Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey
Sept 14 2008

Confined in departmental boundaries

This week a friend subjected herself to an academic interrogation. Her
aim? To scale the ivory tower of Turkish higher education. She sat on
a plastic chair and faced three professors. She had prepared herself
for hard questions, for after all the tests and forms this was the
first human contact. Here in this room they would determine whether
she was a suitable candidate for the university’s graduate program in
international relations.

As they shuffled their papers her mind raced over all the topics she
had studied in the past month: the legal rationale for war crimes
trials in The Hague; negotiations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots;
President Abdullah Gül’s visit to Yerevan and the possibility
of establishing normal diplomatic relations between Turkey and
Armenia; US support for Georgia in the recent battles with Russian
army units; the appropriateness of offering NATO membership to
Ukraine, Georgia and other former republics of the Soviet Union; the
implications of Turkish membership in the European Union for Russian
energy policy; also China’s burgeoning economy and its effect on
geopolitical power blocs and spheres of influence.

She also prepared for more general subjects, such as international
crisis resolution, international treaty law and global trade
agreements. But they threw her off balance with the first question:
What is the organization of the United Nations General Secretariat?

Do you mean like the UN Development Program, the World Food Program?
No, we mean what is the organizational structure of the General
Secretariat¦

She vaguely knew that the Executive Office of the secretary-general
branches down into a zillion agencies and departments, but could not
begin to reel off the list: Protocol and Liaison Services; Office of
the Spokesman for the Secretary-General; Global Compact Office; Office
of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), Internal Audit Divisions;
Monitoring, Evaluation and Consulting Division; Investigations
Division; Office of Legal Affairs (OLA); Office of the Legal Counsel;
General Legal Division; Treaty Section¦etcetera, etcetera,
etcetera.

The candidate’s inability drew tight-lipped responses from all three
judges. Could she at least name the former secretary-general and name
his country of origin? She could: Kofi Annan, from Ghana. This
satisfied them that they were not dealing with a complete idiot, but
her interview did not go well.

To me this form of grilling for exclusive "knowledge" disregards every
education reform of the past 100 years. The high and mighty professors
value facts over concepts, value protocol over inquiry-based problem
solving.

Modern education theory favors critical thinking skills over rote
memorization. Teachers who want to imbue their students with a love of
learning emphasize the multidisciplinary approach to teaching, yet
this panel of master’s degree judges is not only confined by
departmental boundaries, it is bound in a straitjacket of uncritical
thinking.

If they were freethinking they might ask a candidate provocative
questions, such as what neuroscience can contribute to international
relations or how developments in computer science have affected
diplomatic communications.

I’ve seen more imaginative approaches to learning from grade school
teachers than these professor doctors showed in their simple
fact-checking test of candidates for a master’s degree. For example, I
read an interview of an elementary school math teacher who said he
worked on critical thinking skills with the very first lesson, one
plus one equals two. This teacher would ask his little charges a
simple question: When does one plus one NOT equal two?

A few of the studious kids had probably memorized the multiplication
table, at least through 12, and here was their teacher asking them to
violate the code. You can imagine them scrunching their eyes and
trying to think¦and he would let them think for a while. Then he
would say, how about when one river flows into another river?

He said the children’s eyes would light up with the realization that
simple math cannot always handle or explain simple physical events of
addition.

Come to think of it, that math teacher’s question sounds like a better
way to evaluate grad school candidates — for any department.