Heng Swee Keat, Minister of Education, Singapore

At the Ministry of Education (MOE) Work Plan Seminar, Singapore’s Minister for Education, Heng Swee Keat, announced that the MOE will move towards an educational system which is more “holistic and balanced”. According to a report from the Today Online website today, it is announced that:

“To achieve a more student-centric culture, a review will be conducted to determine which practices are too achievements-driven, as well as those which generate too much administrative work, bogging down the teachers. These practices will be refined or done away with entirely, where possible.”

The MOE will also “create a new Character and Citizenship Education framework” in response to request from parents to “place a greater emphasis on character-building among the children.”

My initial impressions of this brief announcement is that this new reform will not make much of a change with regards to reducing stress except perhaps for teachers and school administrators by reducing their administrative workload. No mention is made about making changes (much less removing) the high stakes examinations focus of the Singapore education system.

This the main cause of much of the stress that is in the system. School administrators, teachers, students and parents are affected by the outcome of the students’ performance in these high stakes examinations. No mention is made of the removal of the school ranking system either. In short the changes are only cosmetic at best, and at worst it shows that the country is still stuck in its 19th century factory-like schooling system abetted by an Imperial China-style examination system.

Perhaps more interesting is that the lack of real changes reflects the reluctance by the Minister’s bureaucratic advisors in the MOE themselves to rock the boat. Despite claims in the past, of the need to make changes to meet the demands of the 21st century, little has been done except for an expensive cosmetic infusion of money into a massive MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE), that has still to show any significant result with regards to how teaching and learning is done differently in Singapore schools. Underneath that ICT gloss, Singapore schools are still stuck in the 19th century.

What do you think of these changes that the Minister has just announced? Let us know your thoughts on these planned changes for the Singapore education system.

“Test-oriented education’ refers to the factual existence in  our nation’s education of the tendency to simply prepare for tests, aim for high test scores, and blindly pursuing admission rates [to colleges or higher-level schools] while ignoring the the real needs of the student and social development. It pays attention to only a minority of the student population and neglects the majority; it emphasizes knowledge transmission but neglects moral, physical, aesthetic, and labor education, as well as the cultivation of applied abilities and psychological and emotional development; it relies on rote memorization, and mechanical drills as the primary approach, which makes learning uninteresting, hinders students from learning actively, prevents them from taking initiatives, and heavily burdens them with [an] excessive amount of course work; it uses test scores as the primary or only criterion to evaluate students, hurting their motivation and enthusiasm, squelching their creativity, and impedes their overall self-development. “Test-oriented education” violates the Education Law and Compulsory Education Law and deviates from our educational policy. Henceforth, we must take all effective measures to promote “quality education” and free elementary and secondary schools from “test-oriented education”. (Guojia Jiaowei [National Education Commission], 1997)

~Quoted from “Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization” by Yong Zhao

In my view, the statement above packs a wallop. Even the Chinese have woken up that their “test-oriented education” (I call it “examinations-centered schooling”) is bad for the students and the country. And this is a country with a a very long tradition of imperial examinations and is still very much a socialist country.

That definition of “test-oriented education” as “the factual existence in  our nation’s education of the tendency to simply prepare for tests, aim for high test scores, and blindly pursuing admission rates” definitely describes Singapore’s schooling system even today. No matter what the claims of the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Singapore. So Singapore is no different from China in this respect.

It also unequivocally condemned the test-preparation mind set. It also bravely acknowledges that it “ignores the real needs of the student”. Readers of my blog will know that I have been writing a lot about this, about what the students of today need to prepare them for the real world tomorrow. The statement from the National Education Commission is more brutal in its frankness than anything coming from the MOE. The MOE talks about making small changes most of the time because it is reluctant to admit that today the schooling system in Singapore is flawed fundamentally. Imagine how the teachers in Singapore will feel if it admits to this. Seems like a Communist country is more honest than a democratic one like Singapore. Moreover, it is coming from a country that has been able to put man in space. What about a country that has not, like Singapore.

