Thursday November 5, 2009
Nurture children to be creative
THE suggestion by the Deputy Prime Minister to employ graduates as pre-school teachers is definitely wise. It is time we realised the importance of pre-school and elementary education as children need a solid foundation before they move on to secondary schools.
Our education system does not provide any room for creativity. As a start, please do away with textbooks and activity books for Year 1 to Year 3. Teachers should be encouraged to be more creative and must not rely on any textbooks to deliver.
Why have both textbooks and activity books? Not only does this add more weight to the schoolbag, since the children need to bring both the books for every subject, the activity book is just a transfer of information from the textbook.
Students are required to refer to the textbook for answers, and all the students need to do is to copy verbatim from the textbook!
US lower elementary schools do not have any textbooks or activity books. Instead, the students use a scrapbook where they record everything they learn.
They even have Science experiments as early as Year 1 and are encouraged to do research in the local libraries. Furthermore, the education system there does not even emphasise proper spelling or cursive writing but on creativity, where the students are required to do storytelling: they stand in front of the class and create stories from whatever they brought from home, be it a toy or a pet; thus public speaking is taught at such a tender age.
It will be good too if the Education Ministry starts a journal for teachers to share their ideas, and there should be a best paper award in every issue. The award should be in the form of either scholarships for postgraduate studies or short courses in the United States on better teaching techniques.
Knowing that they will be rewarded will certainly encourage teachers to be more creative and motivated, and our children will definitely look forward to going to school.
On the quality of English in primary schools, I was rather appalled recently when I saw my son’s Year 2 English activity book. The answers he wrote in the book were copied from the answers on the board given by the teacher, yet the answers contained many grammatical errors.
If an English teacher in an urban school has such poor command of English, could it be a lot worse in a rural school? It is little wonder then that our children, once they get into universities, cannot even write a proper sentence in English given the foundation they must have had in elementary schools.
The Education Minister should also consider either training more English teachers, re-hiring retired English teachers, or employing retired native English-speaking teachers.
It is time we paid more attention to the quality of our primary education rather than debating other less pressing issues. The country needs well-trained primary school teachers who should be passionate about their career and who will be rewarded for their creativity and ideas, not in their ability to churn out top scorers.
ASSOC PROF M. FAZILAH ABDUL SAMAD,
University of Malaya
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