Education is defined as any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. However, many people have brought up the issue of an ineffective education system in Singapore, whereby students rely on memorising facts and information instead of applying knowledge and skills learned on real-life based problems. Hence, I will be discussing my views on what Janelle Lee, a student who has brought up the issue of an unflattering education system in Singapore.
Whatever Janelle Lee had mentioned in her open letter is truly what is wrong with the Singapore Education System, in terms of the teaching methods. I totally agree with her that Singapore's education system mainly rely on memorising facts, information and formulas. Here are some ways students have to memorise for examinations. For Literature, students have to memorise information such as Shakespeare's way of portraying plays and the context and content of the literature books such as To Kill A Mocking Bird. For Mathematics, students have to memorise many formulas such as Symmetrical Properties of Circles. For Chinese, students have to memorise letter writing format. For Science, students have to memorise many theories and laws of Science. The list goes on and on, but have we ever wondered why are we doing all of this? This would be the flaw of the education system.
With modern technology, have we ever wondered why is it necessary to memorise so much information/theories/Science laws/formulas? An example would the letter writing format. How many people in the world still use the letter writing format for Chinese? With reference to a statistics report in 2009, the number of people using sending emails in Chinese as compared to writing letters in Chinese are 58:3, and this ratio is expected to increase. As such, is it really necessary to memorise the format of letter writing? This would be an example of rote learning. Rote learning, in the eyes of the Singapore education system, is where students are expected to memorise facts from the textbook and be able to regurgitate or relay all these information during tests, in the hope that they can understand and apply them. However, how many students actually went on and apply them in real life after they graduate from schools with fantastic results from memorising?
However, to the best of my knowledge, the above mentioned does not exist in schools with Integrated Program (IP). Ever since I entered this school, I am quite amazed with the new curriculum being someone who hates memorising. An example would be in Language Arts. Instead of being taught to memorising facts and events from the book To Kill A Mocking Bird, instead, we have a new component called Reading & Reasoning. This new component trains the student's mind to think carefully and analyse the text given rather than memorising information from some guide book and pouring it all in, hoping to get an A1. There are also many other added features to the new education system for Integrated Program, as such schools can edit and control their own curriculum. Hence, I think that Janelle Lee is not being fair in judging Singapore's Education mainly based on a mainstream school. If she had the chance to be exposed to IP school's curriculum, I am pretty sure that she would change her point of view.
In addtition, I think that the best education system Singapore should adopt would be one which, besides imparting facts and formulas, will train the mind to apply whatever it learnt on real-life based problems such as the Future Problem Solving Program. This will then equip students with cognitive thinking and adequate reasoning skills to survive in the 21st century.
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