I will start off with some definitions of the word “chimera” that I have found from some dictionaries:

“1. a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy

2. a fanciful mental delusion or fabrication

3. An imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts”

I often get visitors coming to my blog because they have searched for the key words “Singapore education syllabus” or something similar. From the numbers who did that and have arrived at my blog and also from the newspaper reports, we know many people are interested in the Singapore education system. Many are so interested that they have bothered to look up Google or Yahoo! to find out about the highly acclaimed “Singapore syllabus”.

Quite frankly, I am usually amused by it and usually feel it would have been easier for them if Google or Yahoo! had automatically diverted them to the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) syndicate instead of my blog or some other website. What many of these people don’t know is that in Singapore the examinations is the syllabus! The whole teaching is centered on what will appear in these high stakes examinations jointly conducted by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) and the CIE (Addition: or rather UCLES). Strange but true! One would have expected that an independent syllabus for the schools would have been designed first and then the examinations will be set according to what the syllabus desires to achieve. In Singapore, it has been (as someone I know who was told by her professor recently) that it is actually a “case of the tail wagging the dog”.

Visitors and observers of the “Singapore educational system” have been paying lots of visits to Singapore and websites to find out the secret of Singapore’s successful “educational” system. There’s no secret. All they have to do is teach to the examinations. All the wonderful things that may have been conjured in their minds about the possible reasons for its success are just chimerical, a “delusion”, “fabrication” or a “vain or idle fancy”.

For many who have gone through that system it is also a “monster”. Many have undergone this monstrous system that  calls for only “one right answer”, regurgitation of endless meaningless factlets in a high stakes game of Trivial Pursuit, and routine mechanical operations. Is it a coincidence then that the monster (the chimera) is also supposed to have, according to these dictionaries, the head of a lion, the very symbol of the Lion City?

“Students don’t need to know what an endoplasmic reticulum is…Bad tests are forcing a trivialization of science education and drive most students away from science. Real science is exciting. It’s completely different from these textbooks,”

- Bruce Alberts, editor of the journal Science and former president of the National Academies of Science

In case some of you think I am in the mood  to bash science teachers, please bear with me because I have also lined up some thing about History teachers. I am actually concerned about good teaching. Teaching that not only is logical from a pedagogical point of view but also fun and inspiring.

The quotation above is taken from an article about the meaninglessness of science teaching in many schools today, and I dare say the same is happening in Singapore. The examination-centered approach to teaching any subject will usually mean teachers clinging to the textbooks an focusing on only what will appear in the examinations. While this approach can breed “success” academically, but the kind of success it leads to is at best of a cynical nature.

To quote Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman:

“We’re not doing well. Meaningless testing is a bad thing. If we want scientific literacy, then we want teachers to teach the beauty of science, the fun in it, the humor in it, and to bring examples of modern science into the classroom.”

It is when a wonderful subject like science gets reduced to nothing more than just a high stakes Trivial Pursuit game, that it becomes boring and puts off the very students that teachers want to inspire an interest in science. There is no time for inspiration when acing the examinations is the goal. The goal of passing an examination well is definitely not akin to the goal of the pursuit of science.

The effect of high stakes testing is perhaps summed up by Michael Baldwin, a biology teacher at Hanna High School in Brownsville and president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas:

“So maybe a month before the test, or even as early as December, instead of teaching physics class, the teachers are reviewing biology and chemistry… It puts huge pressure on teachers to abandon their curriculum. The students pass the TAKS test, but then don’t have enough physics for a proper foundation in college.”

This is familiar for most of us in Singapore who have already undergone or is still undergoing the local education system. The only difference is that perhaps in Singapore the examination preparation routine starts even earlier. It starts from Day One of school because the examinations is the curriculum.

I also came across this blog, Primary to Secondary Subjects. It is a very interesting commentary of a parent’s experience with science teaching among others. When I read the blog and saw the examples given by the blogger, I wonder if it was just honest mistakes, or perhaps, worse from the teaching point of view, the teachers’ inability to grasp scientific concepts. I can’t help feeling that the teacher displays the kind of thinking that shows that he is a product of the Trivial Pursuit approach to education in Singapore. Some of the examples shown there border on the ridiculous. Is this the much-vaunted science education of Singapore? Have fun reading the blog because otherwise you will pull your hair out in despair.

Addendum:
I found this post. I think it is worth reading for anyone interested in Science education. See this link.