It is interesting that if you read the statement, it well describes the Singapore system of schooling. Of course in Singapore, there are the elite schools that get to play with the “fun” and “exciting” stuff, like Obama’s daughters get in their elite school. But what about the rest of the citizens? Here again the statement above from the National Education Commission has hit it right on the nail when it said that its system has paid “attention to only a minority of the student population and neglects the majority.” The majority of the Singapore school population is regarded as “not as able” (and that is putting it mildly) as those in the elite schools. The latter gets the exciting stuff while the rest gets “the rote memorization, and mechanical drills as the primary approach” as mentioned above in the National Education Commission‘s report. The “test-oriented education” also “makes learning uninteresting, hinders students from learning actively, prevents them from taking initiatives”. This is from a Communist country where discipline and hard work in the face of traditional teacher-centered instruction. Simply incredible and radical if you think about this. It also shows how seriously aware they are of the shortcomings of their education system. In Singapore, we call it “meritocracy“.

The report also clearly spells out the effects of such a schooling system on the student population. Again, its conclusion is damning. It says that using “test scores as the primary or only criterion to evaluate students, hurting their motivation and enthusiasm, squelching their creativity, and impedes their overall self-development.” This is obvious but nobody in the MOE in Singapore wants to admit to this.

Let us also use that last line of the quote from the report  from the National Education Commission of China:

“…we must take all effective measures to promote “quality education” and free elementary and secondary schools from “test-oriented education”.

PS Prof. Yong Zhao’s book is a great read. Highly recommended. Arne Duncan should read it  too!

In my last post I mentioned that the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Singapore has set up a mock classroom at Raffles Place as part of its recruitment drive to get more people to join the teaching profession. I also said that the layout of the mock classroom with its neat rows of tables and chairs indicates the kind of activities that take place in the classroom. Any serious educator will know that such classrooms represents a certain paradigm that the owner of such a classroom has about what schooling ought to be. Thousands of Singaporeans have gone through such an environment, myself included. We all know that such a classroom layout typify a schooling environment in Singapore where the teacher does most of the talking while the students are expected to sit quietly and give their attention to what is said by the teachers.

While the MOE is lauding itself with the latest TIMSS release, the reality is that the Singapore education system, the Singapore school and the Singapore school principals and teachers have only one thing in mind; the examinations. Schooling in Singapore is, even after acknowledging the diverse views about what is education, not about education. It is about or examination or test preparation.

The static layout of the Raffles Place classroom suggest a uni-directional approach to teaching. Very old-fashioned and certainly mostly irrelevant in this day and age. It is irrelevant on many counts. John Dewey and Marshall McLuhan (click on the book cover on the left if you want to learn more about McLuhan’s ideas) has already argued that what students are allowed to do, that is what they will learned. If all they get to do most of the times is to try and sit quietly and intently, then all they learn is to sit quietly and intently, and also total obedience and deference to authority.

The neat rows with each chair and desk separated by a space also implies that little team work or co-operative learning is done in the Singapore classroom. This is again easily proven if you ask any Singapore student of today or yesteryear about what goes on in the classroom. How do we expect to produce team workers or even a harmonious society if everyone sits in his little island?

Instead, what we will produce are people who will just await instructions about what they ought to do and how they ought to do it. Forget about cultivating the spirit of inquiry. Even in Science they do not teach scientific inquiry, they teach FACTS! Forget about independent learning too. It does not take place. The only form of independent learning valued is the mugging that one does on your own to ace the examinations. We will produce great muggers willing to work very late. This parallel is seen at the work place where workers in Singapore stay up till very late but showing little in the way of productivity. The Raffles Place classroom will produce people with little initiative. They will expect to be told of the only way of doing things, just as there is one way to answer the questions in the examinations in school.

Worse, as I have quoted from Schmoker in my last post, the continuation of this paradigm of schooling as promoted by the MOE at Raffles Place, will hinder quality teaching and learning from taking place. Teachers and schools will see no need to change their paradigm to fit the present world. The methods of yore still works fine because our students still are among the best in the world based on their performance in international examination scores and wonderful international surveys like TIMSS. We have come to believe our own delusions.