Technology is not a good teacher

Yesterday, I read a caption posted by an online news site on facebook quoting our new seventh Prime Minister's comment on drastic changes needed in the way teaching is carried out in our schools.

"OLD SCHOOL: Malaysia's Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad says the country's teaching methods are out of date and wants to place less emphasis on teachers and instead allow students to be taught via "discs or thumb drives" which contain materials from experts for students to learn from.", the report quotes the Prime Minister.

In my opinion this notion that technology can play the role of teachers is alarming.

The best teacher one can afford in life is not technology. It is neither disk nor thumb-drive. It is neither app nor cloud. The best teacher to learn from is, well, a teacher: a trained, educated and human teacher.

An old friend responded to my opinion, asking what I thought about " . . . the idea of a learning facilitator + technology based delivery ? In other words emphasizing the facilitative part of the role of a teacher."

I replied him that this belief in a facilitator of learning rather than a teacher of expertise has been around for a long time. It was actually part of my teacher training back in the early 1980s, in those days being used as one of several approaches in the teaching-learning process.

The issue we had to address in those days was the long time it would take for a child or an adolescent to "discover" knowledge, gain sufficient understanding, and apply themselves to real problem solving situations. And that's not yet going on to analyse, evaluate and synthesize new theories.

In my opinion, a facilitator role needs to work hand-in-hand with a coach role, i.e. the facilitator must himself have sufficient expertise to explain, demonstrate, prescribe drills, correct mistakes and to motivate the learner to achieve objectives.

In other words, the student needs to learn from an experienced person. Perhaps, this is somewhat akin to the "pair programming" that my old friend, a software engineer, talked about some years ago on extreme programming where, simply speaking, computer programmers work together in pairs with one writing the program codes and the other reviewing the code line by line.

Yesterday, while waiting to use the air pump at my neighbourhood petrol service station, I saw the driver of the car in front, a young man, setting the pump pressure to almost twice the normal pressure typically recommended for a sedan. In fact, he had virtually set it to 300 kPa (44 psi), the maximum limit for the tyres on his small car.

As he proceeded to pump up each tyre, I thought to myself, "That is MAX. The tyres are at bursting point. Set it any higher, and they may explode! "

After some hesitation, I decided to get down from my car and alert him about it. By then he had already inflated all four tyres on his car. I told him that it was very dangerous for him to do what he was doing. He could get hurt, even killed if the tyres explode while driving. I urged him to set the tyres to a lower pressure.

He said it was the first time he pumped a car tyre and he didn't know the correct pressure to set. Obviously he didn't even know that the recommended tyre pressure is displayed on the door frame plate inside the driver side door.

Not only that, he didn't know how to read the door frame plate. I had to do it for him and tell him that the recommended pressure for his car is 230 kPa (33 psi). I also had to show him how to set the pump down to 230 kPa and how the pump, a new model, would automatically release excess pressure from the tyre by just "pumping" the tyres all over again at this lowered pressure.

I was relieved that the tyres did not burst and that no one was hurt.

Before saying good-bye, I found out that he is an undergraduate in the university nearby . . .a university student who was completely ignorant about tyre safety.

The young man did not know the safe tyre pressure for his car. He did not know how to find that out. And he did not know about the dangers of driving around with super inflated tyres.

This person needed someone knowledgeable and experienced who could talk to him about the dangers of inflating tyres to their maximum limit. He needed someone to show him how to find out the recommended tyre pressures, to reduce the extreme pressure that had already built up in all four wheels

He needed a teacher.

Whether you call facilitator, guide, coach or mentor, a teacher by any other name must still teach. Without a teacher, the notion of students learning from technology will not work.