The Philippine Education System: Educating Students or Automating Students?

I could recall all the insecurities I had back in school.  There was a short time when I forced myself into the honor rank (but was at the bottom 10). However, the time came when I realized that my aim to become the world's greatest genius failed. One of the conversations I had with someone was that I wanted to become a robot. With those recollections in mind, it would be best to ask, "Are we educating students, or are we automating students." Automation is a language often used in science fiction when it comes to robots. That's why I picked it as the title. 

I wrote about why I hated school because of the grades over learning approach. I cited this article written by a certain Pritika Nair though I'd like to cite the first two areas:

1. Children are treated like robots or machines

The amount of homework, notes to be copied, coupled with home assignments and related activities can get overwhelming for both children and parents. And this trend starts as early as Grade 1! When children would go to school, the only exception (and relief) was that notes were made to be completed inside the classroom. Now with online schooling, this load has also been thrust on their backs (more on the parents’ shoulders though).

I don’t say that any of the above is unimportant or unnecessary for the child. I and other parents like me aren’t able to comprehend why children as small as First Graders are subjected to “undue pressure” from the schools in terms of homework and notes completion? Do the schools perceive kids to be robot-like machines that can keep performing tasks one after the other and finish them in a jiffy?

You ask the school and they say: These notes can be completed by the child in their own time. But where do they give the time? Every day, there’s a new subject to study as per the time table, not to forget the homework and notes to be completed for the same too. This would inevitably pile up the previous day’s load on the child.

2. Children are encouraged to parrot what they learn

Mugging up concepts without really understanding their core meaning is an issue that’s existed in schools since forever. Most of us would agree and reminisce having experienced the same at some point of time in their respective schooling life. The same is being continued even today.

And now that we are parents, we hate our kids being turned into parrots too. They’re expected to score high (both from schools and parents) in the course of which, they will eventually learn well and parrot or write the same to score good marks but they would never be clear on what those concepts mean or be able to explain the same to their children in future.

This would remind us of the classroom setting. I could remember why Chinese lessons are a constant source of frustration in Chinese Filipino schools. I could also remember why I hated mathematics and wanted it removed from the curriculum. Years later, what I realized is that it's not mathematics that is taught but the way mathematics is taught. Sadly, people have replaced monuments of learning with monuments of glory. I guess that's why the stereotypical Chinese parent says that an A- is a bad grade. They care more about the A+ and the entrance to an Ivy League University than the learning their child has. Just watching the video on strict Asian parents on YouTube makes me cringe. One of them was an American Chinese girl named Sofie Xiong. 

The way mathematics is taught is just one example of automating, not educating, students

I couldn't forget screaming in my fourth year of high school to ban mathematics. One of my classmates tried to tell me that if I banned trigonometry, there'd be no more engineers. I kept quarreling with that same guy and even carried that grudge for some time, believing he was looking down at me. I was still suffering from insecurity. I wanted to take information technology because it was trending. I was advised to take something else because my strengths lay strong in writing. I even remember hating another person in high school not only because he was jocular--it was also how fast he could compute numbers. I even screamed at him and close range and said, "How can you compute numbers so fast?" Then he replied, "Okay, but can you answer me how you can come up with an essay idea so fast?" But as Warren Edward Buffett said, surround one's self with better people.

We can post the picture above in the mathematics classroom. A common objection to mathematics is, "I'm not going to use this." Never mind that I wanted to take BSIT only because it was trending. What wasn't so shocking (or shocking) was that I had to go to the mathematics department. Soon enough, many exited BSIT because they couldn't handle the load of mathematics. Mathematics is everywhere and you can only limit the load you get. Then again, with a one-size-fits-all approach, that's why people can say they're bad at mathematics. 

It's one thing that most mathematics classes don't allow calculators, except for higher mathematics. I remember business calculus classes required calculators. Trigonometry requires calculators in some exams because of the length of the exams. Chemistry and physics classes both require calculators. One reason why calculators shouldn't be used is to train the mind. However, a problem that mathematics classes have is that students become trained to be calculators. Nobody does a robot's job better than a robot. Nobody does a calculator's job better than a calculator.

