Fallacies of educational reform

Just a short entry about Prof. Andy Hargreaves's lecture I attended today..

I thought it is rather interesting to attend something of this sort as I had never been to any of such lectures or exposed to thoughts pertaining to educational management issues from a macro perspective.

In short he pointed out the 5 fallacies of educational reforms as that of:

1) Speed

2) Replacement

3) Numbers

4) Prescription

5) Competition

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I was particularly occupied with point 5), where he draws our attention to 'on-field competition' and 'off-field collaboration', both of which produces friendly rivalry that increases performance and results. This 2 entities arent necessary opposite. Well, and he quizzed about how much exactly is 'off-field collaboration' happening between our schools even within our cluster level. By collaboration, he actually referred to not just verbal advices but real concrete (directly beneficial) actions that to certain extent, MAY 'jeopardise' the school which offered help in terms lowering their competitive edge.

I know as a country, our govt do apply this strategy by providing various kinds of aid to our neighboring countries to help them grow economically, resulting in a win-win situation because stability and peace in neighboring countries also meant stability and peace for us, similarly for many other issues including economical growth. So for schools, might it work too? collaboration much more than the sharing of certain resources will not really pull down ur competitive edge against others in national exams?

In a certain sense, I think this sort of points us to the famous quote that, "人不为己天诛地灭!", but perhaps we should re-consider this ancient saying from a broader perspective and not just understanding it from the face-value implication.

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Apropos point 4), the conclusion was that mediocre educational practice is defined by standardization and prescription. Of course I think this is also dependent on the level of operational stage the schools are at... certain degree of standardization does have its pros... else many things will go haywire. We all know about the dangers of prescribing (or overly-prescribing), but in fact 'prescription' does have its usage too, especially at the point of taking off.. Prescription is probably an out-of-date concept in our current society, but I do know that for instance, Chinese traditional 'prescription' to learning is that you memorize the texts you are given first (e.g. poem in ancient Chinese etc.), and usually you wont even know what you are memorizing about, and it's after the memorization that the teacher will then delve into the interpretation and understanding of the texts. U'll maybe only slowly appreciate and understand the memorized facts after months or years. Dont be surprised that such 'prescriptive' mode of learning (if we might put it) is still very much adhered to today, especially certain facets in the study of TCM and higher level Chinese language so to speak. I think it does have its own reasons for close adherance through dynasties up till now. Does it really imply that we'll have brighter physicians if such prescriptive mode of learning is alleviated? maybe yes, maybe not.

But of course I do agree that for later-stage development (considering individuality and other factors), overly prescribing will hamper further advancements

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Anyway just some after-thoughts... Listening to this lecture does remind me of certain strategies that has roots from history... just like for instance many ppl are now applying Sun Tze's 'art of war' to various forms of management... im not too familiar with these kind of strategies to be truth, so im not too sure if there are any connecting points across all this different theories of effective managements that is everywhere (or so it seems to a layman like me).

sidetracking abit, recently I've been watch the 郑和下西洋 tv series every Sat night on Chan U, this particular version is really gd. Now its still showing the preceeding stage before 郑和 was sent to sail the oceans, about how 燕王 was forced to start a war with the current emperor. It's a long story, but anyway what really impressed me about 燕王 was that even as a leader, he managed to win the hearts of all his soldiers, the great respect, loyalty and willingness to follow him and sacrifice for him throughout the years.. i think thats really amazing. To me its an ideal reflection of good leadership. A great leader is not someone who only knows how to talk and operate at the 'high-up' level.. but someone who can be also function at the most basic level, do the most menial job, respecting ppl under his care, be the first person to lead and try out new implementations etc. 燕王 was always in the lead at any wars, instead of getting the soldiers to sacrifice first while he waits at the last line... although his life is so precious and if he dies, there goes the ppl who joined him in the 'rebel'.

he once said, "本王虽是王，但也是兵，也是将".