Research Question: How can we disrupt the psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

What: My topic centers on the result-based orientation of the education system and the psychological impact it has on individuals. I’m interested in the fact that people within a society are required to form a balance of order in society and their own individuality, and education teaches individuals how to follow rules and to maintain order in a macroscopic sense. This either boosts idiosyncratic traits within students (because they want to escape) or it suppresses it entirely.

Why: Result-based education fuels a continuing belief in students (current and former) that grades or ranks would promise “a better future”, and we project it into whatever environment we enter next. This belief is quite common globally, especially in Asian countries, and a lot of people are suffering mentally (and sometimes physically) from it. Personally I have formed this belief as well during high school and I’m still trying to unlearn it.

How: Any system that marks or labels an individual casts a fictional shadow on them, and when this system is large enough to form a macroscopic narrative, it creates a collective belief that your fictional shadow is who you actually are. My aim is to create a similar fictional background myself for future interventions. I plan to create an alternate reality of my own perspective of result-based education and invite people to immerse into it. It’s like receiving a trigger warning or a vaccine of the real world.

Using fiction as a tool also helps to avoid confirmation bias. I strongly encourage skeptical comments about the worldbuilding itself because I’m very aware that my own perspective is biased. Therefore I would unconsciously seek conformation bias while researching. For this reason, skeptical, even negative comments are invaluable to this project.

I tested this idea during the mini-incubator by designing a puzzle in the shape of a test, with 3 pairs of questions that answers each other. (e.g. Question 1 contains the answer to Question 4, and vice versa.) The point of creating this puzzle is to create an immersive experience based on our collective memories of result-based education. I put the “test” in a fictional world called the Ministry of Potential.

1. What is the psychological term for the fear of public speaking?
A. Agoraphobia
B. Claustrophobia
C. Glossophobia 
D. Hypochondria

4. People with Glossophobia often experience a fight-or-flight response when facing what situation?
A. Reading
B. Darkness
C. Heights
D. Public Speaking

Based on the feedback I got, I was partially successful. However, the demographics of my audience were mostly Asian students which is why the feedback I got was mainly positive. I will conduct my next intervention online, which will attract a larger and more diverse audience.

What If: I’m aiming for people to be more critical of the system they are in right now, that they’ll not only have the clarity of mind to question the system in their head, but also the courage to use the system to their own benefits.

In this project, I am not only the creator and researcher, but also one of the stakeholders because I am a former student of result-based education. Being perfectly aware that the education system couldn’t be “fixed”, my ultimate goal is to let more people obtain agency within the system and develop a more active way of learning themselves.

Reading List:

Bregman, R., Manton, E. and Moore, E. (2021) Human Kind: A Hopeful History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Brown, D. (2007). Tricks of the Mind. London: Channel 4 Books.

Brown, D. (2016). Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine. London: Transworld Publishers.

Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Curtis, A. (Producer & Director). (2002). The Century of the Self [Documentary]. BBC Four.

Foucault, M. (1961). Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique [Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason]. Paris: Plon.

Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.

Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.

Staff, W. (2004) Engineering god in a petri dish, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2004/09/engineering-god-in-a-petri-dish/ (Accessed: 16 May 2024).

Steiner, R. (1995). The Spirit of the Waldorf School. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks.

Stewart, T. L. (2007). The Mysterious Benedict Society. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

The thing about dystopian fiction is that it projects and highlights a macroscopic view and reveals to people inside this view about what is inherently wrong about an orderly society or world.

Up till now I have an assumption that I know is biased. I need to collect evidence but I’m unsure of which field of evidence I should collect, therefore I have no direction and am quite lost. The only certain thing I have up till now is my rather dystopian view of result-based education.

I could project this world-view out to the world and get comments. This world-view or narrative, albeit wrong in the way that it is biased and not objective enough, will attract positive and negative stakeholders(or passersby who are interested, which kinda makes them stakeholders) who will make positive and negative comments. Audience feedback will elevate my project into a higher level and give me a more concrete direction. I secretly encourage negative(or a mix of different kinds of) feedback from this intervention because this will mean that I could find a way to break my bias.

Reminder to self: the purpose of this intervention is to collect evidence. Creating change is kinda the next step because we can’t create change when we don’t know where the painpoint is.

TBC.

Just remembered to document something from several weeks before. We watched a video called “The Art of Asking Better Questions” and answered several questions during class. (video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYnGiWlwcj4)

My answers are as follows:

What ideas/phrases have stayed with you?
Childlike questions can turn into sth more concrete(within the mind of an adult) in an adult-driven world.------Jonathon Keats

We're hierarchical creatures that don't want to shame ourselves.------Tim Ferris


Which speaker made you curious to know more about their work?
Jonathon Keats. What he said about adults thinking that childlike/stupid questions are "inappropriate" really struck me, because I tend to worry about stepping over the line when I want to ask sth that is considered absurd in the adult world.


