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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I have written a few posts warning my friends and readers in the countries around Singapore, like Indonesia and Thailand, not to blindly ape Singapore’s much vaunted education system. I have warned about looking at Singapore with rose-tinted glasses. I have argued that Singapore does not have an education system. What Singapore possess is a huge test prep system. Everything that is done in the test prep centers (they call them “schools” in Singapore) is geared towards preparing students to pass those high stakes examinations. I have also written about how foreign observers are eager to praise and copy the Singapore system. Even Barack Obama has mentioned how “well” Singapore’s “education” system is during his campaign trail.

Some readers may argue that there are schools that are skipping traditional examinations like the GCE O levels but they forget these are only for the elite top schools in Singapore. Why is this not the norm in Singapore? I have argued passionately that the examinations system is out of date and is one factor for the disconnect that affects many teenagers in schools in Singapore.

Yet, the Singapore system is being imitated by schools in the Southeast Asian region in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, and even as far away as China. Today, we see this trend being followed eagerly by Obama‘s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. To quote Gerald Bracey:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants a longer school day, a longer school week, and a longer school year and national subject standards, which will inevitably lead to one national test. Duncan wants to institute merit pay, which is a euphemism for paying teachers to produce higher test scores. Such merit pay, combined with national academic standards and one national test, will inevitably continue to transform our public schools into test prep factories. Thus, more and more of the same old industrialist factory model of education. All we need to do to improve schools, says Duncan, is intensify the command-and-control model of education.

Do all these sound familiar to Singaporeans out there? Is it a surprise that Arne Duncan wants something akin to what Singapore has now? TIMSS has caused American bureaucrats and politicians to panic. They fear that the dragons of the East will leave America in the dust with the dragons’ consistent high rankings in TIMSS. But they forget that it is precisely America’s lack of centralized control that has allowed it to produce the world’s most creative talents in all fields that has powered America’s ascendancy in the world today.

Yet, even in Singapore, the Ministry of Education (MOE) is trying, probably reluctantly, to move away from the traditional examinations mode because it recognizes at least officially, that there is a need to change the schooling experience to reflect the 21st century needs. But the change is only for the elite schools. But as Bracey puts it:

“Shouldn’t every child have an education like the President’s daughters?”

Bracey was of course commenting on Arne Duncan’s reforms. He was highlighting a clear contradiction between what the Obama Administration intends for education for the rest of America, and what the President’s daughter receives. In Singapore, what the “elite” receives, is different from that of the lesser mortals too. The elite in Singapore, like Obama’s daughters, will get schools that are not factory-like in nature, boasting of enlightened approaches to education. The rest of America, like the rest of Singapore, will get the rags and the factory assembly line which is indicative of where the powers-that-be think such students should be heading for.

“The working, the working, just the working life.”

- “Factory” by Bruce Springsteen

“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours.”

- John Lennon

I have just read a book called “The Outliers: the story of success” (click cover on the right), written by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is a study of success. The writer tries to zero on the factors that leads to success. One of these factors is what he calls the “10,000-hour rule”. In his book, he quoted neurologist, Daniel Levitin, who said:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being world-class expert – in anything…In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”

Levitin was again quoted to say:

“…no one has yet to found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

The Beatles, perhaps, the greatest band the world has ever seen, paid their dues in the strip clubs where they played for hours on end. John Lennon described this in an interview:

“We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Pete Best, who was the Beatles drummer at the time, was quoted as saying:

“We played seven nights a week (emphasis mine). At first we played almost non-stop till twelve-thirty, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.”

The last word perhaps about the effect of their time in Hamburg is from Phil Norman who wrote their biography, “Shout!” He wrote:

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back….They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

What about Bill Gates? He started doing real-time programming since he was an eight-grader back in 1968. Gates said this about that period:

“It was my obsession… I skipped athletics. I went up there (Information Services Inc.) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had been programming non-stop for seven years. As Gladwell puts it, “He was way past ten thousand hours.” We all know who Bill Gates is today.

What about Singapore schools? We make our students sit quietly for hours for much of the school year. We discourage them from asking too much or being curious for most of their time in school. We also teach them to wait for notes and answers. We also trained them to work for individual success. We drill them fully for the examinations for hours. We do these for at least ten years until they are sixteen.

We all know how well our students do in examinations and international surveys like TIMSS!

But, with the ten thousand hours spent on such things, will the Singapore student be able to acquire the soft skills required for life? Will they be creative problem-solvers? Will they be able to learn independently? I believe we know the answers to these questions.

Seems like Marshall McLuhan is right. “The medium is the message”. But at least we have something in common with the Beatles and Bill Gates.