Life education is important for our students

[何濼生]

The results of a survey released last week once again confirmed that life education is very important to the psychological well-being of school-age children.

Sponsored by the Shih Wing Ching Foundation and working with HK.WeCare of Wofoo Social Enterprises, the Pan Sutong Shanghai-Hong Kong Economic Policy Research Institute developed an index of life education, based on the intensity of activities that promote the values of love, insight (wisdom), fortitude (resilience), and engagement, which is summarized by the acronym “LIFE”.

When we tally the ranking of the school happiness indexes against the life education index, it is very clear that those schools with a higher life education index tend to have a higher “school happiness index”, which is the average of the happiness indexes of students for the grades. For primary schools, the grades covered include Primary 4 to Primary 6. For secondary schools, the grades covered include Form 1 to Form 3. The correlation coefficients suggest that life education may be even more important for secondary schools than for primary schools. While the life education index is generally higher among primary schools than among secondary schools, for secondary schools, variations in the index appear to produce sharper differences in school happiness in the predicted direction.

More importantly, we discovered that for secondary schools, activities that promote love and fortitude are particularly effective. In contrast, for primary schools, activities that promote love and engagement are particularly effective. This makes intuitive sense. First, love education is always the most important among the four dimensions of life education. For both primary and secondary schools, students need to learn that love is about genuinely caring for the overall well-being of other people as well as that of oneself. Because adolescents face many challenges as they must cope with problems that begin to emerge at that stage of life, fortitude education stands out as being very important. For primary school children, on the other hand, engagement stands out as the next most important dimension after love education, because engagement as purposive living and actively looking for interesting things to do is easy to understand and appreciate.

While life education at home and life education at school will significantly lift children’s happiness, life education at home has twice as much impact on children’s happiness as life education at school

There are many ways schools and families can provide effective life education to children. Talks and sharing of life experiences and stories is the most common approach. Another is visits, which can open the eyes of students so that they will learn about the lives of others, the difficulties that they face, the way they overcome the difficulties, and how the community can work together to bring good results. Singing, music, dance, creative arts, poems, drama, role playing, etc., can all play a part in life education. But the most effective kind of life education is educating by example. Teachers and parents, by genuinely caring for their students and children and demonstrating to them how they overcome difficulties together and handle their emotions, will go a long way toward promoting love, insight, fortitude, and engagement, which can be called the four pillars of life education.

One of the findings from the study is that while life education at home and life education at school will significantly lift children’s happiness, life education at home has twice as much impact on children’s happiness as life education at school. Given this finding, it is nice to learn that there are now 14 family life education units — on Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Shatin, Yuen Long, Fanling, Kwai Chung, and Tsuen Wan — run by NGOs, including the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association, the Federation of Youth Groups, and some religious bodies. The Social Welfare Department explains that family life education is “a form of community education which is preventive and developmental in nature. It aims to enhance family functioning, strengthen family relationships and prevent family breakdown through a wide range of educational and promotional programmes such as seminars, talks, groups, family activities and exhibitions, etc.”

Of the teachers who responded to our survey, only 45 percent reported having had training in life education. In my view, all teachers and all parents should have some training in life education. It is regrettable that some teachers could not handle their own emotions, and they set a bad example to their students. Teachers and parents need to be prepared to serve as life coaches to the young minds who need guidance. I hate to say that the policy of “one social worker for each school” could have an unintended side effect: Teachers may then have a tendency of referring all emotional and behavioral problems to the school social worker. Those in my generation certainly know that there were no social workers in our schools. Yet a word of encouragement or advice from our teachers could make a huge impact on us. An article I read recently tells how a teacher’s advice helped the author of that article change from one who had nothing to be proud of to one who had the confidence and ability to serve as a class prefect. This laid the groundwork for her career.

Reference to China Daily: https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/237063

[Ko Chi Kit]

As a student teacher this year, I also agree with the importance of life education. However, this is not in my curriculum. This implies that there is no training provided to upcoming teachers related to life education. The closer will be positive education but it is unsuccessful in many schools. It is just a norm that we all agree to implement to ensure children are proactive, caring, creative, independent, sensible and grateful. As such, we could only rely on religious values to transfer to students gradually. Such a pity.