Vox Parva: Life education in Macau has a long way to go

Benedict Keith Ip

Topics related to ‘life education’ in Macau have been under discussion since the very beginning of the curriculum reform process in non-tertiary education. Universities, institutions and various associations have also been involved from time to time. Recently, high-school principals, mainly those of Catholic institutions, have also set up an association to promote life education concepts and methods to teenagers. The question remains: how should we value the current situation? And how should we implement and develop the content of this area of education in the future?
Universities have organized various seminars and conferences to exchange ideas and try to explore and conceptualize the subjects and aspects of life education. There are also workshops and lectures offered by DSEJ to train existing teachers in the area. For instance, early in September 2004 there was a conference run by the University of Macau. The topic was on life education, mainly related to suicide issues. Two years ago, in December 2013, the University of Saint Joseph also gathered scholars and teachers from the Asian region to hold a life education forum focusing on youths’ life-planning, career development and many other subjects.
With an opportunity granted by the recent establishment of The Life Education Research and Promotion Association, which was inaugurated in St. Joseph Secondary School 5 (CDSJ 5), I had a chance to discuss this topic with some of the principals and teachers there. I also invited some high-school teachers to share their points of view. Dr Jasmine Chan, one of the high-school teachers, pointed out to me that Macau must find its own unique subjects in order to suit our local society. She said that the definition of life education differs very much across countries. For example, Australia focuses on health issues such as drugs, violence, AIDS etc.; while Taiwan focuses on the meaning of life, respect and treasuring our own lives. Topics therefore focus on the concepts of life and death, and even different religious concepts about an afterlife.
The curriculum reform, led by DSEJ, is the result of a decade-long effort on their part to propose laws and ordinances that will regulate the hours and classification of subjects. Although life education includes disciplines like psychology, depression, picture-books, death counseling and grief-coping mechanisms, religion, sex education, cardinal virtues, elderly issues, dementia, etc., the new curriculum only allows schools to plan for the inclusion of this content in lessons roughly twice a week. This is because life education, together with religious studies, has been classified as “others” rather than as a designated subject.
“Other” subjects that are not listed in the DSEJ are entitled to only two lessons according to the laws and ordinances. In addition, civil education has taken one of those teaching sessions, which means there is only one session left to assign either religious studies or life education.
Therefore, I would like to raise two points on this issue: first, there is very little room to teach human values in the existing curriculum. All of us know that scientific subjects are important and essential to advance technology and economic development. But this education will be shallow if the students do not also inherit our human values, and use these values to guide their development, resolve ethical issues, and become a real “person”, so to speak. Of course, it could be argued that these life education concepts could be incorporated into civil education and religious studies, but one must notice that both of those subjects have their own established syllabus. And bear in mind that I do not include the controversial national education into the curriculum at the moment.
Second, in short, Macau should not simply copy the life education teachings from Taiwan and Hong Kong to form the content of our course. This is a very good opportunity to raise awareness of ethical debates about our casino industry. I would be interested to see how our educators define the lines between gambling, responsible gambling, corporate social responsibility, and so forth.