Our Desk: School of democracy

João Pedro Lau

I read a news article last month about a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education who lost a court case against the Kansas State Board of Education in the United States about the teaching of evolution in schools. The article said that the dispute was caused by an educational framework drawn up by 26 states of the US, in collaboration with the US National Research Council, on the teaching of science in schools. This article caught my attention because of a quote in it; the fundamental idea of the framework. It says “science—and therefore science education—is central to the lives of all Americans, preparing them to be informed citizens in a democracy and knowledgeable consumers”.
I am not going to discuss the teaching of creationism vs. evolutionism here, as this is virtually a non-issue in Macau; nor am I going to talk about science education in general. What I want to talk about is how the quote seemed to reflect one of the goals of US education, which is to prepare students to be “informed citizens in a democracy”.
Looking back to Macau, sometimes I wonder how our schools have prepared us to become citizens in a democracy. My first “democratic experience” in school consisted of electing my class prefects and treasurer. Of course, the democratic election was somehow controlled. The candidates were either nominated by the teachers or were decided based on their academic achievement. It was just like Plato’s Utopia, where “…those now called kings [must]…genuinely and adequately philosophize”.
But apart from that, there was nothing in my school that prepared me for a democratic society. In fact, I feel like I can function better in an autocracy or a dictatorship after graduating from my school. Recently, I have heard an incident that has further destroyed the image of my alma mater in my heart and convinced me that a Macau school (at least mine) is absolutely not a good place to train citizens of democracy.
My school used to ask students to wear traditional school coats when attending important events. Several years ago, the management changed the design of the school coat. Nevertheless, students were still fonder of the old design, even if it had been heavier and not so trendy. In the beginning, the school allowed students to choose between them. But the school management changed its mind two months ago, suddenly requiring all students to buy and wear the new school coat. To make the decision even more ridiculous, students were told to wear the new coat at all times in school when the temperature is above 23 degrees.
Of course, adolescents are never cooperative, especially when they have these kinds of unreasonable instructions forced upon them. Eventually, most of the senior students in my school refused to comply with the new order and did not put on the coat during the daily appearance checkup. After a week of “civil disobedience”, the school finally dropped the unpopular instruction.
Imagine if you were a student in my alma mater: what would you have you learnt from this incident? For me, I think they have learnt the following: that authority is not always right, sometimes they make stupid rules; that you have to resist when authority imposes unreasonable rules on you; that the authority will back down when it faces enough resistance; and that you cannot trust the authority, because you do not know when they are going to come up with another stupid rule.
Well, I think my school is preparing students to be citizens of a democracy after all.