The World of Education: Where Efficiency is Inefficiency

     Victor Hugo, a world-renowned playwright and novelist whose works include the famous and influential novel Les Miserables, remarked an emphatic quote to address the urgency of an education reform in the nineteenth-century France: “He, who opens a school door, closes a prison.” Thanks to the attentive and active reformers of the past, a number of problems of education seem to have been, to a certain degree, alleviated. World’s illiteracy, for instance, has been halved just in the time period of between 1970 and 2005. It seems that the educational system is finally covering more of the society’s prospective learners. Yet it is not to remark all problems have been vanquished. If Mr. Hugo was revived in today’s world, he would definitely be drawing an immense exclamation mark upon the issue of the inequality in the level of education and would comment, “He, who opens a door of a “good school,” closes a prison.”

     One may ask, then, why such a problem of inequality exists in the modern world. He or she may further pursue to find why the educational goals have deviated from those aspiring educators of the past had set. While finding specific details for this question may be difficult, the general answer to such inquiry is, rather, simple: governments’ pursuit of “budget efficiency.” The world of education has been, in a majority of situations, trying to expand the quantity of education, so that more students can accommodate learning, rather than increasing the quality of it. Yet, the “problem of quantity” seems to have been diminished at least in the wealthier nations. In such countries, education reformers are constantly pecking on the issue of increasing the quality and diversity of education provided; this issue has been hardened like a rock thanks to the constant ignorance of governments. According to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, a well-accepted psychological theory about human intelligence, there are different types of intelligence and thus students cannot be standardized like products from a factory¹. Sir Kenneth Robinson, an expert in education reform, also has commented, “(The education system of nowadays) focuses the head, slightly to one side,” meaning what the world provides for the students is not extensive enough². The education administration, rather, focuses on giving uniform learning experience for all students. It seems, thus, that it is appropriate to say that in the world of education, efficiency is the greatest inefficiency that people face.

     The issue of focus on efficiency does not seem to lie only on the issue of budgets, but also that of the information input. In not only the world of education but also the modern world in general, the word “efficient” has been a constantly irritating false synonym for “fast.” Thus, those countries that were regarded as education gurus in the modern world were often associated with the great amount of input in a shorter period of time. Yet the basis of this concept seems to be paradoxical itself, for more input does not mean more understanding; rather, more input means more time required for the thorough comprehension. As such, the efficiency of students’ learning seems to be inversely related with that of information input. A proof can be found by comparing and contrasting two different educational systems, the Korean one and the Finnish one. In a short documentary made in a Korean broadcasting company, EBS, the two systems are differed in a way where in which Korean one focuses the efficiency of information input, as well as implementing a hierarchical relationship amongst students through competition and the Finnish one focuses on “no child left behind” and a sense of cooperation. Despite the Korean system’s educational ardor on its façade, the Finnish system managed to prevail in a standardized test to measure students’ level of knowledge³. Such a result is definitely another evidence for the statement for an efficiency leading to a greater inefficiency.

     The solution to this educational crisis seems to be hard to grasp. This is because one cannot deny that there is a certain need for the efficient use of monetary and human resources provided in the educational sector which are limited to certain amounts. Yet one should detect the fact that the current system is, not at all, fully efficient. What is significantly important is the allocation of such resources into right places. For instance, the budget for education is, many times, related to the internal corruption of bureaucracies, and if one can unearth such filthy yet serious truths, a lot of monetary resources will be correctly relocated. This is significantly shown in the documentary Waiting for Superman, an award-winning documentary analyzing the failures of American education which continue to thrive even after the years of attempts to reform. A part of this movie shows the former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system, Michelle Rhee, finding out the “muck” of her predecessors and by destroying the corruption, making an effort to make the system closer to a status of efficiency⁴. As this example illustrates, mobilization towards a greater efficiency is needed, not by decreasing the budget for the current system but by finding out where the “leak” is. Furthermore, as the aforementioned examples such as theory of multiple intelligences and Korea-Finland comparisons indicate, there is a need to increasing the efficiency for students, not only the budget-wise efficiencies.

     In this complicated world where efficiency is inefficiency, one could rather remark that there is no other trustworthy solution other than trial and error. Often, some conservative dissidents of reform may remark that by changing the system as a whole, a greater damage will be received by it. Yet the problems are clear as if they are desperately waiving their hands to be noticed. Such problems have to be removed, for the future generation should not suffer from the same obstructions. Just as Victor Hugo and his contemporaries strived to deliver public education to the French students of the nineteenth century and eventually succeeded, there is no guarantee that their modern counterparts will fail in solving this paradoxical inefficiencies of efficiencies.

Sources

1: Dongkyung’s Blog: Theory of Multiple Intelligence

2: Mr. Garrioch’s Blog: TED Conference Video Clip – Sir Kenneth Robinson

3: Kyuhong’s Blog: EBS Clip – Finnish Education

4: In-class: Waiting for Superman