I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay. All of this is holding America back in a world that’s moving faster than ever.

- Sir Ken Robinson, “Transform Education? Yes, We Must” on The Huffington Post

I was reading the post by Sir Ken Robinson posted on The Huffington Post. He was commenting on education in America. He was especially commenting on American education in the NCLB era.

For those not in the know, the NCLB has led to a greater “teach to the test” approach in US schools. This has caused an uproar among many teachers and others in the education field. In other words, the US education system is becoming more like the “education” system you see in Singapore. You now have high stakes examinations coming to the fore in the US like it is now in Singapore.

As Sir Ken Robinson correctly points out the NCLB “promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability.” The same could be said of Singapore’s education system. Only recently is there some shift but even then when attempts are made to honor the other intelligences, you find that it did not come from the Ministry of Education (MOE). For example, the School for the Arts (SOTA) was set up not by the MOE but by the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA). The Singapore Sports School was set up by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS). Surely this tells us something about MOE’s attitude towards what constitutes intelligence. This MOE attitude towards intelligence has also led to a very skewed and misguided Gifted Programme. This has led to to what Sir Ken Robinson calls a “terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students.”

Sir Ken Robinson also said that the NCLB “confuses standards with standardizing” and has led to schools in the US “becoming dreary and homogenized.“ This same comment is also true of the MOE’s approach to education and assessment. MOE almost always talks about the standards that it has achieved and is trying to maintain or improve upon when put on the defensive about its high stakes examinations-centered approach to education.. The reality is perhaps closer to what Sir Ken Robinson has written.

This is what a teacher has written in a poem entitled, “Dressings”. Schools in Singapore, instead of allowing students the chance to dress up in the best of clothes which individually fit each student best, serve these students only rags. It is this force fitting of students into ill-fitting rags that has perhaps led to many good, passionate teachers leaving Singpore’s education service just as Sir Ken Robinson has indicated above.

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