Education must evolve with the rest of world

By Lim Chiow Ang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-11 11:05

It was recently reported that Yunnan provincial educational department will abolish its middle school examination. In other words, junior middle school students in Yunnan will no longer be solely assessed on the basis of the nationwide entrance examination prior to entering senior colleges. However, there will be other evaluation criteria taken into consideration.

These junior middle school students will be evaluated in the areas of personal ethics, learning attitude and ability, communication skills and teamwork, physical fitness, appreciation of aesthetic and character development.

Despite being an educator by profession and having taught in Vietnam, Singapore and China for the past couple of years, I do not think I am in the position to argue the merits of the "revolutionary" idea espoused by the Yunnan provincial educational department.

But I do applaud the department for having the courage to take bold initiative to its education system where status quo is the norm.

It takes more than just the political will to see through the successful implementation of these changes.

To move from the traditional rote learning-based examination system to a soft-skills evaluation system requires a paradigm shift in the thinking of their educators. The Yunnan provincial educational department has its work cut out.

First, they have to sell their idea not to the parents or the students but, perhaps ironically, to the teachers themselves. Teachers are important stakeholders and are the key to the successful implementation of the new system.

They need to undergo a mindset change and be convinced about the merits of the changes. We must not ignore the fact that local teachers were brought up and trained in the traditional scholarly educational system.

I am not going to be drawn into contentious discourse on the pros and cons of exams. I believe each evaluation system has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

However, I do have a word of advice for all educators. It is of paramount importance to keep an open mind and be receptive to changes as education is never stagnant and changes are inevitable in a dynamic world.

As education evolves, various approaches to learning and assessment are being implemented all over the world, including problems-based learning, multi-disciplinary learning, and projects-based learning, just to name a few.

To this end, China's education system must also evolve with the rest of the world and adopt practices that will instill in their graduates a resilience and versatility which employers of today value very much.

As the late famed psychologist B.F. Skinner said: "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."