In both Singapore and Finland, opportunities for receiving an education is present and accessible. In Finland, according to the Finnish National Board of Education, a “basic education is completely free of charge (including instruction, school materials, school meals, health care, dental care, commuting, special needs education and remedial teaching).”Under their comprehensive education system, “schools do not select their students but every student can go to the school of his or her own school district. Students are neither channeled to different schools nor streamed.” In addition, education is compulsory by law from the ages of 7-16.

In contrast, in Singapore, basic education is not free but heavily subsidized. While this may seem like a little difference, schooling costs can be high if other incidental costs like textbooks, commuting and school uniforms are taken into account. While there are avenues for assistance, the Singapore government’s stance against “welfarism” means that it is not given as a right but any assistance would have to be sought. While the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, have made it harder for students to drop out, there are still loopholes that allow for this to occur, especially after primary education (12 years old). Bear in mind that the Compulsory Education Act of 2000 only is targeted only for students up to that age and not after.

In addition, while in both systems, school-based remedial programs are available, there is perhaps a marked difference between the two. If looked upon at a systems level, the absence of high stakes examinations and the emphasis on a formative and nurturing learning environment mean that the degree of remedial action is less in Finland.  In Singapore, the emphasis on high stakes examinations mean that the perceived need for “remedial action” is multiplied.  It is common in Singapore schools for whole classes to come for regular “extra” or “remedial” classes. This is because schools (and the school principals) see these extra classes as vital to ensure that the students excel in their examinations in the light of the competition for places in the higher levels of education or because of the streaming of students. School principals are also concerned because of the ranking of their schools (and their own ranking too I suspect) is very much linked still to the schools performance in high stakes examinations. If one drives around Singapore, one is bound to be struck by the number of banners hung prominently on the school fences to highlight the performances of their best students. These banners will even highlight these students examinations score in big, bold numbers! This is done so parents will send their children to these schools (Add on: and the competition for places will mean that they will get a “better” cohort of students).

In addition to this, in the Singapore system, the overly heavy examinations focus means that parents will also scramble to ensure that their children will have extra after school tuition classes in various subjects. The MOE has blamed parents for being indulgent and for putting additional pressure on their children with these additional classes but seriously, most parents will see it as a necessary evil since the MOE is the one responsible for introducing student ranking and streaming, and competition for places at the higher levels of education. Parents send their children for these tuition classes not only to get them to pass the high stakes examinations but also to make sure they excel. What all these mean is that parents who have the financial means to support all these additional classes and all additional learning materials and programs, are likely to have the edge over those less well-off. So while there are equal opportunities for education in Singapore, on closer examination, the system supports the elite.

Another aspect of the less than “equal opportunity” system in Singapore is that the elite schools have been given greater freedom to move away from examinations like the GCE O levels on the grounds that the students in such schools will do well anyway. Students in such schools have opportunities for a more varied curriculum with more emphasis on the “newer” approaches to learning as opposed to the schools for the rest of the masses where rote-learning and routine mechanical operations is the norm in the teaching. It shows a bias in the minds of the MOE officials who cannot understand that perhaps many of the students do not perform as well in the average Singapore school because of the sheer senselessness and tedium of such approaches to teaching. This is in spite of MOE initiatives like “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN)” and “Teach Less, Learn More (TLLM)”. These students may actually excel with a different and more exciting approach to teaching and learning. It is as if the MOE has not heard of any other type of intelligences. One can’t help also feeling that the rest of the school population that is not in the elite schools has been set up for mediocrity. In contrast, in Finland, the absence of school league tables (ranking), streaming of students and the absence of high stakes examinations means that schools are more egalitarian in the opportunities that it offers. All schools are created equal.

In Singapore, the government has also created the Special Assistance Plan (SAP)schools to ensure that the survival of the Chinese culture and Mandarin. The Chinese schools at one time were in danger of being closed down due to their increasing unpopularity in the face of competition from the English medium schools. The MOE decided that these schools needed help and they were changed overnight into SAP schools and overnight these schools were able to attract the best students and today are considered among the elite schools in Singapore. In comparison, the Malay medium and Tamil medium schools were closed down for their “unpopularity”.

In comparison, in Finland, its Swedish-speaking and Saami-speaking minority are given equal treatment. According to the Finnish National Board of Education, “The national languages are languages of instruction in educational institutions on all educational levels.” A look at the place given to the Saami, the language of the Laplanders who number only approximately 1800 people or 0.03 of Finland’s population. They have the right to receive services from society in their mother tongue. There are schools and universities which are conducted in both the Swedish language and Finnish.

Obviously from this comparison, what is said to be equal educational opportunities for all in both Finland and Singapore is not quite equal. It sounds almost Orwellian in Singapore as some are more equal than others.

