Without a doubt, Janelle Lee’s letter is precise and accurate, in terms of pinpointing the education system’s inflexibility in teaching methods, along with the failure of moral education. It definitely voices the opinions of so many students, who have been sick and exhausted by the oppressive system, which has so often been dictated by the Ministry of Education’s “optimised” syllabus. The inefficiency of rote learning is apparent in the real world – people can only be successful if they can think and innovate and our rigid education system has done the opposite, liberating us of our right to voice out our opinions. To be truthful, I have to say that our system is like a totalitarian organisation, governed by oppressive policies which inadvertently suppress the right to question the “questionables”.
On Janelle’s point of inflexibility, I do think there are education systems out there which are capable of rectifying this problem. Singapore’s education system has a method of force-feeding students with information, such that they are not given the freedom to express themselves at all. Our education system is supposed to nurture leaders of the future but at this rate, how are we to discover individuals who have the courage to rectify the flaws in the policies of the nation? Where are we to seek for people who dare to be the change? This system is not capable of accommodating the inquisitiveness and creativity of the human mind, the two most critical aspects of progress, and this underlying cause for concern has to be eliminated. If we were to study the Finnish education system, which stands on the apex, it provides full autonomy to schools by not imposing a standardized syllabus and offering educational institutions the privilege to structure their education model, often addressing local concerns. The long-term cultivation of the system has resulted in a near-perfect one which advocates knowledge, as well as thinking.
Additionally, I believe our system is also rather exam-oriented which focuses on rote learning, rather than critical thinking. Rote learning, in the eyes of the Singapore education system, is where students are expected to memorise facts from the textbook and be able to regurgitate all these information during tests, in the hope that they can understand and apply them. The truth is: nobody will do so if we are not oriented towards thinking. This gives rise to many other problems, such as the misconception that “As long as I get my A1s, nothing else matters.” It definitely reflects upon a serious flaw in our system. Living in a globalised world, we need talents who are rational enough to think of methods to overcome threats and challenges. Certainly, there is too much emphasis on results and not process, which inevitably gives rise to sheep-thinking, where no one would be willing to challenge the norms.
Moral education is an integral part of Asian culture, where one of the most celebrated philosophers, Confucius, originated from. In Janelle’s letter, she mentions that morals cannot be instilled in students through force-feeding by books and files. However, this can be contradicted by the fact that much of Confucius’ teachings were passed down in the form of books and scrolls. The only difference was the socio-economic conditions of modern and ancient times. Youths these days fail to be inspired by moral principles solely because of the insignificance of them in our world. Do moral principles grant you a place in university? Do they grant us a job which pays extravagant salaries? No. The only way through which we can inculcate moral principles in youths these days would be through effective parenting techniques that subtly influence them in their moral principles, along with sufficient support from teachers in schools which can fuse both to develop a coherent teaching style which hopefully does not involve the use of books, given the ineffectiveness of it.
To conclude, the best education system Singapore should adopt would be one which, besides imparting knowledge, nurtures the power of the human mind, through infusing the curriculum with cognitive thinking and reasoning skills, thus equipping us for the future.
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