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?