Why can’t they think critically?

Published on: Saturday, December 06, 2014

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Not long ago, our Deputy Education Minister mentioned that many top students failed to gain admission to universities and secure scholarships because they failed their oral interviews. To back up this point, the Minister cited a particular candidate who not only had no inkling of the name of our Prime Minister, but also conveyed his reluctance to return to his home country if he was given a scholarship. On the pretext of filtering incompetent students, to accuse students of their less credible performance is easy – so that no one will assume responsibility for that seemingly unpardonable failure. My question is “Is it reasonable to point a finger of blame at the students?”A couple of months ago, I was at a sales centre to purchase a few products. At the time I walked into the premises, there was no one. A young personnel who was in her early twenties directed me to get a number to wait for my turn. I placed my order and made the payment. Another staff handed me the items, and suddenly I realised that one of the items I purchased was not the one I wanted. So I requested the personnel to get the right one for me. She frowned and said it was irreversible once payment had been made.

I became very indignant. Upon my demand, she rang her manager to explain the incident and put me on the phone with her. The manager gave the same reply. My anger flared up and I rattled on, “Look! I am now standing here. I have not left this place, and I haven’t opened the bottle. What is the logic that I cannot top up some money and get the right one?” The manager on the phone haphazardly gave her explanation and finally came to term with the exchange of the product. This encounter and many others that you have noticed confirm the report that the education system in Malaysia “has historically fallen short of critical thinking, reasoning, creative thinking, and innovation” (Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013, p. E-10).

Two international assessments— the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assess a variety of cognitive skills such as application and reasoning. Students’ scores dropped if compared the results in TIMSS 1999 and 2011. 35pc and 38pc of Malaysia’s students failed to meet the minimum proficiency levels in Mathematics and Science in 2011.

These students were identified as possessing only limited mastery of basic mathematical and scientific concepts. Likewise, PISA aims to evaluate 15-year-olds’ proficiency in Reading, Mathematics and Science.

Its focus is not on curriculum content, but on students’ ability to apply their knowledge in real-world settings. The results from PISA 2009 of which Malaysia participated for the first time, Malaysian students ranked in the bottom third of 74 participating countries, below the average of the international and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

44pc and 43pc of the 15-year-old Malaysian students who participated in PISA did not meet the minimum proficiency levels in reading and Science. Students are “less able than they should be in applying knowledge and thinking critically outside familiar academic contexts” (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2013, pp. E-10). The results suggest that Malaysian students’ cognitive skills and reasoning (critical thinking skills) is under par.

As an educator and a researcher, observing the teaching and learning in schools is heart breaking. As a parent, it is more excruciating when I cannot deny what I am experiencing.

I take the blame on myself for knowing too much. For instance, with the new implementation in the secondary schools – PBS (School Based Assessment) and its examination PT3, the blueprint is promising as it stresses a holistic education to prepare students to meet the challenges of living as well as academics.

Teaching and learning is seen as an integrative process. Its main objectives are to develop students’ creativity, innovation and knowledge of contemporary issues by means of exploring, researching and disseminating information including assignments and public speaking (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2012). PBS encourages cooperation between the public and the private sectors, and involvements of parents and community.

However, the supposedly doable and feasible implementation is hindered at the executing stage where some school teachers are presumably not well-informed, unclear about the objectives, ill-prepared for it, or just resistant to change. I doubt how many of them have actually read the plan. I will now turn to discuss the two effects on teachers and students.

The effect on the teachers is the Hawthorne effect which refers to a phenomenon whereby individuals improve or modify an aspect of their behaviour in response to their awareness of being observed. Many teachers if not all adopt short-cuts; what I call microteaching to fulfil the requirement. Microteaching in the present context is pretend teaching and learning, similar to a child engages in pretend playing. A typical example is to make students copy word for word from a text book to an exercise book or a coil binding project-like report.

It is for convenience – easy marking, which they can technically prove to their principal and auditor that the goal is achieved. It is a way to keep students busy, and justify completing the work which reflects what is needed – end of story.

On the part of the students, it is the Mathew effect, which is to describe a phenomenon observed how learners learn new skills. Early success in acquiring certain skills usually leads to later successes as the learner grows, while failing to learn may be indicative of lifelong problems. Metaphorically, it denotes the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

That is to say the teachers get the credit for mission accomplished, while students suffer from the ripple effect. I gained this experience first-hand, my daughter was asked to copy pages of notes, samples of composition, samples of answers to literature questions (the aims of literature is to cultivate critical thinking skills), and samples and explanations from the grammar book during class time and as homework. It is peculiar that this teacher ‘marked’ each answer, and the whole of the exercise book and the project work had no comments. It is not students’ own production, so what is the purpose of that marking?

Learning has not taken place to begin with. What is the feedback or comment given to the students? Where are the corrections? What have students learnt? What have students done? Work done by copying garnered no exploring, no researching, no innovation, no creativity, no reasoning and absolutely no thinking.

The ripple effect from such microteaching (what I mean here as pretend teaching and learning) is initially a subtle one, much like the students in North Korea who will have to complete a three-year course on the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, as part of their secondary school studies. As narrow as it sounds, like Ebola, without adequate sterilisation of instruments, Ebola virus transmission can continue and amplify an outbreak. Imagine the teacher I mentioned earlier is teaching four classes of 50 students, through direct contact, she is churning out a total of 200 students who are heading towards that doomed direction.

If you have watched the popular Stephen King’s mini-series, The Stand which depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which a man-made plague escapes a government laboratory and ravages the world, destroying most of the world’s population. Well, a real-life plague of this devastating magnitude, derailing the critical thinking and reasoning of our young is now a very real possibility.