Thoughts about Singapore education

On this 45th National Day, the thing that's on many people's minds isn't finding the best place for watching the fireworks. The national obsession of Singaporeans isn't food. Nobody likes to face it but all, and I do mean all, Singaporeans are obsessed about education. Talk to any parent with children of school-going age and you'll get the feeling that you've spoken to a war-weary veteran.



Getty Images

There are as many points of view as there are Singaporeans, yours truly included. My beef is with too many mandarins fiddling with the system. We started down the slippery road with P3 streaming. Guess who was among the first batch of students subjected to streaming?

Grade school education is very simple - get kids to love learning. Never mind the technical skills, just teach them to fish. If any, only two things need to be done:

1. Get rid of P3 streaming.

2. Reduce class size to 20 or less.

The reason behind streaming was so students of similar cognitive ability would feel more comfortable learning with their peers at a similar pace. But take a moment to think about this. Isn't it unrealistic to expect a teacher to handle 40 EM3 students who *all* need close attention?

Experienced teachers will agree with me that in any class there will probably be 4 or 5 students out of 40 who need attention. That works out to about 10% of any cohort. Now if we reduced class size to 20, a teacher will have 2 students of such learning ability. Plus, having 18 other students of quicker thinking will exert a positive influence on these 2. That's way better than having all slower students lumped together.

Class sizes of 20 is realistic. Think of the millions spent on an "elite" few. That's more than enough to pay the salaries of extra staff and building more schools. Not enough land? I don't think so. If we can have 20 golf courses and God-knows how many shopping malls, we can build more schools. If we can have 50-storey HDB flats, we can have schools going vertical. A classroom on the 40th floor with plenty of sunlight lifts the moods of kids anytime.

Remember this, education is not about the fancy whiz-bangs, the facilities, the first places in academic olympiads. Heck, it's not even about fancy notions of teachers making dinosaurs leap out of textbooks. Just get every child interested in learning and stop destroying their self-worth with streaming.

Give the war-weary veterans some rest.