The final exams are approaching at universities and this is not good news for me. It is not that I dread the time-consuming designing and correcting of an infinite number of exam sheets; that is manageable.
What is worrying is that if I applied standards for the evaluation of exams that deserve the predicate “academic” I would have to fail an estimated 90 percent of my students, and this of course is not possible under the given circumstances; it would not even be fair.
Note that I am referring to situations one can easily find at many of the non-elite universities in Taiwan.
It is not that the students do not prepare — most of them do — but there is no sense of academic standard involved in their preparations. Most exams in Taiwan are designed to prove that examinees have properly memorized textbook content, for which understanding is not necessary.
An integration of new ideas and facts in the student’s mind, and turning information into knowledge, is not on the agenda.
This fact is hardly breaking news. Many commentators have been observing this situation for decades — to no avail. There is no easy solution to improve this educational malaise, but there can at least be a beginning.
One might start with the remodeling of exams, especially entrance exams, since their design shapes the method and content of preparations. The problem is that most of these exams require the reproduction of content that students should be learning only after having entered the desired institution.
For if exams could no longer be prepared by cramming content into mindless brains, requiring instead “only” an ability to analyze a given problem, schools, in turn, would have to redesign teaching methods as well. Learning and testing would eventually become more meaningful and more significant.
However, there is an even more serious educational concern at stake than the acquisition of academic skills: the ongoing disabling of basic operations of the mind.
Taiwanese students, in general, find it difficult to think logically and coherently. Often, they are not really aware of contradicting or circular statements; they do not correct opinions after refutation of their premises; they cannot grasp the main ideas of a simple text; and they are not able to put what they have read into their own words.
Irony, parody, innuendos, analogy and metaphors are unusable in class if trying to avoid insurmountable misunderstandings.
It is not really a language problem. It is a culturally induced mental dullness and intellectual obtuseness — condoned by most local educators and politicians — which has reached tragic dimensions. The main culprits are prevailing local paradigms of what is called learning, studying and teaching.
I have just reread George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. One passage in that novel explains how a totalitarian or “Orwellian” society controls the thoughts of its educated people, stultifying them by a method labeled “Crimestop.”
It “includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [the ruling Party’s doctrine], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
This passage reads like a description of an Orwellian world made in Taiwan.
However, this time not resulting from political oppression a la Stalin, which Orwell had in mind, but from a soft power named culture, which inconspicuously exerts its destructive force in local classrooms mind by mind, day by day.
There is another difference. Here, no Big Brother is watching you. There are many Small Brothers instead, although not malicious ones like the one in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Often, they are people with good intentions: They are teachers and professors who are in charge of implementing “protective stupidity.”
The situation is more serious than most people think. Here are some related examples from the educational front of an average university:
Just recently, I asked students in my writing class to put on paper their opinions about capital punishment. As expected, the result showed that about 90 percent of about 35 students favored executions.
Then I discussed the issue with them, refuting with arguments and facts the “reasons” they thought would support their stance.
A week later I asked them to write down their opinions again, re-emphasizing that any opinion would be respected. Result: no change of minds, with one exception. Some homework assignments handed in a week later repeated the same cliches.
Another example: A few years ago, I deliberately talked sheer nonsense for about 15 minutes in class. Something along the lines of: “The last King of America resigned after Japan successfully colonized California in 1888.”
I forget what I really said.
There was no reaction in class, just a very few students frowning at me. There was no challenge, no smirking, no doubting, no enragement — nothing.
Recently, I asked about 30 students to write in class an essay on the topic: “Is it good to have slaves (owning a person) if there is mutual economic benefit?”
I briefly explained the notion of slavery with a benign facial expression before they began to write. Result: about 50 percent answered “yes.”
Possibly, some might have confused migrant household workers with slaves, despite my preceding explanation, but some also wrote that having slaves is not a good idea, because it makes their owners lazy.
You can be sure that those 50 percent are nice, kind people who would have been appalled by the idea of slavery if they had thought more about it. They just do not know what they are talking about; they are lost in a world which is not theirs.
Soon they will get jobs.
A recent editorial in this newspaper (“Adjusting to an industrial revolution,” June 21, page 8) held that for jobs in the future, “human creativity, interaction, discernment, judgement and empathetic capabilities will become more important in the supply chain in which the machines are taking over repetitive tasks.”
I wonder why there is still no public outcry about the kind of homegrown “Orwellian nonsense” that takes place in so many classrooms in Taiwan.
Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung.
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