After Mr Wang’s post on why Singapore schools don’t touch Cyril Wong’s literature, I encountered this meme circulating amongst quite a few academic blogs out there:

“Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?”

Here are some of the more notable responses in response to the latter question (bold in original, italics mine):

Why is academic freedom essential? It’s implicit. If the joy in teaching science is in probing, exploring, seeking out the new, you can’t be hampered by authoritarian constraints; reciting old knowledge by rote isn’t science, and leaving out the bits that make some of us uncomfortable is the antithesis of good science pedagogy. The only limit on what we should teach is the evidence. - PZ Myers (biology)

I have come to realize that teaching is my essential political action [...] The content and structure of what public schools we have are a product of the political processes [...] If we emphasize science and math with the goal of international economic competitiveness we simultaneously devalue science and math beyond the economic benefit they give while we present a distorted image of what learning and education really are [...]

For my job as a teacher [...] is to empower my students. That empowerment does not mean that I peel back their skulls and pour in factual information to be regurgitated on the multiple choice test of your choosing. To be sure, they will learn vast amounts of factual information, but in context: what do these facts mean, and why? [...]

In my teaching I try to present alternatives, taking upon myself to make sure that should no student be able to present a point of view to which none seem drawn that they at least be able to grasp how something seemingly alien to how they think can have an intellectual consistency and honesty: one basic factor of human existence is that we do not all think and react the same, and thus we need to be able to seek to understand the point of view of the other if we wish to achieve some common ground. - Teacher Ken (Government, Religion and Social Issues)

I want students to understand that historically, there have been a lot of ways to organize society and live life that don’t look a lot like the modern U.S., and that each of those have been reasonable responses to the circumstances in which those people found themselves. This doesn’t mean I require students to accept all ways of living as equally desirable; [...] however, I think you have to understand something in order to change it. Academic freedom is crucial to this - we need to be able to understand even practices we disagree with on their own terms. So we can’t just label something “evil” and not try to understand it further. - New Kid on the Hallway (History)

Teaching philosophy, then, involves instilling a feeling of wonder in students. To put it another way, philosophy takes what is otherwise ordinary and turns it into something that is both extraordinary and intoxicating–it turns water into wine. [...] To perform the miracle, the professor must be allowed to take students on a journey of the mind, a journey that will not only alter their current view of themselves but their current view of the world in which they live. [...] The journey would be impossible without academic freedom. In Book VII of his Republic, Plato lays out a now famous analogy–the allegory of the cave. He applies the analogy in his discussion on the nature of education. He begins with people who have been enslaved, chained to a structure hidden deep within a dark cave. They face the terminal wall of the cave. Behind them some distance is a fire and men who act as puppeteers, the shadows of the puppets (cast by the fire) appear on the terminal wall, which the enslaved see. Their reality is a shadow-show, manipulated by the puppeteers.

Socrates, a main character in the dialogue, asks us to consider what would happen were we to release one of the enslaved and show him the setup. Since they’ve never seen light directly, their eyes would certainly hurt (when looking at the fire), as well as their bodies, since they’ve never had to stand prior to being released. (Sounds like the movie, The Matrix, I know–where do you think the writers got the idea?) No doubt, they would think that what they were seeing (the puppeteers) was a dream or some such. They would be frightened, especially as we encourage them to consider that the world they knew prior, the shadow-show, is “less real” than the one they now see (the puppeteers). Socrates suspects that the intuitions of the enslaved would be to demand to be put back in chains, so that they might return to “reality,” the shadow-show, the world that they know. And, suppose that we instead took hold of the enslaved and dragged him out of the cave into the light. Just think about the complaints then!

[...] That SO many students are feeling uncomfortable is perhaps a sign that what we are doing in higher education is a success, and not a failure, as Horowitz, Anne Neal, and others who have never taught a class will try to cast it. No one is being INDOCTRINATED, they are being challenged, and as the process works, they are being EDUCATED.

Without academic freedom, the above would be difficult if not impossible. For, academic freedom gives professors the needed elbow-room in a classroom to help guide students through this life-altering process. If just any complaint brought the process to a screeching halt, education would be impossible. [...] [W]hen someone simply feels uncomfortable considering certain ideas, THAT is a symptom of growth, and I wouldn’t count that as a complaint but as confirmation that the process is working.

So, let me end by returning to the instilling of wonder. Why teach philosophy? If I perform the miracle, students needn’t be dragged out of the cave. If I perform the miracle, and they experience wonder, they will walk out all by themselves. The difficulty then will be to slow them down a bit in order to provide them with the skills necessary to succeed in the world beyond the cave. - Smith (Philosophy)

Most Singaporeans don’t realize that education is a political tool, and possibly the most insidious. Nowhere is the power of this universal panacea so espoused by Chinese teachers1 more obvious than in the introduction of the National Education syllabus in recent years, a travesty of education that makes even veteran teachers cringe and whisper to their students “You all know what to write to get an A in this class”. And the last few times I’ve dropped in to say hi to my former teachers, I’ve been hearing complaints about how it’s difficult to introduce NE-related components into a teachable curriculum plan. At least in my former schools, the emphasis has always seemed to be on the As and teaching to the exams; whatever happened to actually caring about what students learned?

If we as a society are to continue our perennial navel-gazing at what makes the average Singaporean so rude, uncultured, and incapable of critical thought, it’s high time we examine the teachers who taught them (and us) and their love/hate relationship with the pressure-cooker system2 that includes and how successful they have been at molding the stereotypical, quintessential Singaporean.

To any past or practicising teachers and/or academics out there, please do weigh in on this. I’m gonna start off by arrowing Kungfuzi, Loy & co., Tym, Ondine and Stressed Teacher. :)

Footnotes
  1. I’ve lost track of how many 作文 I’ve written or model essays I’ve been forced to memorize that begin with “报章报道：” that included the sentence “我们应该以教育为主，从小栽培新加坡人样成——的良好习惯，以及保持——均匀的心目。” or some trivial variation thereof.↩
  2. One of my Chinese teachers loved to complain about our “填鸭式的教育制度”. ↩