One can brag about how good they were in mathematics in high school. However, they were better at doing computations than knowing how those computations apply to everyday life. One can brag about knowing the properties of trigonometry but couldn't do a simple application of SOH-CAH-TOA. Maybe, I could say, "Well try to apply SOH-CAH-TOA to everyday life." They might start hurling insults in the process, just to irritate me and make me walk away or they can play the victim should I explode. 

Rewatching this video makes me think about how mathematics is taught. People value their numbered or lettered grades more than their learning. Right now, I can appreciate trigonometry like I never did in high school. I go to the malls and say, "So this is how trigonometry works." I ride an escalator and think of trigonometry's applications. Then I remember how mathematics classes are generally oh-so-boring for some people. Some people are fascinated by it and can easily connect to it. Others are just book-smart but not street-smart. I never found myself connecting to mathematics. I always felt stupid because I couldn't get mathematics right. I even remember having a feud with an elementary math teacher. I was told to simply forget about her and move on. I had a compassionate fifth-grade mathematics teacher but not even she could help me, at that time. I had more compassionate mathematics teachers but I refused to open up. I was supposedly Chinese (by ethnicity) but why am I "bad" at mathematics? It's more of math anxiety than being bad at mathematics.

Mathematics is taught rather dumbly or better said, foolishly. Looking back at old mathematics textbooks in elementary, we're taught more about how to do mathematics but not its applications. The mathematician Paul Lockart describes it like this:

Lockhart begins with a vivid parable in which a musician has a nightmare in which music is taught to children by rote memorization of sheet music and formal rules for manipulating notes. In the nightmare, students never actually listen to music, at least not until advanced college classes or graduate school. 

The problem is that this abstract memorization and formal-method-based "music" education closely resembles the "math" education that most students receive. Formulas and algorithms are delivered with no context or motivation, with students made to simply memorize and apply them. 

Part of why many students end up disliking math, or convincing themselves that they are bad at math, comes from this emphasis on formulas and notation and methods at the expense of actually deep understanding of the naturally fascinating things mathematicians explore. It's understandable that many students (and adults) get frustrated at memorizing context-free strings of symbols and methods to manipulate them. 

This goes against what math is really about. The essence of mathematics is recognizing interesting patterns in interesting abstractions of reality and finding properties of those patterns and abstractions. This is inherently a much more creative field than the dry symbol manipulation taught conventionally. 

As mentioned earlier, students are taught to be calculators instead of humans who can reason with numbers. Mathematics is subjected to the scientific method. Mathematics makes no sense if we don't have the right data. Mathematics is everywhere but the teachers are forced to teach it like students are expected to be calculators, not thinkers. The calculator's function is to double-check or to make one's work faster. Preparation of receipts may require one to use a calculator since one needs to compute the value tax and the withholding tax. Sure, I can compute the 12% and the 5% without a calculator. However, in a fast-paced world, one may need to use a calculator. Students need to learn how to memorize the arithmetic table. However, students need to learn the basic applications. 

One reason Chinese people tend to be stereotyped as being good at mathematics is because of competition. However, one needs to take a look at how Chinese mathematics works. After reading Domino Chinese, Some people talked about how Chinese mathematics was taught with better reasoning than the regular mathematics class. My proposal is to use the modern Chinese method of mathematics in regular mathematics classes. Now, think of this statement:

The pedagogical approach to teaching Mathematics at schools in China is known as the Mastery Method, and there is a lot more to this approach than simply memorising times tables. 

A central concept in the Mastery Method is the development of a solid foundation in basic Mathematics ability.  This is established by focusing on a narrow set of core skills during the early years of education. Students are supported in the development of each skill to the point where they have mastered the concept. When, and only when, students have mastered each concept can they move on to the next skill.

Mathematics builds upon skills, you need to count before you start addition, you need multiplication to divide,  you need division to master fractions, and so on and so forth. An approach which affords individual students the necessary time and practice to master each skill before moving on to more advanced operations, has clear benefits.

