Recently, I came across an advertisement in a newspaper in Singapore. The advertisement was for an accelerated learning program targeted at students in Singapore schools who have to face high pressure, high stakes examinations. The advertisement got me to think about its message. The advertisement described examinations as “just a game”. I thought that this description alone is a telling indictment of Singapore’s much vaunted education system.

The advertiser was not lying when he came up with that phrase. Everyone knows that in Singapore, the only thing that matters in school are the examinations. Principals, teachers, parents and students are really only concerned with the examinations. All else plays a very distant second fiddle. Even the Singapore government tacitly acknowledges it by encouraging local self-help organizations like Mendaki, SINDA and CDAC to make after school tuition for school-going children core programs of these organizations.

Private tuition is the state’s next best, worse kept secret in the educational field. It is a fact that a whole army of private tutors “assist” the schools to help students to ace their examinations, although most schools in Singapore will never acknowledge the assistance provided by this guerrilla army of tutors hidden amongst Singapore’s homes. All these shows the place that examinations have in “educating” the child in Singapore.

Yet as the advertisement seemed to suggest. There is perhaps very little real learning taking place in Singapore schools. What they really do is to play the “examinations” game, a larger than life version of Trivial Pursuit. Teachers and private tutors drill students to ace the examinations. Teachers and tutors in Singapore generally teach to the examinations. This is what happens when there high stakes examinations. American teachers are beginning to do that too with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy initiated by the current Bush Administration which has come under strong criticism by American educators for creating such effects. Which imply once you master how to do some rote-learning and memorize mainly mechanical operations in your head, you are likely to well. No deep understanding of content is required. Just enough to ace the examinations and we know much of the examinations will only require rote-learning and memorization of mechanical operations.

Even with the thinking skills initiatives introduced into the schools in some subject areas, Singapore’s pragmatic teachers have found a way to teach in “thinking” in a very mechanical way, and usually it is taught only in the context of how to tackle the examination questions that supposedly tests the higher order thinking skills of the students. In Singapore schools, seldom are the higher order thinking skills proffered by teachers during the teaching of the content of the subject despite the teach thinking skills initiatives being around for years. What is often done is to teach the text-book and then drill the students on examination-type questions. Clearly, knowing to play the game is key here in Singapore’s examinations-heavy system. Once you know the rules of the game, then you can play the game successfully. That advertiser definitely hit it on the nail with his advertisement.

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