Woes of Studying

Was reading this essay in the newspaper today, Insights section I think. The author talked about how meritocracy is starting to screw up the education of America badly. I think I should say Singapore's one is already in the mid-stage of being screwed up.

Meritocracy is a wonderful. It fulfils the criteria of equity and efficiency. Everybody gets equal opportunities initially. Everybody is judged by their abilities, hence people with the greatest abilities gets the job and therefore is an efficient outcome. You cannot improve on this outcome anymore without spoiling the output.

However, in the long run, meritocracy slowly kills the principles of learning. In a society where each final exam is not the last but the signal for the next one, we have becomed accustomed not to the principles of education and learning, but the principles of how to play the game and beat the system. The game I am talking about here, is the exam paper. Obviously, to beat the system you do not have to expend a lot of work. The job is about as interesting as being a clerk sitting behind a gray table. You just have to memorise lots and lots of cotent, memorise how to apply the content, and go in to the hall and spam everything that you have got. It is most interesting that this situation is so much like those CounterStrike scenarios, go in with the machine gun blazing down everything in sight.

It is also furthur compounded that early in our education, teachers make it a point to make sure everyone is to sit quietly, copy everything from the board. Now, there is several points that should not be in this quaint utopian picture. Firstly, why should everyone be sitting quietly? They should questioning why is this like this, why is that like that. Secondly, why the hell are they copying everything on the board?? Its not a efficient way, because you can probably compress some of the stuff on the board. Its called note-taking. It is also probably one of the most stupid ways to learn too, by copying everything blindly and not processing it, saving it for later processing is too darn late. Because the stuff on the board is meant to go together with the verbal explaination of the teacher. If you copying everything blindly, you cant be thinking about what you are writing AND still listen to the teacher at the same time. So of course when you go back home to study, you do not understand anything that you have written. Unless you are genius, you will take quite a lot of time and effort to figure out.

Thirdly, that quaint utopian picture above effectively cultivates the student's fear to speak up, to go against the norms. "Dun ask so much, go and do your work." Is the famous line. Perhaps not so much by teachers, but more commonly spoken by..classmates. "Oh, look at that smart-aleck asking stupid questions now..Is stupid or what?? Isnt the answer blindly obvious?" Perhaps, the questions are 90% of the time really stupid. But then when the questions hit the weak spot, more often that not, they revise 80% of the previous knowledge.

It is this fear of failure that has prevented us from learning. In an intense atmosphere of competition, we have only remembered how to keep ahead the rest of the crowd. What about taking time of think, and find a way to beat the crowd effortlessly? Yeah, initially you will lagging a bit, as you are stopping and questioning while the rest of the herd is stampeding mindlessly ahead. But when you find out the answer, like say getting a helicopter and riding effortlessly above and away all those people below, you will more than make up for the lag. You will be the one laughing at those people.

It is this meritocracy is most ironically killing of the progress of science for the last quarter of the century. We need more people who are willing to break the rules. Any takers?