Is education like bomb disposal or like cooking?

Malay Mail

16-06-2025

JUNE 16 — I apologise for the weird headline but I think it's an important question.
I've been working for more than 25 years in the education sector. I've seen the stress, the pain, the 'obsessions' and not least the pressures that parents place on students and students place on themselves.
I've had parents sit with their daughter in front of me during Parent-Teacher Day and basically court-marshal the poor girl for not doing better than a C in Geography.
I've heard stories from counsellors (and sometimes even HR) about the depression, the self-harm and the breakdowns.
Hence my original question (posed to parents mainly): How do you view education? Is it a life-or-death matter? Is it as critical as disarming a bomb placed in some mall and figuring out which wire to cut, the red or blue one, where one wrong move can lead to disaster?
What if we treated schooling the way an open-hearted chef viewed his kitchen i.e. as a place where experimentation reigns, where various recipes and concoctions may be tried and tested, where success need not be narrowly defined and can, in fact, be a matter of 'taste' and individual desire? — Picture from pexels.com
Do we view education as analogous to performing heart surgery where we need to monitor practically every little step our child takes, where we need to ensure that every subject he's taking produces a Distinction, lest the whole world collapses and our families are branded as societal failures?
Because if we do so — and I suspect many Asian families do — then it perfectly explains the amount of burdens, stresses and pressures we as parents and educators place on our children and young people.
Seeing formal education and examinations as Do-Or-Die or as some Mission Impossible quest through some booby-trapped maze would totally explain why we 'hover' over our children with their studies, why we place such heavy (even impossible) academic demands on them, why they would end up believing that anything less than all-pervasive excellence equates to failure.
And why many of them break.
Is there a better way?
What if our paradigm of education — instead of approximating something like missile-interception or a brain operation — took the form of, say, cooking?
What if we saw education as a rich practice where creativity can flourish and multiple outcomes may be accepted?
What if we treated schooling the way an open-hearted chef viewed his kitchen i.e. as a place where experimentation reigns, where various recipes and concoctions may be tried and tested, where success need not be narrowly defined and can, in fact, be a matter of 'taste' and individual desire?
What if we treated learning like travel? Where the journey is at least as important as the destination? Where difference and variety are concepts and practices to be celebrated and enjoyed, where 'competitiveness' is rejected as false and unhealthy?
If we can be courageous enough to try, then maybe fewer students will hate schooling. Maybe fewer will feel like they're being shoved into prison every day.
Maybe fewer will feel like losers because we'd all realise that not achieving a high score in Biology is about as normal as not being able to play top-class tennis (that is to say, not at all a matter of failure, disgrace or about being a social outcast).
And schooling and learning can finally be a matter of enjoyment and fun.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.