The Arena - An eye opener about the Singapore education system

By: deepb

... as compared to the one available at the United World College (UWC).

I hope it will serve as a wakeup call to the Education Minister and his top HQ officials, principals and teachers. I hope they would do some soul searching about how young Singaporeans are being educated, apart from being trained to become future economic digits and workhorses for the country's economy. People have only ONE life to live and money is not the be all and end all of a human being existence, who will walk this earth but once.

I have been following the series closely and it is abundantly clear that Singaporean students cannot think very well on their feet!

The lack of depth and grasp of a topic being debated is so very obviously written all over many of their inscrutable dumbfounded faces. Their lack of a wider grasp and a very apparent rigidity of 'sticking to the script' approach saw them 'done in' by the UWC who were most impressive with their fluent, effortless and extemporous style (which was no doubt the result of both rigorous and vigorous preparation).

The UWC debater obviously came well prepared and able to think out of the box. In contrast, the Hwa Chong debaters seemed troubled, flat footed and unable to even talk themselves out of a bag! The HC were not the only ones, I saw the same hapless expression on so many other Singaporean students' faces during the series, many from so called 'top' local schools. On the other hand, one bright spark, a girl student from Loyang Sec, a neighbourhood school, stood out impressively and endearing with her gutsy and spontaneous style.

We can all see just how much hype there have been about our 'impressive' educational system and how much more 'superior' it is compared to other countries' esp. those of the west. But where it counts most in a globalised setting our students/scholars are no match to the free and easy, flexible, truly creative approach of the rest of the world.

I doubt if we can even hold our own vis a vis regional or other Asian nations when the chips are down and words of disagreement turn to push and shove. As LKY so sycophantically re-affirmed once again recently, we have to take cover under the apron string of our US nanny.

It was telling that the teacher who coach HC was an obviously young teacher and in contrast the UWC coach was a middle age lady teacher. So it is patently not necessary true that our young can think better, do better. Like in all substantive issues, it would seem that maturity and experience really count for much more than mere youthful enthusiasm. And it's all happening here in this 'uniquely' current Singaporean habit of throwing out the mature and experienced workfore in favour of the young FTs who happen to be also cheaper.

There was this story about Col Boey Tak Hup, a scholar in the same NS cohort as LHL: He was once asked to comment on the youthfulness of Spore's senior army officers as compared to an obviously more senior in age Col of the Australian Army during an SAF commissioning dinner. BTH apparently replied his questioner to the effect that being younger he can think better and faster in a given battle situation. He forgot that while he may have to rack his gray matters to think of how to respond to a situation, the Australian Col in all likelihood would have already been there and done it too!

"The Arena" is a debate-style television show produced by Mediacorp Channel 5.