experiences. A good instance of more personalised topics would be to have pupils describe one sporting event they have participated in and to pour their heart out on the subject, rather than more asbtractly headed ones.

An essay requiring a pupil to espouse on "The Efficacy Of The UN In International Dispute Arbitration And Intervention" would probably have students reading up on the UN and rattling off a list of successes and failures it has had in handling global warfare or discord.

But someone who works for the UN (maybe on internship even) will be in a singularly unique position to write insightfully on the intricacies of round-table discussion, negotiation and opposition versus someone who just creams off information from a book or a magazine.

These are the kind of subject matter students should be writing on, from their heart and personal experiences. Not just solely gleaned from "reading and research".

But of course, we do need some of the "read and research" topics to have students understand and appreciate a whole spectrum of writing between pure textbook regurgitation or a personally experienced one and even a combo of the two.

Having said that, students within their narrow bandwidth of encounters in the real world, are perhaps unfairly expected to have personally experienced the topics they write on. They usually do not.

Education cannot just be remote, perhaps even alien , expatiation of Calculus or Optical Physics but an indepth look into how these can be applied meaningfully to our day-to-day existence.

In this light, the English Language, the humanities ,the social sciences and some fundamental parts of Maths (four basic operations) and Science (applications of water pressure and heat perhaps?) seem more pertinent in educating us as a whole.

We communicate in the English language. Other than pronunciation, correct intonation and grammatically strung sentences, diction, concise and precise thinking leading to crystal clear conveyance are part and parcel of the communicaton process.

Literature helps us understand psychological and philosophical thinking and motivation of Man. History helps us understand why the world is the way it is today and Geography teaches environmental science which are applied to pollution control and resource management.

How real can education get as far as language, the humanities and social sciences are concerned? Compare this with the hard sciences of Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Hardly a teeny weeny fraction of us use it in our daily dealings except for the very fundamentals.

The analogy can be drawn by examining how we have poured billions into infrastructural development, utilising the hard sciences. But we may not have really looked into functionality and aesthetics as much as we should, with functionality over-riding non-sensical aesthetics if the latter renders the former useless.

This is only half the equation gotten correct.

The other half will be to improve on the people manning and living the infrastructure. Using languages with a heart of humane-ities, a good understanding of sociological perspectives, logic and reasoning with the hard sciences guiding us in more scientific rationalisation of things, events and people.