What are some "stupid" questions you have after watching these videos?
Will we get sth different if we interview kids? Or if we ask a kid(a normal one, not a child genius) to give a presentation/talk?

To me, one speaker stood out amongst others: Jonathon Keats. So I researched his work further, and found that he had an experiment in which he attempted to genetically engineer God and to determine its place on the evolutionary tree.

And I was like, woooow.

I was really interested in anything related to Mythology and Belief(it was a HUGE chunk in my Box of Uncertainties, where I quoted Puddleglum’s belief in Narnia’s existence when he was trapped in a darker world), and I’m currently searching for modes of media other than novels, audiobooks and visual images(film and television) to demonstrate fiction. This is exactly what I was looking for.

In this project, Keats aimed to explore the intersection of science and religion by attempting to create a physical being that could be considered God. This project was more of a thought experiment rather than a scientific endeavor, which excites me because I didn’t know there was such a thing called a thought experiment;)

Keats focused more on exploring the concept rather than a literal scientific experiment. He wasn’t successful in creating a God(unsurprisingly). But he did manage to spark discussions about the nature of God, the boundaries of science, and the role of art. His initial intention was to use art and philosophy to challenge assumptions and provoke conversations, not to literally create a deity.

This is somehow extremely relatable to what I’m currently doing and searching for in my own project. I’ll sort out the logic later. This entry is literally something that I remembered was important for me but forgot to document immediately at that time.

(https://www.wired.com/2004/09/engineering-god-in-a-petri-dish/)

Adding a definition of thought experiments here:

Thought experiments are mental exercises that involve creating hypothetical situations to explore a concept, theory, or question. They act like simulations in your mind, allowing you to play out scenarios that might be impossible or impractical in the real world.

Research Question

How can we reduce the negative psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

(Changing details a few days later)

How can we disrupt the psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

what

My topic centers on the education system and the psychological impact it has on individuals. I’m interested in the fact that individuals within a society are required to form a balance of order and chaos, and education teaches individuals how to follow rules and to maintain order in a macroscopic sense. This either boosts idiosyncratic traits within individuals outside the education system or it suppresses it.

why

When an education system is result-oriented, it fuels a continuing belief in students (current and former), and we project it into whatever environment we enter next. From my knowledge, this belief is quite common globally, especially in Asian countries, and a lot of people are suffering mentally (and sometimes physically) from it. People would complain about it on scattered safe spaces on the Internet when they are outside the system and away from the rules physically.

Personally I have this belief as well and I’m still unlearning it.

how

Result-based education, or any system that labels an individual, is adding a fictional shadow to that individual. And when this system is large enough to contain enough people to form a collective story, it creates a collective belief that your fictional shadow created by the system is who you are.

I aim to create a similar fictional worldview (an alternate or parallel reality) and set that as a background for future interviews and interventions. This alternate reality is a safe space for stakeholders because with me as the creator of this fiction, I could make sure that people can enter and exit this world freely without getting immersed in it to the extent that they believe it as their reality. The worst they’ll receive is a trigger warning or a vaccine of what is actually happening in the real world. I also encourage skeptical comments about the worldbuilding itself because my own thoughts are subjective and aren’t open enough, feedback like this will be invaluable to this project.

what if

I’m hoping that people will be more skeptical/critical of the system they are in at the moment, that they’ll not only have the clarity of mind to question the system in their head, but also the courage to use the system to their own benefits.

In this project, I am not only the creator and researcher of this project, I am also one of the stakeholders because I am a former student of result-based education. I’m hoping that there will be more people(quantitatively) who obtains more agency in the education system and develop a more active than passive way of learning themselves.

reading list

Derren Brown: “Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine”

Derren Brown: “Tricks of the Mind”

George Orwell: “1984”

Aldous Huxley: “Brave New World”

Bryan Caplan: “The Case Against Education”

Michel Foucault: “Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique” (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

Adam Curtis: “The Century of the Self”(a documentary)

PoorRolemodel (2023). What is an ARG? [online] ARGCREATOR. Available at: https://argcreator.com/what-is-an-arg/ [Accessed 2 May 2024].

Reflecting on what I wrote:

Am I still talking about education, or am I talking about something else?

Do I stick to education or do I explain this phenomenon from a perspective that is more abstract?

We mapped out our thinking process in the shape of a snail, starting from creating the Box of Uncertainties to what our research question is up till now.

Updating my research question:

How can we disrupt the psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

P.S. Interventions, in my opinion, is creating chaos/disrupting order healthily when this “order” is generating negative things. In this scenario we can no longer hold the binary belief that order is good and chaos is bad.