The development of students’ foundation in Mathematics is supported by carefully designed exercises which encourage students to identify patterns. Schools which follow the Mastery Method use a wide variety of visual representations to help the students make these connections. Number lines and fraction diagrams are also deployed by teachers to support students’ mastery of fundamental concepts. 

In short, students may soon become either (1) bored and frustrated with mathematics, (2) just study mathematics so they could graduate (and it's a requirement, after all, and I hated that fact), and (3) they get high grades in mathematics but can't connect to real life until they take a mathematics intensive course. This is because the problem is, that mathematics teachers are forced to turn their students into calculators based on the mathematics textbook given to them. How often are important aspects of mathematics like its history and usage discussed in mathematics class? I even had to wait until physics class to see that Isaac Newton and Archimedes were the people responsible for the wonders of calculus. I even had an initial panic attack with calculus and my attitude got worse with trigonometry. 

The way Chinese was taught, back in my day, in Chinese Filipino schools makes parrots, not speakers

Bahay Tsinoy, museum of Chinese life in the Philippines

I remember the old Chinese textbooks which I definitely don't recommend for learning Mandarin. I could talk with people from different Chinese schools is the trauma they had with those books (above). Maybe, my favorite thing to complain about is, "Why are we required to learn Chinese first before entering the Chinese classes?" I really got into trouble with the Chinese teachers, regardless of who the teacher was. I remember most of the Chinese language teachers are said to get stricter every year. It's a good thing that they were very strict with discipline. However, strictness alone will not create the quality that's needed. Even more, the Chinese classes were just parroting and not learning. I even remember hating to study Chinese because "What am I studying if I'm not learning?" It was all endless rote memorization, regardless of the school. It didn't matter if it was School A, School B, School C... it was the same methodology. Some people even learn Chinese in high school and still can't speak Mandarin fluently. 

I heard from a Chinese language teacher that Amoy was no longer taught. If I can remember things clearly, she said that Amoy is now only taught at home like the Cebuano dialect. I remember taking Chinese classes in college. The difference was that the Chinese language class in college taught Mandarin as a second language. I remember we still had what would be called bon toi (question and answer) but there were English translations provided. It was more conversational and we spent time practicing it, before writing it down in the exams. Even so, the teacher made us translate the questions into English before he could answer them. The answers had to be translated into English too. It was the practical approach sorely missing. I even think Chinese schools should've shifted to Pinyin (which I still refer to as Bopomofo) back in my day. I guess it's all about sticking to what you're used to huh? I even laughed when a classmate of mine jokingly begged the teacher to write it down in Zhuyin rather than Pinyin. 

Chinese language teachers can continue to talk about how Mandarin is a widely spoken language. There are cover versions of the Chinese songs. However, the methodology only made parrots (or tape recorders) out of children. I could remember a classmate of mine crying while memorizing something. The student came from a house that didn't speak Chinese. I even remember a Pinay classmate of mine, having reached higher levels in Chinese, but still struggled with speaking even basic Hokkien. Some people had higher grades than I did. The comparison was only on the grades, not learning. 

Keats School Blog

I looked at some videos from Taoli and other Chinese websites. These Mandarin textbooks are called the HSK course. HSK means 汉语水平考试 (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì) or Chinese proficiency test. Those old textbooks never taught how to speak, just how to memorize. Instead of endless memorizations of Bon Tois, the solution is to make them meaningful (read here).

What happens next is that robots are created, not scholars

I could remember my fourth-grade Chinese language teacher who said, "I don't think Grade 1 only has one Bon Toi." Okay, I "took her advice" when I studied Mandarin in college. It was like going back to Grade 1 under an updated curriculum. Just think that before we got into memorization of the answers, we had to learn the Pinyin. We dug into Pinyin first though we learned it using the old arrangement (which I prefer) instead of the new arrangement. Instead of parroting, we had to understand the questions and answers. We even had to translate the questions into English during recitations. True, it wasn't just one Bon Toi but it was more meaningful running through the conversational course. 

