Last Thursday morning, I had the misfortune of listening on the radio to the views of the President of the teachers’ union here in Cyprus (“OELMEK”). It was a real extravaganza of molded views, the foulness of which almost permeated my car through the radio, making concentration difficult and driving, near impossible. But I think I have already dedicated more than enough lines to an individual that is clearly a zealot of a wrong cause (protecting teachers, no matter how (un)worthy they may be) and that will hopefully soon fade into obscurity for the good of our society.
Let’s put aside my personal views on the individual and proceed to the facts:
A recent study in the education sector showed (quelle surprise!) that the performance of Cypriot students compared to their counterparts around the world, is deteriorating, especially in the field of language comprehension. (Indeed, try to converse with a Cypriot in Greek -even in the local dialect- and you will notice that half of them mix and match words from various languages in an effort to communicate. It is a depressing form of something sort-of-like a watered-down language.)
Moving on to math, when asked about the reasons behind the worsening performance of our students, the President of OELMEK responded that this is not the teachers’ fault, “[…] because [they] didn’t get the chance to prepare the students for the tests of this particular research!?!”
So, basically, we have someone claiming to be representing the teachers, saying that the only way for our students to fair well in international exams, is to prepare them for the specific mathematical exercises that they will encounter “[…] because there are thousands of different mathematical problems and our students cannot possibly remember everything!?!” [Hi sir, my name is critical thinking, pleased to meet you. I am the polar opposite of memorizing knowledge.]
There is a point to be made here however, regarding the usefulness of these research papers on education. Any truly interesting problem, one that hasn’t been encountered before, will probably take more time, effort and resources (like research) than an exam setting allows for.
So, is there a chance that we are measuring the wrong things? And if we are, what’s the point in having standardized exams in our educational system? Wouldn’t it make more sense if we measured the percentage of individuals finding work in their field of studies and weighing it perhaps with whether the feel happy for having chosen this field, or whether they would have chosen differently had they had the chance to choose again? Some may say that such a measurement system would entail judgement and would by extension, not be objective. And my question to them would be: Is there really a measurement system out there, that is 100% objective and not at all biased? Take a minute to (critically) think through this before rushing to give an answer.