(To be continued)

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Tip toe through the tulips with me

Lisa Daner, M.D., wrote the book, “Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis”. In the book, she recounted her experience being asked to take part in an experiment by Dr. Marvin Chun, professor in the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Yale. In the experiment, she was asked to view a video. In the video are two teams, one dressed in black and the other in white. And each team is given a basketball. Daner was tasked with watching the white team and keep track of how many times the ball was passed between players “keeping separate counts of when it was passed overhead and when it was bounced from person to person.” This was how she described her experience (click on the gorilla to view the video):

“The image started to move and I kept my eyes glued to the white team’s basketball as it was passed silently among the moving mass of black and white bodies. I got up to six overhead passes and one bounce pass and I lost track. Determined not to give up, I kept going until the thirty-second video was complete.

Eleven overhead passes and two bounce passes? I ventured. I told Chun that I got a little confused in the middle. Despite that, I’d done a good job, he told me. I missed only one overhead pass. Then he asked, “Did you see anything unusual in the video?” Other than the unusual setting for the game, no, I saw nothing at all out of the ordinary.

“Did you see a gorilla in the video?”

A gorilla? No, I had definitely not seen a gorilla.

“I’m going to show you the video again, and this time, no counting, just look at the game.” He restarted the video. The white and black teams sprang back into action. Eighteen seconds into the game”around the time I lost my concentration”I saw someone (a woman, I find out later) in a gorilla suit enter the hallway court on the right. She strolled casually to the middle of the frame, beat her chest like a cartoon gorilla from a children’s TV show, then calmly exited out of the left side of the picture. Her on-camera business lasted eight seconds and I hadn’t seen her at all.

If you had asked me if I thought that I could miss a gorilla–or even a woman in a gorilla suit” strolling through the picture, I would have agreed that it was impossible to overlook such an extraordinary event. And yet I did. So did more than half of those who were given the same task by Daniel J. Simmons in his lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. How is that possible?

We have tremendous faith in our ability to see what is in front of our eyes. And yet the world provides us with millions of examples that this is not the case. . . . Researchers call this phenomenon “inattention blindness” because we often fail to notice an object or event simply because we are preoccupied with an attentionally demanding task. . . .

As it turns out, most of the time we see what we want to see, what we expect to see. Our ability to see objects or events that are unexpected and dissimilar to those that we are looking for is extremely limited. . . .

Based on research like this, Chun and many other researchers in this area now believe that the expectations of the viewer are the primary shapers of what is seen, and that the unexpected will often be missed. We become better seers when we have better expectations. When you are given a specific task”-follow the ball as it’s passed between members of the white team”you can predict what the expectations might be, and that observers are unlikely to see the passing gorilla because it’s not in their set of expectations.

What about in situations where you are looking but the task is more complex–the way it is in real life, or in the hospital taking care of patients? If their theory is true, what you see and what you don’t see will be shaped by what your experiences have led you to expect. Perhaps Osler was mistaken when he said that more diagnoses were missed because of not seeing than not knowing. Perhaps not knowing is what caused not seeing.

This is a cautionary tale for those involve in Singapore’s education system. Have we been so focused by the powers-that-be that we only see what they want us to see? I will be the first to admit that my blog has been very critical of the Singapore education system (I prefer to call it schooling system). I have lambasted the system and highlighted its faults. Someone actually said I was only taking “pot shots”. But I can honestly say that it was done with full awareness of the praise that the system has been garnering internationally. Our leaders never ceased to remind us of that. My purpose was to provide an honest alternative view or at least a view of the dark side of the moon.

But I wonder how many of those in education in Singapore can spot the gorillas in Singapore’s school corridors? While we have won accolades from all over and been the subject of study, not to mention be the model for emulation, I wonder how much of the negative aspects of the system been highlighted to international visitors?

Have they been told of the sheer narrow-mindedness of the system with its focus on high stakes examinations? Have they been told that much of these examinations concentrated to be not much more than an overblown version of a Trivial Pursuit game and mechanical operations? Something that even some commercial vendors know when they sell their accelerated learning programs and teach you how to “play the examinations game”?

Has anyone told them about the stigma that is attached to those less successful in the examinations game? Has anyone ever told them that the streaming of students that is a direct result of their performances in school examinations has led to their being labeled as underachieving students or failures? Has anyone told them how many carry this negative stigmas for the rest of their lives? Has anyone told these eager visitors why a large number of our students just choose to disconnect themselves from school? Has anyone also told them of the lost childhood of many a student due to extra classes and tuition? Has anyone told them the reason why such a good system seems to hinge on a large number of remedial classes? Not to mention, the army of private tutors that our students and parents depend upon?

How many of them have been told that while Singapore has done well to provide basic education for its population, what it is preparing for a large portion of its student population is a 20th century education? How many have been told that only the elite and the best students are only beginning to be exposed to a 21st century education?

