June is always a peculiar month. Summer in the air, with longer days and the promise of slower-paced days. Yet, this is tempered by the onset of the exam season. I loathe the feeling of the coming of exams. That dreaded feeling of studying. A time marked by pressure, long hours of revising, and mounting anxiety. It's always an anxious journey for students, feeling both prepared and unprepared at the same time, optimistic yet overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Reading to learn is relaxing, enriching, and informative, but cramming for exams is just dull and draining.
Examinations, within the local education system, is still largely sociologically grounded in the traditional metaphor of students as empty vessels, as passive recipients of knowledge to be filled with information and later emptied onto exam papers.
Pink Floyd's shout of "We don't need no education" in Another Brick in the Wall hits hard. Yet, we do need a solid education system. What we do not need is the exhausting, memory-based exam system that rewards recall over real understanding. It's not education we should question, but the outdated methods we use to measure. This ties in with what Ivan Illich wrote in the early 1970s in his book Deschooling Society. For him the institutionalised education system often stifles creativity and disconnects learning from real life.
The prevalence of anxiety among children and adolescents is a growing concern in contemporary society as recent local studies suggested. Often high-stakes examinations serve as a significant trigger for this psychological distress. The structure of the current examination system predominantly emphasizes rote memorisation over critical understanding, reinforcing a narrow conception of intelligence that privileges the capacity to retain and reproduce information under pressure.
Memorising facts and dumping them onto an exam paper isn't learning, it's cramming. It offers little real engagement with the subject matter. This approach does not lead to true understanding or meaningful learning. Instead, it often involves absorbing large amounts of information, some of which may lack practical value, and focusing only on retaining it well enough to pass assessments. Students are evaluated on how effectively they can regurgitate memorised facts under time constraints.
The exam, therefore, becomes an exercise in short-term memory rather than a measure of meaningful learning or intellectual growth. The system often compels young people to absorb vast amounts of content, facts, dates and formulas. This is particularly evident in content-heavy subjects where local syllabi are densely packed with historical minutiae or complex mathematical procedures, often with little connection to the lived realities and practical skillsets demanded by today's rapidly evolving world.
These pupils are growing up in a world where AI is shaping how they access, process, and interact with information across nearly every aspect of life. This also creates challenges in assessing works. I speak now also as an educator, where the challenge lies in assessing genuine critical thinking amongst the easy availability of AI-generated content; a task that's becoming increasingly complex.
Yet, now more than ever, students must learn the value of questioning, evaluating, and discerning, not just absorbing. In this rapidly evolving landscape, the ability to think critically is not just valuable; it's essential. Broader competencies are needed in the 21st century, such as problem-solving, adaptability, collaboration, and emotional resilience.
Moreover, the "empty vessel" model is failing to recognize the diverse backgrounds, intelligences, and ways of learning that students bring with them into the classroom. It privileges a type of learner, typically one who excels at memorisation and written expression, while side-lining those who may be more reflective, practical, creative, or collaborative in their thinking. Now, more than ever, with increasing cases of pupils diagnosed with autism and various learning difficulties, the race to keep up with the system's demands becomes exhausting for them and their parents who sit with them to study.
In sum, a system that prioritises exams as a means of pouring knowledge into empty minds fails to honour the complexity of learning and the agency of learners. For education to be truly transformative, assessment must evolve from measuring memorisation to valuing understanding, creativity, and the capacity to think critically about the world. It is only in this way, that we can preserve the joy and enriching experience of learning.
Prof. Valerie Visanich is an Associate Professor in Sociology