What's needed to learn is to let the student adapt. Not everyone who enrolls in a Chinese school will come from a Hokkien-speaking home or an ethnic Chinese background. 

Turning science subjects into just requirements to pass rather than a subject to connect life with

It's very easy to say science is everywhere. However, things can be very stupid when chemistry and physics classes come along. We had a good teacher but she was bound to a very lousy system. She kept talking about the importance of our grades. Yes, that's the problem with how science is taught as well. I remember arguing with two science teachers about when chemistry would be used. All the science teachers were forced to say was, "It's required by the DECS. Either you study it or you will never have a good future." 

I could remember the stars in my eyes when science was taught. However, I soon started getting discouraged especially when I had a very mean science teacher at one point. I remember how often I cried not because I didn't like the lesson. Instead, I kept believing I was stupid even when the two science teachers tried to help me out. Science involves a lot of facts. We still need to memorize certain facts and figures in science. For example, if I didn't memorize the concepts of acidic and basic, I would probably not know why I need an antacid if my stomach acid is reacting. I would never know what foods to avoid if I'm having acid reflux.

The problem ends up with just regurgitating information. I want to learn and explore. The problem is you're just forced to study science in the same way mathematics is studied. Even more, it's almost like filling the mind only with information when that's not the way science is supposed to be. Back then, we had biology, chemistry, and physics. It's all around us. I do some exercise and I can apply some knowledge in all three subjects. The biology will help explain the heart rate going up and that it pumps more blood. More blood goes to the brain. The application of chemistry and physics is with fat burn. One thing I never learned in school is how fat leaves the body. I was amazed to know that fat can leave the body in the form of excess carbon dioxide. When the body is doing cardio, more oxygen is inhaled as the body is in high heat. That's why exercises have warm-up and cool-down. Isn't that an interesting fact to think about? 

This illustration above may explain why I lost interest in science classes in high school. Now think about the world outside. Biology is the study of life. However, students end up in more boring classroom discussions. Let's imagine the setting above is a biology class. Students are forced to simply just study the facts instead of seeing the beauty that the subject can be used. I remember hating studying scientific names because of just how difficult they were to pronounce. I could remember being in the medium difficulty in a science quiz bowl. Memorization of facts in different branches of biology can be boring, unless connected to real life, or put into better practice. 

The problem is science has been too focused on quizzes than the scientific method. Student's inquisitiveness is killed and isn't that needed for a good scientist? Even worse, there's the bad science of students who are forced to stay up late at night rather than get a good night's rest. Scientific studies have shown what a lack of sleep can do to the body. Why is it that schools still tend to pass the mindset that fatigue is a badge of honor? I really felt so awkward in college, when we were told to get enough rest a day before the defense. It was a far cry from high school when the teachers talked about how previous batches had eyebags writing their term papers. 

I even needed a tutor during my third year and fourth year. It didn't help that the Hotel and Restaurant Management (HRM) course was used as a scare tactic and a dumping course. Having a tutor, I even feel like, "Why do I need a tutor and everyone else can do better?" If I'm not wrong, an IQ exam showed that I actually could learn mathematics better. I think the problem was more on anxiety and the grades-over-learning approach. I guess that's why some people insist that there's no such thing as being "bad at math", the problem is more on how we teach mathematics. The same issue goes with the way sciences are taught. 

The end results aren't flattering if you think about it

Oe can brag day in and day out about being an honor student. Two of my classmates fired a shot at me and said, "What year was it and what year is it now?" That was in 2001. If the person was an honor student in the 1950s or 1960s, much time has already passed. That means schools have had to adjust to much more difficult lessons because of new information generated daily. The amount of new information generated means that learning methodologies have to adjust. 

