20 November 2007

Another mass production of students

An article appeared in Today newspaper on the 17th of November, titled: School experiment that failed. It's about a parent dilemma on sending her children to a Singapore public school, or an international school. She decides to give the public school a go but the venture proof to be short lived, and she finally send her kids to an international school.

Of course this not the first time our educational system has been criticised, and the its many short coming discussed in the media. And our educational board will again, metaphorically, smiles and nods, and reassure us how about how innovative our schools are, and how improvements are constantly made to an already world class formula, and exciting new classes on creativity thinking are around the corner.

But stupid is as stupid does. The fact that students nowadays are still facing the same kettle of fish like I did, shows the problem are not going to away with a few new 'creative classes'.

Passing exams has becomes the aim and goals of schools. The true purpose of teaching and learning has been forgotten in the pressure of higher school ranking. Exams results has been the sole determination to a person's worth. It has become an end in itself. Can anyone honestly deny this culture of fear of exams in our students?

We boost of high maths and science scores. But our unnaturally high scores in this area are nothing to be proud of. Simply because these are subjects that one can prepare for by doing the holy 10 years series. In other words, you can do well in these subjects by doing roughly the same thing over and over again. You simply have to follow.

Ever wonder why we don't seems to do so well in literature? Maybe because to do well, you'll need to come up with your own ideas and original content. Something that is perhaps sadly foreign in our students. Seriously, how many Singapore students ask questions in your university class?

The problem with our system is that it systematic destroys ones creativity, uniqueness and self-esteem. Round pegs are made to fix into square holes and polygons are filed to form squares. There is simply no room in the system to be yourself. It's a system that rewards conformity and punishes uniqueness. The best way to pass exams is to do what is tried and tested and avoid risk.

I have never felt that I actually learned anything in the 10 years I spend in government school. In fact I'm glad that I'm still able to do a little bit of thinking once in a while despite the fact that I have been authoritative educated (But then I have stop reading the straits times, so I guess that helped).

Our schools may be good in imparting factual knowledge, but at a cost of a person innate sense of creativity and discovery. While factual knowledge are useful, I can't help but wonders if I can't achieve the same result by keeping a small library. Creativity can't and doesn't need to be taught, it only need to be allowed. Sometimes I feel we give up the forest for a tree.


You could say that the high teacher-student ratio are to blame and that the teachers and schools mean well, but I'm incline to be unforgiving to a system that robs me of my childhood, destroys my self esteem, and teaches me to be afraid of the world.

School experiment that failed

How will their kids fare in a local school? One expat mum finds out Noelle de Jesus


Weekend • November 17, 2007

THOSE who had watched the international schools defeat some of the best local schools in televised debates earlier this year found much to discuss across their dinner tables and at cocktail parties.

The key question: What kind of educational system best prepares children for today's challenges?

For my husband and I, these discussions took place much earlier. When we moved here eight years ago, our major concern was how best to educate our daughter and son — Filipinos carrying United States passports, now permanent residents of Singapore.

We wanted strong academics, of course, but we also wanted them to be life-long learners with confidence, creativity, responsibility, self-respect and awareness of the world. Neither did we want them to be set apart from the youth of the country which we had chosen to make our home.

Seeing groups of expat teenagers skateboarding in the youth park off Orchard Road, I sensed alienation and a lack of belonging. Somehow they seemed cut off from society. We did not want this for our children.

So we sent them to local schools. We were aware of the strengths of the school system — the solid foundation in science and mathematics and the remarkable self-discipline that would be so efficiently instilled.

We had read of a few foreign students who had emerged triumphant from local academic rigours, securing admission into fine universities abroad.

But we also understood potential pitfalls — the largely authoritarian system, the single-minded rote approach to learning and the high student-teacher ratios.

Many raised eyebrows at our choice. A colleague at work said: "You have a choice, why put them through that?" She spoke of the way the system can kill the joy of learning, the ability to think "out of the box".

But we had taken to heart the news that the Ministry of Education (MOE) was slowly but surely changing the system. It was allowing the teaching of simplified Chinese, establishing support for more creative as well as more critical thinking, and promoting the arts and sports. Anything else our children needed, we figured we would be able to provide at home. We were hopeful.

After sending them to a local Montessori pre-school, we found ourselves living 1km away from two of the best primary schools, one for girls and one for boys. That single kilometre was critical. Our son went through the ballot, but they both made it.

Our first frustration was foreign language learning. Anxious that they learn Mandarin, we (and they) quickly found it was next to impossible in the local system, due to the pace and depth of the classes — classes that proved too difficult even for Singaporean students.

