The State of Education at International Schools

Irisa Kwok (KGV) Artwork by Bernice Chong (DGS)

In the Paideia Proposal, Adler argued that every child is owed ‘a liberal education.’ Tis is based on Socrates’ system of the study of paideia: as well as their vocation, mathematics, logic, ethica, aesthetics, music, poetry, rhetoric, and science in equal measure. Nowadays, private schools parade liberal education and critical thinking as a hallmark of their great distinction, but really, how faithful are they to that system, and is there a need for a more vocational approach to education?

Sitting in the waiting room outside the offices on a cold December day, I sneakily checked my phone. I was almost half an hour late for class. But I couldn’t leave; it is a truth universally accepted that a villain should, must, and will receive their just desserts. My crime? My socks couldn’t fully cover my ankles.

It is a formative moment of sorts to sit on a cushioned bench, jiggling your leg because you know that every minute spent there is 10 dollars wasted, unable to take your phone out to check the time for fear of further punishment, and have only the school brochure keep you company. Now I do not have the exact wording, but I remember seeing something along these lines:

X School fosters a holistic, tolerant and multi-cultural perspective among our students in line with our mission, values and aims of embracing diversity, difference, and the uniqueness of every learner. We have a long tradition of serving the community and achieving excellent examination results and producing well-rounded young adults, focusing on building self-awareness and -esteem in our students by encouraging intellectual curiosity and independent, critical and creative thinking in a liberal environment which will maximise students’ potential and promote the growth of the whole person.

And that made me freeze. “Holistic”, “tolerant”, “diversity”, “critical thinking” and “liberal”, were words that, in my humble opinion, did not belong in such an institution where image-policing runs rampant. You shouldn’t be fined for forgetting to bring a tie, nor given a detention because you felt like wearing lip gloss, nor being singled out because - gasp! - your skirt is too short. And it got me thinking: We reason that local schools face much stricter policies and therefore free-thinking is limited, but are we really being given the true liberal education here?

Thus, through this two-part article, we seek to answer 3 questions: 1) What is the liberal education, and how did it come to be? 2) How does and can it truly exist in a modern post-recession society, and 3) Therefore, have we any need for it? Firstly, what is a so-called liberal education and what does that have to do with private schools? Rest assured, my apolitical friends, that a liberal education has nothing to do with being liberal or conservative the way these terms are often used in modern politics.

The liberal education as we know it today was in fact created in Ancient Greece by the philosopher Socrates, who defined a true education as an interactive experience involving critical inquiry, an equal dialogue between equals in terms of the learner and the learned, and a collaborative process that encouraged people to question the world around them by reasoning things out. Most importantly, every man had a right to this enlightenment. His student, Plato, further developed that idea by creating the paideia, a list of subjects meant to be extensively studied solely for the purpose of enriching the mind. They included: rhetoric, history, philosophy, arithmetic, logic, ethics, aesthetics and science.

This was seen as revolutionary; at the time, people simply went to tradesmen if they wanted to learn a craft. A winemaker would teach winemaking, or if you had legal aspirations you could corner the nearest lawyer and beg him for an apprenticeship. The idea of learning simply for the sake of learning was novel, and the citizens of Athens flocked to it. However, despite it costing nothing, there was still a price to be paid: time. “Bronze” people, who consisted of tradesmen and artisans, as Plato so dubbed them, needed the majority of their days to hawk their goods and learn their trade - they had no need of rhetoric, philosophy, or biology. Why should they need to spend hours memorising what a dead general said if they could spend that time earning money, try to make their living a little less hand-to-mouth? And so, it became a privilege left only to the rich, the “silver- and gold- souled” citizens who heaped their teachers with precious gifts as thanks for this enlightenment, in helping them become “guardians” of the citystate; such payment then became customary. To put it crudely, the aristocrats of Athens who had previously been lounging around their silks and spices, started trading them for this knowledge, enabling them to take positions of office to serve their own interests. Slowly, they infiltrated senates, courts, markets, schools. In trying to create a holistic education for the everyman, social mobility was erased, as winemakers stuck to their wines and lawyers to the law, all under the servility of a powerful aristocratic class.

There were obviously other factors, like revolutions, mass migrations, endless wars, but, from the lens of philosophy, that is essentially what happened. Now, liberal education, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, was in vogue. Vocational education was out, unless it innovated itself, which it did, with trade schools, polytechnics, and comprehensives, marketed towards middle and lower class families as the equivalent to the liberal aka private education. Despite coming from a completely different intent, vocational education now had essentially the same learning model and liberal education, purely because of its popularity, and its students being disproportionately successful and able to influence the future of the education system. Which leads us back to the question: what makes those two so different? Why do we pay for one and not the other? Well, status, for one. That much is clear. But for many, they knew it wasn’t a sufficient justification. Paul Freire, Brazilian educator, considered freedom to be the defining factor between liberal education and vocational. The perceived frivolity of the liberal education, he conjectured, lay then in the addition of the cultivation of freedom, in the form of critical inquiry and free, creative expression, as laid out in Socrates’ original theory. Rote-learning and standardised exams would be reserved for those who could not afford to know such freedoms.

And there you have it: Apparently, only through strong tradition and conserving ancient values can a love of knowledge, critical inquiry, and freedom of expression truly thrive.

Paradoxical, I know. Is it any wonder that we’re all a bit thick?