The recent news show a S4 student writing a letter to our MoE here. You can read her letter through here (YES SHE IS A GIRL!!!).
To a certain extent, I find some points raised are in fact true about education systems in Singapore. For example, she raised an issue about students not often taught to ask ‘Why?’ What she means is that why aren't children answered with questions of reasoning like "Why is the grass green?" or "Why is the sky blue?" In fact "Children are curious and inquisitive, asking their parents questions many parents themselves are not able to answer."
I realised in Singapore (since I'm Malaysian) competition is frequent among students. Parents always ask their children to do well in their studies without even learning the true stuff!!! It seems like the aim of learning for us students is only to get good grades rather than learning stuff we are suppose to learn. Or in general, our learning is a dead learning, meaning we only memorise stuff from textbooks and pour it all out during tests. In this modern world where creativeness is one of the most important factors of success, the education here seem to go off the right track.
Notice the language she uses. How does it reflect the girl's attitude? From what I see, she seems to have been unsatisfied by the education system for a long time. Although she is complaining in the letter, she minds her language and remains her manners while writing to the minister. Still from the tone I think she is still quite concerned about it and I can see how she wants this matter to be solved as soon as possible. Quite well-crafted, and the tone is appropriate too.
If I really were to write such letter I would just explain the current system and the desired system. Frankly speaking I have no opinions too. However, some important issues I would raise may include something like teachers blame students straight away without finding the truth, or like what the girl has raised about educating moral values, or maybe uncreative education. I would also give suggestions after raising these issues.
I definitely agree with the statement that learning, in the current society, is "dead". It's just about memorization and learning the facts that they need to know to do well in the exams. But in fact, they didn't learn about the truth of the nature. However, you could also raise up the point about the CME and comment about it. But overall, nice opinions on the point stated. Besides that, I think that her letter is somehow one-sided. We were taught that we should praise something first before we actually start complaining or vice versa so that the letter seem more balanced. But still, I quite agree that her tone is appropriate but for some reason, I do find it critical sometimes. Do you agree with that?
ReplyDeleteHi i am colin and i totally agree with what you said about the fact that there is a flaw in this current education system due to the current materialistic society. People are forced to know model answers to get good marks. I feel that this is a misleading concept but we should accept it. So what if you ask a lot of WHY and get a lot of information? I believe these would not help you to have a better future. Only by memorizing then can you get better results. Therefore, we should actually not blame the education system but the society. The education system is forced by the society.
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