Fundamentally, I see my role as an educator as to find creative ways to nurture the development and resilience of the human brain. Yes, I teach subjects, and there's content knowledge that I impart to my students. But at its root, pedagogy is about the process of teaching and learning, and not about filling an empty vessel.
If you are born a wildebeest, once you are dropped to the grassy savannah from your mother's womb, you need to figure out very quickly how to run. Your survival depends on it. If you hatch from your egg a turtle, treacherously high up the beach above the tide line, you need to get from your nest to the water before a looming seagull snatches you up from the sand.
But if you're born a human baby, you are utterly dependent on another to feed and protect you. Your only strength is to wail at the first distant pang of hunger, only a remote concern for a newborn wildebeest or a turtle.
Our species has long known that it is not our physical attributes that are remarkable. They are not when compared to other far more impressive beasts. It is the size of our brains and our mental capacity to solve problems, communicate, and innovate that make us dominant. And for the human brain to perform to its capacity, like any muscle, it needs to be tested and exercised and given a combination of repetitive and dynamic challenges so that neural connections can be made to form memories, from which knowledge grows, and the individual can perform tasks to varying degrees of proficiency, contingent on the commitment to practice and mastery.
Anyone who has learned to play a musical instrument can attest to the seeming impossibility, at first, of plucking the right strings with the right fingers to produce the right chord. But after many repetitions, and after a period of time, the neural networks take shape, and the fingers tacitly find the correct frets, and one starts to play.
It is a process. But not only that. It is an accomplishment that is invigorating to the human mind, and it is core to our fulfilment. Without the struggle, accomplishment lacks meaning.
It is the reason we teach our children not to cheat and to value hard work. It is the reason for cultural traditions such as the Zen practice of calligraphy or bonsai grooming or Taoist traditions of self-cultivation through music or martial arts. Human societies have long understood the power of process for enhancing self-awareness and mental fortitude.
However, in our education institutions, I fear we are losing this principle. There is an accelerating shift away from the process of cultivating the human mind and towards a dogged fascination with the capacity of technology to make life easier. This is not a new trend, but in recent times, it is growing in intensity.
The popular emergence of ChatGPT has dominated office conversations in my department. How to distinguish authentic student writing from bot-produced writing? How to work with AI instead of policing it? Should we not ask students to write any more and do something else altogether?
For me, the question is more fundamental. What are we here to do? Is it not any more about exercising our minds, to become more intelligent and resilient? These are the values I hold, but I may be guilty of simple idealism, and at risk of losing pace with the times.
I fear that if our worship of technology and convenience supersedes our values for process, it comes at the expense of our integral sense of accomplishment and meaning. My colleague at MUIC, Associate Professor Dr Douglas Rhein, reported about the spike in mental health conditions among Thai students and the lack of resources available to them. Part of the mental health epidemic is diminished resilience, due to stress associated with an over-reliance on technology and social isolation. It is also reflective of a growing value for shortcuts and tech hacks that do away with struggle, leaving young people less equipped to handle the extraordinary pressures of young adulthood.
This is endemic in the education world. The Bangkok Post reported that the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research, and Innovation (MHESI) is changing standards for the academic promotion of university professors, as many are paying ghostwriters to produce publications. I wonder how the ministry handles ChatGPT when journal articles are written by bots for free.
In the end, I return to how we see our role as educators in our society. At risk of sounding like a luddite, I fear we don't fully appreciate the consequences of our shifting values. It is cliché to say that it's not the destination that matters but the journey. But it is critical to our being, our mental health, and to our spirit that we engage with the process and, indeed, the struggle of our development.
One suggestion is that we shift emphasis away from summative assessments to formative tasks. It has long been observed that in Thai education, there is an outweighed emphasis on exam scores and standardised tests. This issue is real and multi-dimensional. But it is also reflective of a value for results over process. Which then, for instance, makes way for a hyper-competitive tutorial school industry, each claiming to have the fastest way to an A.
But an A without the process makes the grade meaningless. It may come, but without authentic learning and only with a shortcut and a price tag, and we know it.
Education, in many ways, is for sale, but knowledge is earned.
If we adopted a system that rewarded the struggle to learn and not only the outcome, this would reflect a healthier value and promote the development of an educated human society. Alternatively, if we are seduced by the challenge-saving capacity of technological tools like ChatGPT, we risk undermining the potential of our minds, our greatest asset.
Matthew Robert Ferguson, PhD, is a lecturer in the Humanities and Language Division of Mahidol University International College in Bangkok, Thailand.
