The current Parliamentary session debated the Education Ministry on Monday, and today's newspapers (8 March) duly gave prominent coverage to the matters raised.
I, for one, was was struck by the personal testimony of Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who described how he grew up poor -- the first public housing for the family, comprising his parents and six children (including himself), was a rental flat in Zion Road shared with other tenants. "Upgrading meant moving to a three-room flat in Queenstown. This time we did not have to share and we could own the flat," Dr Ng told Parliament.
We know the rest of his story... he managed to get into ACS, he went on to study medicine at NUS, and he achieved success as a top cancer surgeon before becoming a politician.
His story is retold, with variations of course, in many other cases from the Baby Boomer generation. Not all of us reached the height that Dr Ng did, but most of my classmates, and I -- from the primary to the tertiary education levels -- can count ourselves as having achieved something. Many of us started poor or at least were not well-off.
Many factors were at work in the postwar and post-1965 Singapore Story. But this elusive term, motivation, seemed to play a major role (apart from the opportunity from "second chances" in those less relentless times).
Indeed, three American academics, in their highly acclaimed book "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovations Will Change the Way the World Learns" pinpointed motivation as a necessary ingredient in classroom learning. The three men -- Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson -- went on to suggest that today's classroom methods will have to keep in step with today's Wired Generation to sustain its motivation and interest in learning.
Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction, which also has a brief reference to Singapore at the end:
Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
We all know that becoming a great athlete or a great pianist requires an extraordinary amount of consistent work. The hours of time required to train the brain to fire the synapses in the correct ways and thus hone the necessary muscle memory and thinking required is no different from that needed to learn to read and process information or think through math and science problems. Unless students (and teachers, for that matter) are motivated, they will reject the rigor of any learning task and abandon it before achieving success.
Motivation can be extrinsic and intrinsic.
Extrinsic motivation is that which comes from outside the task. For example, a person might learn to do something not because she found the task itself stimulating or interesting, but because learning it would give her access to something else she wanted.
Intrinsic motivation is when the work itself stimulates and compels an individual to stay with the task because the task by itself is inherently fun and enjoyable. In this situation, were there no outside pressures, an intrinsically motivated person might still very well decide to tackle this work.
When there is high extrinsic motivation for someone to learn something, schools’ jobs are easier. They do not have to teach material in an intrinsically motivating way because simply offering the material is enough. Students will choose to master it because of the extrinsic pressure.
When there is no extrinsic motivation, however, things become trickier. Schools need to create intrinsically engaging methods for learning.
Consider this example. When Japanese companies were developing their world-class manufacturing clout and passing American companies in the 1970s and 1980s, a common explanation was that four times as many Japanese college students were studying math, science, and engineering than were U.S. students — despite the fact that Japan had only 40 percent of the population of the United States. These scientists and engineers, many concluded, were responsible for Japan’s economic ascendancy, which was widely seen as a threat to the U.S. economy.
As Japan reached prosperity, an interesting thing happened, however. The percentage of students who graduated with science and engineering degrees declined. Why did this happen? The answer has little to do with the schools themselves, which did not change significantly. Prosperity was the culprit.
When Japan was emerging from the ashes of World War II, there was a clear extrinsic motivation that encouraged students to study subjects like science and engineering that would help lift them out of poverty and reward them with a generous wage. As the country and its families prospered, however, the external pressure diminished. Some people who are wired to enjoy science and engineering in the way schools traditionally teach it — and therefore are intrinsically motivated — or those who have other extrinsic motivations in play still study them. But many no longer need to endure studying subjects that are not fun for them.
The same downward trend is now beginning in Singapore and Korea. As their economies have prospered, a smaller portion of their students are studying math and engineering because the extrinsic motivation has disappeared — and there is precious little intrinsic motivation, given the way these subjects are taught.
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