New ways to solve old problems

A few conversations I've had and events I've attended over the past week led me to this blog post. It's a post that is primarily about thinking of new ways to solve old and new problems in the education realm in Malaysia.

The first conversation I had was with a friend and we were talking about smart people whom we both knew. I came to the conclusion that many of us make the unconscious link between being smart with having a high IQ or being book smart. This is not really surprising given that our whole education system is geared towards rewarding people who are book smart. But the older I get, the more I realize that emphasizing being book smart above other kinds of 'intelligence' is not a very smart thing to do, whether one is an educationist, a corporate leader, a politician or a parent. In any project / organization that one is involved in, I think it's necessary to have people with different kinds of 'intelligence' to achieve good outcomes. This kind of intelligence may be verbal, spatial, linguistic, inter-personal, etc... You cannot hope to put a group of book smart people in the same room who are from the same background and assume that you will get good results. It probably is better to put in people with different backgrounds and different types of 'intelligence', if you want to find new ways of solving old and new problems.

The second conversation I had was in an email exchange with different people discussing the merits and demerits of a 'Harvard' type approach towards research that is highly individualistic versus a 'Wisconsin' i.e. state school type approach towards research that is more collegial in nature. Many were in favor of a more collegial approach that is more productive on a person by person measure and perhaps also gives workers a better work life balance. We also discussed the possibility that if the collegial model were to be introduced in a Malaysian university, the 'free-rider' problem would be one of the main challenges. Within the collegial model, there still needs to be some level of accountability.

The third conversation I had was really in the form of a talk given by CNN Special Investigations anchor Soledad O'Brien. It was the final event during the Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) week at Duke. Ms. O'Brien had just finished covering the Obama inauguration as part of the CNN team. CNN had also just finished showing a series called Black in America in the run up to Obama's inauguration and MLK day - Ms. O'Brien was one of the key journalists in this series.

Ms. O'Brien said a few things that struck me. She said that having people of diverse backgrounds come together to work on a project usually results in a better product. And she's not only talking about racial diversity, she's also referring to diversity in terms of backgrounds, sexual preference, previous work experience, geographical origins, etc... She referred to the findings of Michigan Professor, Scott Page, who wrote a book arguing that diversity leads to better outcomes, using, of all things, mathematical models. She also talked about the experiments which Roland Fryer, the youngest tenured black professor at Harvard, was doing in schools in Dallas, where children were financially rewarded based on how many books they read. She gave this as an example of how important is it to 'think outside the box' in terms of finding solutions to the many problems society is facing and in fact, has been facing for the past X number of years. Thirdly, she also said that having diverse voices heard is not something easy because you have to somehow find the 'best' solution among all the ideas being proposed. Diversity is not about coming together to sing 'kumbaya'. It's much more complicated than that.

These three experiences I've had in the past week led me to think of how this might translate into trying to find solutions to problems which we're having in the education realm in Malaysia. I think some of the lessons I've learned over the pass week may apply in the Malaysian context. The lessons are - don't overemphasize book learning or being book smart, working in teams with proper accountability structures, diversity is good in terms of coming up with solutions and finally, thinking outside the box.

How would this apply to one particular problem which parents complain about time and time again - the problem of too many school kids spending too much time at cyber cafes playing games such as Starcraft, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Counterstrike etc...? This problem has existed every since the internet was invented and cyber-cafes were established in Malaysia.

There have been calls to ban all cyber cafes or to impose restrictions which makes the cyber cafe owners liable for fines if kids wearing school uniforms were found on their premises. I think that these kinds of 'solutions' for this kind of 'problem' are far too blunt and do not demonstrate an understanding of why kids go to cyber cafes in the first place. If you ban cyber cafes, these kids may find other outlets for entertainment. Some of them may get involved in drugs or gangs. If you prevent them from wearing school uniforms while being in these cyber cafes, they will use change their clothes after school.

If we take to heart some of the lessons I learned over the past week, there would be many different kinds of 'solutions' that can be tried out to try to 'solve' this problem. First of all, you cannot just depend on MOE officials or parents to tackle this problem. You need people who actually play these games to be in your 'team' so that you can understand why kids actually play these games.

I have to admit that I love playing computer games including Starcraft and Warcraft but have stopped playing them since I want to finish my PhD this year. But I know friends who are white-collar workers and company owners who play Warcraft in their office on Friday evenings as part of their 'team-building' exercise. (That's their 'official' reason) If white collar workers are playing these games, without much detriment to their own work performance, can we really say that playing these games is a 'problem' for young kids?

The problem here has more to do with the fact that some kids are spending ALL their time playing these games and not enough time on schoolwork. If this is the case, can there be more creative solutions to solve this problem?

If I were an MOE official put in charge of tackling this problem, I would first get together a group of diverse 'stakeholders' - selected teachers, parents, kids, gamers, researchers, local politicians, entrepreneurs etc... - and ask them to come up with a list of solutions. Having a diverse group of people means that all voices will be heard. The kids will let the parents know that not all gaming is bad, the researchers will tell talk of different ways to incentivize the kids for doing homework and playing computer games, the local politicians will come up with creative ways of policing, the entrepreneurs will come up with ways of making money that will benefit them as well as the kids playing the games...

I can throw out some ideas which I've thought of myself which can definitely be refined in the context of a bigger group with more experience and local knowledge than myself. Some of these ideas include:

- Allowing kids to play some of these games in the computer labs in schools with the caveat that for every hour they are allowed to play, they have to read a book or finish a piece of homework which takes 1 or 2 hours to do
- Asking parents from the same neighborhood to network their own computers so that their kids can play against one another from the safety of their own homes. This way, parents can monitor how much they play and the kids themselves can play with one another without having to go to the cybercafes.
- Giving 'prepaid' cards to kids who do well in school so that they can redeem these cards at ministry approved cyber cafes. Or give these cards to kids in exchange for reading a certain number of books or improving their grades by a certain amount.

Some of these ideas may be stupid, some of them may be problematic to implement, some of them may need buy-in from the different stakeholders to succeed. My larger point is this - we need to find creative ways to solve some of the trickier problems that affect our education system. And we cannot adopt a one size fits all approach. What may work in KL / PJ may not work in Teluk Intan or Sekinchan or in Raub or Kelantan. What you need are people at the MOE who can get together the different stakeholders to that creative ideas can be generated and then implemented. Those which succeed should be continued, those which don't should be discarded. If these are done on a localized basis, then there's more room for experimentation. Just my 2 cents.