Parents need to distinguish between memorization and understanding. A child can come home and repeat the entire alphabet from A to Z or Alif to Ye but this is not education.
A series of articles on education in the form of a multi-installment letter to the parents
By Anjum Altaf
Dear Parent,
In my last letter I recommended that the first year of school should have no textbooks and no examinations. I am conscious of the fact that many parents would find this suggestion quite radical given what they are used to in Pakistan. But, as I mentioned, this practice is common in progressive schools all over the world.
The reason for this, strange as it may seem, is that young children learn more through play than from textbooks. While playing, drawing, and story-telling, they not only learn about the objects they are dealing with but, more importantly, they learn to actively express their own thoughts and ideas. This is a much more pleasurable and effective learning process than passive reading and memorizing of other peoples’ thoughts about a subject.
For this reason, there should be no content included in the first year of school in which children are required to memorize anything because this inculcates the habit of rote-learning which has become the bane of our education system. This habit is reinforced both when the content is something children do not fully understand and when recall of the material is tested through examinations.
Parents need to distinguish between memorization and understanding. A child can come home and repeat the entire alphabet from A to Z or Alif to Ye but this is not education — even a parrot can do that with a little bit of effort. What distinguishes a human being from a parrot is that the former can manipulate the alphabet while the parrot cannot.
So parents need to find out if their children are really learning with understanding or just memorizing material without comprehending it. This is not an easy task especially for parents who might themselves be minimally educated. We need to find a way to generate awareness about this aspect of our schooling system: How to determine how good are schools at educating children?
We do have some evidence about this from large surveys that show big gaps in learning outcomes. Many children in Grade 5 in public or low-fee private schools, for example, know less than what they should in Grade 3.
This macro data should alert policymakers that there are serious problems in early childhood education but unfortunately they do not bother to use it to reform or improve schooling. However, the macro data does not enable parents to figure out if the particular schools in which they are enrolling their children are good, adequate, or poor at educating their children.
This is the biggest challenge for us at this time. How do we get parents to assess the quality of the education their children are getting in return for the money they are spending for the purpose? We need a credible mechanism that can help parents make better choices when selecting a school for their children and I will discuss this aspect further in the next letter.
At a minimum, parents should not need to wait till their children complete high school to find out if the education they received was any good. This is too costly a method and also the damage is irreversible. They can get some indication by ascertaining the experience of other children who graduated in the last few years from schools in which their children are enrolled. If a majority of them are not faring well in the job market, it is a warning sign that the education they received was not of much value. Most likely their own children would meet the same fate a few years down the road.
Parents need to turn such information into a political demand for better education. Otherwise, a very large number of children could very easily join the growing number of jobless youth with worthless diplomas who, after ten or more years of schooling, are applying for positions as peons and not even getting called up for interviews. These poorly educated and under-employed cohorts would impact the kind of country that the more fortunate and better educated would be living in. For that reason, improving the general quality of education should be a shared objective of all Pakistanis.
Sincerely,
Dr. Anjum Altaf
[author title=”Anjum Altaf ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anjum-Altaf.jpg”]Former Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)[/author]
For previous letters, click on: Letter 1; Letter 2; Letter 3; Letter 4; Letter 5; Letter 6; Letter 7; Letter 8, Letter 9 , Letter 10 , Letter 11, Letter 12, Letter 13, Letter 14, Letter 15, Letter 16, Letter 17
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