Audience(if there is an audience or whoever is reading this), be prepared, because this blog is going to get a LOT more chaotic from now on.

I chose to map everything out during spring break because I was getting tangled in my own thoughts.

This is basically a physical version of my internal thoughts. I’ve linked everything that I thought was objectively(and subjectively) logical.

I got a bit stuck when we were asked to draw a mind map turning time into space——I interpreted it as mapping out what we imagine our action would be from May to November.

When I realised that I was basically copying what I had already done before, I turned the page over.

A project evolving is a bit like the evolving of a plot in a story. Hence, quoting Neil Gaiman: “And then what happens?”(in his words, this sentence always pushes a story forward)

Using fiction as an intervention is an easy thing to say(and to write in essays and anything made up with words) but it’s a harder thing to plan, and even harder to actually take action. Letting go of reality and rules and the norm is harder than I thought as well, because our minds are used to a certain way of thinking, and we forget that what already exists in reality was once imagination, a thought or an idea in a person’s head, and if that thought had been different, or was changed during its evolvement, the world we live in might have been veeeeeery different from what we are used to now.

I don’t know a lot about what happens next. But I do know that if I asked someone about the education system, they would show their immediate views about it(I’ve been mostly focusing on the negative side of people’s comments because there were a LOT of negative comments, and they never really appear in an interview sort of conversation, they mostly appeared in a conversation-in-the-bar-and-everyone-was-tipsy sort of conversation), and then, reading and understanding psychological and societal phenomenons, I would catagorize those comments.

And, at least to me, reading fiction(dystopian and speculative fiction) like 1984 and Brave New World REALLY helps to link psychological and societal methodologies to facts I witness and comments I hear in real life.

I think interviews are the last thing I could do to get evidence because people don’t usually feel safe enough to tell the truth in that environment, because they know an interview will be recorded and documented and sent to other people and an unknown audience. The comments I saw on social media(in China) addressing this topic sound much more REAL. Up till now, starting an intervention on social media addressing this topic is probably going to get more genuine reaction compared with an interview.

This is an example of an alternate reality game. The creator uploaded 8 videos on Bilibili, introducing 8 stages of the game, and created an uploading area for players to upload their answers. I loved this game because people were really actively engaging in solving the mystery in the narrative. And it helps because the central plot of this game is about Final Exams. (a bit like Squid Game actually)

Just remembered, I lost definitions of words I was originally really certain of (Fiction, Storytelling, Narrative etc), but then I decided to stick to my own understanding of those terms because I had to have an initial definition of those words in order to communicate.

We also did a “Theory of Change” worksheet on our individual projects.

Ummm…based on what I have up till now, I’ll probably need to redo it.

My research question had morphed and evolved. This is the newest version:

How can dystopian fiction reduce the negative psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

I replaced “we” with “dystopian fiction”. It was originally “How can we reduce the impact of……”

TBC.

Recently had doubts about my individual project, because during the preparation for EPP, I found my project getting more and more political, in the sense that my project is pushing me to become an activist. I had this realisation when I found myself searching through different political eras throughout Chinese history and chatting to my friends from a variety of different backgrounds about their perspective of Chinese education.

And I stopped myself, because this feels wrong. I came with the initial goal to create change with fiction. While learning the origins of Chinese education is beneficial because the result-based education system is itself a “fictional” world that generates/encourages a certain mode of belief, is fiction the best way to create maximum change? One fact I do know is that it is certainly the best way for me, as an individual, to create change.

On a personal level, reading and creating fiction brings me joy, and on a societal level, fiction condenses macroscopic views into a world that is easier to comprehend.

emmmm okayyy here’s a thought:

Result-based education system is fictional.

The way you are educated is fictional. They tell you about a fictional world(whether good or bad, if it can be defined that way)

This reality that you form, whether as a student or as a graduate, is a fiction edited from the objective truth.

Richard’s idea: curating a movement of fiction/artwork/screaming(??) with rules and guidelines.(to do whaaaat…?)(to project this view to younger people?)(because there is a religion/belief going on that should be broken or unlearned.)(By curating this movement, people are not just letting off steam on the internet, they’re also giving off a warning to youngsters who are just stepping into this environment).

This itself would be a platform for fiction.

And that goes back to the education system(grades, ranks, hierarchies, etc) being fictional.

e.g. feedback on unit 2, the one next to the letter grades, gives u a small story of who u are(which clearly is one-sided and therefore untrue, but it is a brilliant example). Young students tend to believe it to be their own personality and that’s why they are negatively impacted when their grades are relatively bad…

Two works of fiction I could add to research:

The “Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu.

and Dungeons and Dragons(a game I’m not familiar with).

And of course, 1984.

I need to remind myself to take action(interventions) rather than just analysing the same information again and again.