For this term’s final View from the Top, we hear from Dr Richard Malpass, head of senior school at Tanglin Trust School in Singapore. Below, Dr Malpass waxes lyrical about the power of a liberal education, and the importance of an academic framework in schools that is adaptable to both the present time and the potentially unpredictable future worlds of work.
We live in an age which now is generally characterised as being dominated by rapid change, be that in systems, politics or our once accustomed norms.
And whilst the headlines of news reporting might well be regularly punctuated by issues including new technological realities, the politics of impunity and demonstrations of international sabre-rattling and garrulous demagogues, the realm of education generally occupies rather more benign paddocks across the landscape of society, quietly evolving as a civilised asset of an enlightened age.
Still, despite the seemingly innocuous slow burn of education’s significance to the development of society, I would like to make a few comments about what I consider to be the profound power of a liberal education, such as that articulated in Tanglin Senior School’s Inspired Learners Vision. This academic initiative, highlights how deep engagement with a liberal education remains so important despite the pace of change we experience around us. Through Inspired Learners, different themes around learning are highlighted each term, encouraging our students to embrace the importance of learning, and in doing so develop independence and agency in their learning and gain knowledge on ways to improve.
Recently, I had the chance to share some thoughts with our Middle and Upper School students regarding the contrast between this sense of rapid change in our contemporary world and the fundamental stability of our glorious access to great ideas, learning and discovery inherent in our Tanglin curriculum and co-curriculum. Furthermore, how those academic subjects and co-curricular pursuits are so intrinsic to our rich engagement with the world.
In the Senior School, Tanglin provides our children with a tangible and well-crafted experience of a ‘liberal education’. We aim for an enduring intellectual life which will be adaptable to both contemporary and the potentially unpredictable future worlds of work. Core subject knowledge for its own sake, as well as a relentlessly rigorous range of academic and co-curricular pathways, remains essential. Such a liberal education is hardly new, and we might usefully consider the perspective of Matthew Arnold, a leading Victorian 19thcentury English social and literary critic. Writing in 1868, he proposed that, during the junior years of secondary school, children should study ‘the mother-tongue, the elements of Latin, and the chief modern languages, the elements of history, of arithmetic and geometry, of geography, and of the knowledge of nature.’ Arnold believed such a curriculum would be ‘the first great stage of a liberal education’, claiming that ‘the aim and office of instruction … is to enable [students to access] ‘the best which has been said and thought’. A great education such as we strive for in the Senior School is intended to allow our children to have a rich and purposeful engagement with humanity’s extensive capacity for striving, discovery and intellectual achievement.
Whilst it is abundantly clear that we live in a time of unprecedented swift access to facts, data and AI tools, a deep engagement with this liberal academic and co-curricular diet is of crucial long-term benefit to the intellectual muscularity of young people as they grow into the swiftly-changing next few decades. Daisy Christadoulou’s influential book Seven Myths About ÍÑ¿ã°É confronts the sometimes fashionable notion that students no longer need to ‘know’ anything because it can all be googled or sourced from AI applications. The argument goes that modern education is about skills development rather than knowledge acquisition because knowledge is ubiquitous and instantly accessible online.
Such a position has also been variously rebuffed, for example, by ÍÑ¿ã°Éal Psychologist, Dr PA Kirschner, who comments on the value of a deep engagement with the learning of the subjects of a liberal education. He notes that ‘our understanding of the role of long-term memory in human cognition has altered dramatically over the last few decades. It is no longer seen as a passive repository of discrete, isolated fragments of information … Rather, long-term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory.’ Indeed, we teach this theory to our Year 8 students through our Learning to Learn programme, by introducing them at an early age to Schema Theory, desirable difficulties and Willingham’s assertion that ‘memory is the residue of thought’.
Put another way, the more extensive the landscape of our children’s ‘factual’ and detailed knowledge of fundamental subjects may be, the richer and more powerful their ongoing landscape of instantaneous reference when encountering each new situation. The years to come will almost certainly present our students with a few hitherto unpredicted challenges. However unforeseen such challenges may be, we know that our children will leave Tanglin and eventually enter the next generation of our fascinating world, possessing a landscape of instantaneous reference, a ‘long-term memory’ which will be securely founded upon ‘the best which has been said and thought’.