APRIL 7 ― Rote learning gets a lot of attention in Malaysia from the media, employers, parents and the Ministry of Education. Most of this is negative and it hones in on examples of students in government schools dutifully transcribing text from blackboards, like human photocopiers.
There is also quite a bit of empirical data that suggests that practice is fairly widespread in the nation’s schools. A recent UNESCO survey found that 60 per cent of Malaysian students claimed to have teachers that stressed rote learning and 40 per cent indicated that the predominant teaching style was to copy text from the board. CfBT Education Malaysia recently commented on this in our research report on Effective Teaching, which was published as part of our 35th Anniversary Series.
The current consensus seems to be that rote learning is almost always bad thing. The reason being that it is a memorization technique based on repetition and it involves putting students through the same basic drills over and over again until factual knowledge becomes ingrained. The criticism is that students end up memorising facts but they don’t have the skills to meaningfully interpret these facts or to apply them to other contexts.
Aligned to this the Ministry of Education (MOE) is now strongly emphasising Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and approaches to teaching that are more student-centred and that involve children collaborating with each other to investigate and discover information for themselves.
The MOE’s proposed approach also mirrors the Progressive education model that has taken hold in many other education systems, where the teacher’s role is seen more as ‘the guide by the side’ empowering learning, rather than ‘the sage on the stage’, imparting knowledge. For Malaysia, the clear idea is that the Rakyat’s children must be equipped with the kinds of 21st Century skills that they need for work in a knowledge-based economy, where transferable thinking skills are considered far more important than the memorisation of facts and figures.
However, education scholars such as E.D. Hirsch and Daisy Christadulu argue strongly that some education systems may have actually moved too far along Progressivist continuum. They point to examples of schools in the US and the UK where students are left to explore facts in their own time, on the internet, and where classroom time is devoted almost entirely to skills-based tasks, involving students working in groups on activities and projects.
For E.D. Hirsch, the danger with this approach is that students leave school with little ‘cultural literacy’ – their knowledge of contemporary global history and of general information about their country is wafer thin. The UK is an interesting case in point. It has long relegated fact-based learning, in preference to an emphasis on Higher Order Thinking Skills. However, in a recent survey, 33 per cent of UK primary school children respondents thought Sir Winston Churchill (Britain’s Prime Minister during WWII) was the first man to walk the moon, when in fact it was Neil Armstrong. Even more bizarrely, 25 per cent of secondary school respondents thought that Churchill was a fictional talking dog.
The message from E.D. Hirsch and Christadulu is clear: whilst an emphasis on higher order thinking skills is always a good thing, be mindful of the danger that it can completely crowd out factual learning. So balance is the key and there are four very powerful points we can take away from their writings:
1. Factual knowledge actually ‘turbo-boosts’ our information processing and analytic capabilities. Our long-term memories are able to store a great deal of information. By contrast, human working memory, which is the place we do our thinking, is very limited – being able to process no more than seven distinct elements simultaneously. This means it is very important that we collect and store facts in long-term memory and sometimes the best way of doing this is through rote learning. Once facts have been filed in long-term memory, we are able to ‘cheat’ the limitations of working memory and draw down on this vast storehouse of information and feed it into our working memory to help us solve problems. In this way, stored facts ‘turbo-boost’ our mental processing abilities.
2. The new transferable skills we think we need for the 21st century economy might have been a bit overstated. As Christadulu argues, the alphabet and the numbering system are two of the most valuable innovations we have, they were invented in about 2000 BCE and 3000 BCE respectively and no one, as yet, is clamouring for their replacement. Whilst modern Malaysian employers on Job Street are demanding staff that can adapt, innovate, communicate and solve problems – these are exactly the skills that were needed by the craftsmen working on the Pyramids and Stonehenge, several thousand years ago. The crucial difference is more one of quantity rather than quality: today we need even more people with these skills. So we don’t necessarily need as-yet undiscovered education techniques to bridge the divide, it’s more a question of up-skilling larger numbers of people than previously.
3. It’s probably a bad idea to banish learning facts from the classroom and to get students to look everything up on the internet. The Nobel Prize winner Herbert A. Simon authored some pretty authoritative research on the subject. The paradox he uncovered was that you can only successfully look something up on the internet if you already know quite a lot about it. The reason the novice struggles is because the human mind is only able to process and store a handful of new information items before further items disappear from memory. The expert, by contrast, has already digested most of the elements they are looking up and are instead looking for two or three additional pieces of information that can easily be integrated into their prior knowledge. So the less you know, the less you will understand what you read on Google.
4. Teaching Transferable Skills is definitely hard and might actually be impossible. According to E.D. Hirsch, skills may not actually be all that transferable across different subject domains. His argument is that you actually need rich and detailed background knowledge about a specific subject area in order to see the logical structure of the problems and arguments in that field. It’s only with this subject knowledge that you can actually solve problems. Hirsch’s strong view is that if you only have a formal understanding of the methods of critical thinking, they will not help you much when it comes to dealing with an entirely unfamiliar subject area. He argues that when we see people drawing on what we think of as transferable skills, it’s more probable that we are looking at someone with wide-ranging subject knowledge in a large number of subject domains.
So what’s the take-away from all this for Malaysia? It’s pretty straightforward actually. The Ministry of Education is moving in the right direction by both embedding Higher Order Thinking Skills in the specific subject domains of the curriculum and in training teachers to be more student-centred in their teaching approach. This is a natural reaction to the fact that the mix is currently too skewed towards rote learning and needs to be adjusted to balance knowledge with application.
But in the longer-term, the danger is that the Blueprint is implemented too effectively and that the balance tilts too firmly the other way, resulting in the now common rote learning approach becoming totally eradicated. After all, we don’t want Malaysian children leaving school in 2025 thinking that Tunku Abdul Rahman was the first man on the moon, when everyone in Britain knows it was actually Sir Winston Churchill!
Dr Arran Hamilton is Director of CfBT Education Malaysia (www.cfbt.com.my), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1979, which in turn is part of CfBT Education Trust, the world’s leading not-for-profit education consultancy.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.