This reminds me of what the late Lee Kuan Yew saw in China. LKY visited the Deng Xiaoping and discovered Communist China had outdated textbooks:

Our visit to the university in Wuhan, one of China's major industrial cities along the Yangtze River, was a saddening experience. Some of the professors we met were American-educated. Although advanced in age and their English rusty, they were obviously men of erudition and quality. In the library, Ling, then a medical student, spoke to a young man who was recording an English-language biology textbook. She asked to see it and found out it was printed in the 1950s. She was incredulous. How could they be reading a biology textbook 30 years out of date? But they have been shut off for more than 30 years; having just opened up to the West, they had no foreign exchange to buy textbooks and journals. And they had no photocopying machine. It would take a long time closing the knowledge gap that had widened between them and the developed world. The Cultural Revolution had set them back by a whole generation. The present students, recovering from the Cultural Revolution, were taught with outdated textbooks by teachers using outmoded teaching methods and without audiovisual aids. This would be another semilost generation. True, the most brilliant of them would make it regardless of the disadvantages. But an industrial society requires a well-educated total population, not just a brilliant few.

It's not a bit flattering about Filipinos with low comprehension in reading, mathematics, and science (read here). I was laughing at how people condemned the mayor of Valenzuela over what happened in Venezuela during the COVID-19 pandemic. I wrote an article where school produces idiots instead of intellectuals. I was reminded of a poor student who wrote a simple speech about studies. If there's one thing worth saying, "Medals and certificates will one day rust but knowledge remains." I wouldn't be surprised if some humble honor students threw away their medals and certificates. Being an honor student doesn't mean one is never wrong either. 

Education is supposed to be a cooperation, not a competition. The problem has been really systemic in nature. It's all about the lack of a systematic learning approach. Systematic means to be organized and orderly. There is no real order if students are just treated like robots. Sure, they can be said to be fed with the information. However, simply feeding them information to memorize but not to understand, isn't going to produce the quality needed. No amount of threats will ever improve performance. No amount of firing and hiring a new set of teachers will help. It's because the system tells people how to behave. 

Whether we want to admit it or not, the education system should be shaped and maintained by the consequences. Sadly, people see the consequences but never see the system as the problem. It doesn't take a Ph. D. to understand that systems shape behavior. A system is more than just who's in charge but also how people should act. It's all about whether or not one's system is people-based (which depends only on the person in charge) or rules-based. The Titanium Success gives this insight into why a business' success depends more on the systems than just people without systems:

If your business requires that kind of a person, you’re always going to be putting too much out there because you’re going to be too people dependent and you do not want to build a people dependent system. You want to build a systems dependent company.

And when you have a systems dependent company and then you put really great people on it and you give them really great training, imagine how good that’s going to be. What it does, it also takes some of the pressure off of your people. Because they are following a system where they know that slight errors aren’t going to cause this entire thing to fall apart.

Those slight errors aren’t going to destroy the whole company. And so they come in, they’re more relaxed. And guess what, they make even fewer mistakes and isn’t that exactly what happens to you as you’re driving down the freeway?

Because you know you all have this margin for error, most of you drive down the middle of your lane. Of course, that’s unless you’re talking on your cell phone which you shouldn’t be doing, don’t do that. So as you’re driving down the freeway, you have all this margin for error which puts you in a state of being relaxed and being comfortable and calm so you can focus on staying in the lane and end up getting even better results.

But if the highway patrol has decided that they are going to give you 40% room for error as a professional driver and over 50% room for error as a normal driver, then imagine how much room for error you need to give your employee. This is a short episode because I want you to turn off this podcast.

Then as soon as you do, I want you to make a list of the most critical systems within your business. And what are you going to do to be able to make the systems so good that as your employees make mistakes they’re still going to be able to get the desired results.

It could be related to sales scripts, it could be recipes, it could be systems where things are done, it could be how many different people are involved in a process so that you have multiple eyes on something so mistakes are caught by other people.

But either way, that’s your most important job. In terms of getting to that 70%, but if you can create a business where anything in your business can be done 70% as well as you and still get results, you got a business that is going to be able to grow, expand and do all of that without your day-to-day involvement.

Just what you really want in a long-term because you don’t want to have a job where you’re working in a company that you own. What you really want is you want that freedom to have a business that doesn’t rely on you day-to-day.

The problem with the education system should be overhauled. After all, even the most creative of teachers will get defeated. It's because systems will tell people how to act. Still not much about the system and more about the person running the system?