Tag Archives: education

Classical music used as punishment in school

Here’s an amusing article about a school in Britain that has started using classical music to punish misbehaving students. It’s normal practice of course to punish such students by giving them detention, but the school is apparently aiming at making detention more unpleasant by piping in classical music into the hall. According to the headmaster, this seems to be working as infractions of school rules have dropped by 60 percent since he started the practice.

Once again, I’m not really a listener of classical music but I do appreciate the intellectual achievement in it, so even I feel a little sad that the pendulum has swung so far that not only do youngsters actively hate it, but that a school is willing to exploit this fact and use it as a form of punishment.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (September ’09)

A little late this month because I made more posts last week than I’d originally planned for but here are three articles for September, all of them related in some way with human nature and with two of them related to video gaming. Two of the articles are from The Economist. I suppose I should try to find the time to read more widely.

The first article from The Economist covers the development of muscles in human males as a way to attract mates. Naturally, muscles in human males are useful because men do most of the fighting and hunting, tasks in which physical strength is a great asset. However, William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara believe that the evolution of prominent and visible muscles in men are also driven by sexual selection, just as the tail feathers of male peacocks are. Working on the assumption that sexually selected characteristics are expensive to maintain, the researchers found that men generally consume fifty percent more calories than women do, even after adjusting for different levels of physical activity.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (September ’09)

Evolution education under attack in Texas (again)

Just a quick link to the news that the Texas school board is voting this week on a new curriculum that would challenge the principle of evolution. It’s pretty depressing that the chairman of the school board is someone who believes that God created the Earth less then 10,000 years ago. So again, for anyone who still has any doubt about evolution and wants to educate himself or herself on the mechanics and literature behind what is now of the most solidly well-documented principles in science, just go spend some time on the TalkOrigins Archive.

One thing that I’m somewhat grateful for is that Muslims at least don’t seem to have jumped onto the Creationism bandwagon in a big way. Then again, our Education Minister in Malaysia has just called the leader of the opposition a race traitor so that’s not much of an improvement.

Why unity through enforced assimilation doesn’t work

My wife and I are currently working our way through all five seasons of Babylon 5. It’s one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction shows ever produced for television, so not having watched it was seriously hurting my street cred as an sci-fi geek. Anyway, in one of the first season episodes, The Geometry of Shadows, the command crew of the station is presented with an odd problem.

Members of one the minor races, the Drazi, have begun fighting one another for no apparent reason, and the escalating level of violence is threatening the security of the station, so the newly promoted Commander Ivanova needs to find a solution to the problem. To do that, she needs to find out why they are fighting. As it turns out, every once in a while, the Drazis put a number of sashes in a gigantic barrel, one for each Drazi. Half of the sashes are dyed purple, the other half green, so whichever colour of sash a Drazi draws out of the barrel determines which group he belongs in. As the Drazis explain, “Where there was one Drazi people, now there are two. The two fight until there are one.”

Continue reading Why unity through enforced assimilation doesn’t work

Dong Jiao Zong threatens to strike over language issue

I know I’ve defended vernacular schools in Malaysia earlier, but this latest move by Dong Jiao Zong puts me in a bit of a quandary. My libertarian instincts tell me that the schools should be free to teach whatever subjects in whatever languages they feel like and parents should be free to choose which schools their children should attend accordingly. Threatening to mount a nationwide strike over the issue however strikes me as a tad heavy-handed especially since there are already independent Chinese schools which have voluntarily switched over to teaching science and mathematics in English with good results.

The organization justifies its actions, as always, mainly based on the fundamental right of Chinese Malaysians to be educated in Chinese if they so wish but I can’t help but wonder if the real reason might not be a more pragmatic one. After all, I seriously doubt that many of the teachers currently teaching the two subjects in Chinese are able to competently switch over to teaching them in English. Even if the schools were able to recruit enough replacement teachers, that would result in a huge number of unemployed or underemployed teachers, something that Dong Jiao Zong would understandably find unacceptable.

This isn’t a frivolous point by the way. If Malaysia doesn’t have enough teachers who can teach in English competently, then it doesn’t make any sense to force everyone to teach in English, as this blog post highlighted earlier this year. Trying to retrain teachers who used to teach the subjects in either Bahasa Malaysia or Mandarin to switch to teaching in English doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see that moving to teaching the subjects in English should be the the way forwards and unless the schools are given some pressure to move in that direction, they’ll just hope that this is just a fad that will hopefully blow over and won’t give serious thought and effort into switching over.

Segregation and the net generation

In a recent review of a book published in The Economist, I noted something that I had suspected all along. In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, author Don Tapscott argues that not only are the children now growing up in a world of networked computers more intelligent and well-informed than any previous generation, they are also more tolerant of diversity and more concerned with social justice.

This is an argument that makes a lot of sense to me. After all, it doesn’t matter what skin colour you are when you’re interacting with each other on all sorts of forums, using instant messaging software, in multiplayer games, on social networking sites and even using old-fashioned e-mail. What does matter are the quality and content of your posts, messages and other forms of communications and it is by those standards that participants are judged by the communities they choose to be a part of. What could be fairer than that?

In a previous post, I addressed some concerns about racial segregation in Malaysia. I argued that the existence of vernacular schools had little impact on whether or not Malaysians of different races would cooperate and coexist peacefully in society and that the divisions between the races are the result of government policies, and not prejudices learned as children. I reiterate that stand here. The largest Malaysian forum on the internet, LYN, is full of Malaysians of all races, of all religions and many different types of schools. Yet, none of that matters on the net.

Folks are segregated on that forum, but they are segregated not by race but by the choices they make: what hobbies they take up, what shows they like, what games they play, how outgoing they choose to be and so on. It’s hard to argue there isn’t a great deal of tension between the different races in Malaysia now, but again, I say that this is due to politicians playing up the issue and instituting policies that are expressly designed to create divisions. Here’s to the hope that the net generation will prove wiser and more resistant to such divide and conquer tactics.

Vernacular Schools in Malaysia

This post grew out of comments that I made in a post on Jed Yoong’s blog which linked to another blogger’s post calling for all vernacular Tamil schools in Malaysia to be closed down. I think it’s worth taking the effort to explain that in this context, “vernacular schools” refers solely to primary schools that use Chinese and Tamil as the medium of instruction, while still receiving government funding, as opposed to those that teach using the national language, Bahasa Malaysia the so-called “Sekolah Rendah Jenis Kebangsaan”.

There are a couple of obfuscating factors at work here that needs to be explained. One, the original call to close down Tamil schools cited the generally poor quality of these schools as a primary reason. As Jed Yoong quoted from the original writer of the post, Balan:

One of the contributing factors leading Indian youth to gangsterism and other criminal activities is their inability to excel in education, particularly when they enter secondary school.

The new environment and being not conversant in Bahasa Malaysia which is the medium of teaching in secondary school have resulted in students dropping out after their PMR and SPM.

The reason this happens is the poor quality of Tamil schools in the country. Most of the Tamil schools in the country are poorly managed, lack facilities and are helmed by substandard headmasters and teachers.

Continue reading Vernacular Schools in Malaysia