I soon discovered that all the students in my daughter's class were taking extra Chinese lessons. As one tutor said: "Children don't learn mother tongue at school; they learn it from their tuition."

With no Mandarin background, my children tuned the classes out; the rote system of learning did not work.

"Why can't they take Mandarin as a foreign language?" I asked an MOE administrator. There was no ready answer. Instead, my children were invited to take French, German or Japanese.

When my daughter told me she had to prepare for her science exam, I told her to study her textbook. She replied: "There's nothing in the book."

The girls were told to "read on their own"; what to read was not specified. Later, I found out parents bought old science exam papers for their daughters to study from.

I also found the rather quantitative methods used in my kids' English classes highly suspect. If my daughter tried her hand at a complex sentence with modifying phrases and she made a mistake, the entire sentence was marked incorrect and points were taken off. This made her decide to stick with easy noun-verb sentences.

As for my son's compositions, they were edited subjectively. His quirky, still grammatical sentences were red-penned and in many cases, falsely labelled incorrect.

But the high teacher-student ratio — 1 teacher to 40 students — proved to be our utmost concern. It rendered the simplest dynamics of question-and- answer explanation difficult to say the least. In the boys' school especially, teachers struggled to maintain order, let alone teach.

My son, a square peg in a round hole, was labelled a trouble-maker for inquisitiveness. The reputation followed him from Primary 1 to Primary 2.

One day, his teacher called me to report him as "the mastermind" of some class bullying, saying his own friends had fingered him as the culprit.

When I spoke to my son, he denied he was solely responsible, saying: "What's the point of saying I'm not; they'll all say it's me, anyway. So I just took the punishment."

When we heard this, all our doubts crystallised in one decision. Despite all our hopes, this wasn't working for him. Creativity, language, even writing — we could teach ourselves. But we felt unequal to the task of constantly undoing daily institutional damage to his self-esteem. And we had no desire to fight the system.

We withdrew both children from their schools and placed them in an international school.

There, they could at least learn Mandarin as a foreign language. They would be able to have a real relationship with their teachers, enjoy inquiry-based learning and be encouraged to express themselves. They would each be in a class with no more than 25 students and that ratio would only make things better all around.

It is by no means perfect. No education system is. And we were disappointed that our experiment failed.

Cost, of course, is one issue. To pay the price equivalent to that of a small diamond, when once we paid the price of an apple for a year's schooling, will not be easy.

We also continue to seek opportunities for our children to interact with other Singaporean children, grateful they have maintained some of the friendships they forged at their old schools.

But on his first day at the new school, my son told me he had the best day of his life. My daughter came to me and thanked me for moving her. "Here," she confided, "I feel like I am learning something every day." How can you argue with that?

At the end of the day, the root problem of the local school system is the high teacher-student ratio which demands more control from the teacher and gives the students less opportunities for variation.

Many foreign families make it by dint of playing the game we did not play: Filling the children's time with extra classes, buying old exam papers and willingly allowing their children's uniqueness to be efficiently rubbed off so that they could fit themselves neatly into the system's uniformly round holes. We did the only thing we could do.

At least, you can't say we didn't try. And it was a learning experience.

Ultimately that's what education should be about.

Noelle de Jesus is a freelance editor and writer who believes parents should be responsible co-educators of their children.

2 comments:

yanjie said...

the writer has valid points, but I think she is asking for too much. The world doesn't revolve around her, especially the mother tongue language part.

I too think that our curriculum is asking for too much from our students.

As for the exams part, let me take it to another extreme. Any teachers would love to let their students do all kinds of crazy things while learning and not drill them for exams.

Unfortunately, our society looks for paper and exam results. It is your grades that determine if opportunities are opened or closed to you. What good will I do to my students if can't help them perform well in their national exams, so that they can go after their dreams? Ultimately, they can be extremely creative in their answer, but Cambridge don't give a shit if you don't know how to answer the question. There must be a balance - some drilling and exam practice must still be involved.

Sad to say as well, many students base their interest on their exam results as well.

But one thing I have to agree with you - we need to raise the confidence and self-esteem of our students. Only then they can believe in their own thoughts and ideas and bring it far.

Cheng Eng Aun said...

I just couldn't take my mind off this quote of Frank Lloyd Wright when thinking about the education system-at-large:

"How many millions of students go to the university to be educated? They come away conditioned, but not enlightened."

Btw, found your blog thru the SE3218 class roster :) You took SE2218 last sem right?