These visitors probably have been told that in the Singapore system there are things like streaming. But like Daner in the experiment, their expectations of what they will see has been “managed”. They see what they want to see. They also see what they have been told to see. So even if they are told about the streaming of students into the clever and not-so-clever, they will see it as a positive step in making teaching more efficient. They won’t see the gorillas.

What about those in the education service in Singapore? Have they also failed to see the gorillas in the school corridors? Are they too busy counting the number of distinctions and failures that they do not see the lasting negative impact of the educational policies that they are implementing? Are the schools too busy going after ISOs, and Gold and Silver Awards, that they forget what is basic? Are they too busy counting everything that is not important that they fail to see the negative human impact of these policies?

It seems that we have “inattention blindness”. Is this because school-ranking and the high stakes examinations are considered as attentionally demanding tasks by the Ministry of Education (MOE)? Those in schools have no choice but to toe the line as good civil servants. Even then it would be nice to hear from them to acknowledge at least that they are suffering from another form attention deficit disorder instead of thinking only the world of the Singapore’s education system and is defensive when criticisms are made of the system.

Both Singapore and Finland enjoy international repute for the sterling performances of their students in international surveys like PISA and TIMSS. Both countries have also been known to produce students who have done well in international Mathematics olympiads. Singapore students have been known to do well in the Cambridge GCE O and A levels too. For the lay person, these are indicators of good educational systems.

But even then, Singapore’s leaders have repeatedly said that it has to move away from the examination-focus of the country’s education system. It is interesting to note in this video of a lecture by John Seely Brown, he mentioned at the tail end of the video during the Q&A session of a lecture (see video here), that Singapore leaders have indicated to him that while they have done well in international surveys, these surveys are for 20th Century skills not 21st Century skills. In other words, they are near irrelevant.

In explaining their success in international surveys, the Finnish National Board of Education, said that among the reasons for their success is:

“Assessment of both schools’ learning outcomes and pupils is encouraging and supportive in nature. The aim is to produce information that will help schools and pupils to develop. There are no national tests of learning outcomes and no school league tables. Pupils and schools are not compared with each other. National assessments of learning outcomes are based on samples and the key function of assessment is to pinpoint areas requiring further improvement in different subjects and within the entire school system.”

and also:

“Organisation of schoolwork and teaching is guided by a conception of learning where pupils’ own active involvement and interaction with teachers, fellow pupils and the learning environment are important. Pupils process and interpret the information that they absorb on the basis of their prior knowledge structures.”

Here you see that in the Finnish system does not stress on summative assessment of its pupils unlike in Singapore where high stakes national examinations, ranking of students against one another and school league tables (we call it school ranking in Singapore) is the norm. In contrast, teaching and learning in Finland is through the “pupils’ own active involvement and interaction with teachers, fellow pupils and the learning environment are important. Pupils process and interpret the information that they absorb on the basis of their prior knowledge structures.” I will revisit this point in a subsequent post.

The other commonality between the two countries is the centralized steering albeit done in different ways. In Singapore, educational policies are laid out by the Ministry of Education (MOE). In addition to this, the fact that almost all schools in the country are required to do high stakes examinations, it means that the syllabus for almost all the subjects are defined by the University of Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) examination syndicate which works in tandem with the MOE. The MOE is beginning to allow some exceptions to this link with the CIE but such exceptions are only allowed for the more prestigious schools. The MOE does allow schools some degree of autonomy in the daily running but almost all schools must subscribe to its major policies, for example, with regards to ranking and examinations.

In Finland, according to the Finnish National Board of Education:

The education system is flexible and its administration is based on intense delegation and provision of support. Steering is based on objectives set out in the Basic Education Act and Decree and within the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Responsibility for provision of education and implementation of objectives rests with local authorities (municipalities).

This devolvement of responsibility gives the Finnish system that flexibility with regards to the running of schools. Furthermore, in the Finnish system, there is greater level of partnership building with relevant institutions and organizations with regards to the educational support that the schools receive. They sought to ensure that:

“Activities at all levels are characterised by interaction and partnership building. In order to develop the school system, there is co-operation between different levels of administration, schools and other sectors of society. Finnish school authorities also co-operate a lot with subject associations and teacher and rector organisations. This has secured strong support for development measures.”

In Singapore, little such interaction and partnership building is done. If they do exist, they are from institutionalized.

The two countries also offer comprehensive education for students. In Finland this is up to the age of sixteen. In Singapore, the Compulsory Education Act made it compulsory for all parents to enroll their children in school till they have completed primary education (twelve years old).  This measures are likely contributors for the two countries relatively good reputation in the educational arena.

So while there are similarities in the two countries’ educational systems, even in the similarities, there are, I believe, important differences that account for the markedly differing character of the two educational systems. I will be delving more about this in subsequent posts.

(to be continued)

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