Consider this contrast: recently I received a questionnaire by email from my niece as part of a school project. Fascinated, I attempted to answer the engaging questions she asked: "Are you a good learner? What are you good at and why? Are you good with people? How do you learn best?" Such questions seem designed to foster and promote an enquiring mind and also to focus on the key question of how we learn at all. She will benefit hugely from finding out about how to develop the skill of learning in an era when facts are no longer immutable but constantly changing. My niece, by the way, is seven years old, and clearly thinking for herself in a way we might never dare to suggest here at her age.

Perhaps the biggest problem in our education practice here, however, relates to the whole notion of memorisation: a method of learning which encourages conformity, passivity, and acceptance of what we are told rather than individual expression, challenge of received ideas, and analysis of the 'truths' handed down. Memorisation is a precise tool that has value only in certain, very limited contexts, such as learning vocabulary when learning a language. Apart from that, the only real skill it develops it that of remembering long pieces of text, and that's not a skill I've had to call on once in the twenty-five years since leaving school. It's considered an essential technique for passing exams as well of course, although even the most cursory glance at pass rates for the major exams here suggests that if this is the method of choice, it's not really working.

Such classroom approaches and conventions can continue for decades. Teachers tend to teach as they were taught, and unless they receive meaningful training (not just exposure to exotic theories), there is neither reason nor incentive to change the status quo. The torch is simply passed on from generation to generation. At least now there are training programmes across the country trying to raise awareness of alternative practices and break this rigid mould, but there's a long journey ahead, and these are just the first steps.

In conclusion, let's revisit our opening question. It's possible to say that education at its best can fulfill all three goals: transmit culture, offer guidance as to the kind of social practices and attitudes required in a harmonious state, and equip the next generation with key life skills. Currently, however, our typical class does none of these satisfactorily. Culture is best transmitted through being engaged with and understood, not memorised. The social skills we want our young people to develop are hardly fostered in our strict classroom atmosphere where co-operation is non-existent and competition to reach the front bench and to pass the exam is the dominant goal. As for developing key life skills, such as independent decision-making and the confidence to go on learning, over the years these students are implicitly told their voice counts for nothing, that risk-taking can lead to humiliation, and that the best way to succeed is by keeping your head down and repeating what you have been told. Above all, they receive loud and clear the message that reality is there to be accepted, not questioned. Is this really the kind of student we want to produce?