Why Julien will NOT go to a Singapore school

A little history....
When I was growing up, I did a lot of reading, and when I say a lot, I mean all the water in our oceans type of a lot. My mother taught me to read when I was 3, I think. She bought a whole set of Ladybird books, like Cinderella and Rapunzel, and she sat me next to her and she started reading. Then she taped herself reading them on our then-very-modern radio and cassette player and I remember playing the cassette tape every day listening to my mother's voice as I read the books on my own.

I must have gotten the habit of reading from my mother, because all my life, I remember my mother reading a book in her spare time. She would take me to the library every weekend as a kid and we would spend an hour at least, there. I would check out over 20 books because somehow my mother got hold of library cards for my whole family, my father's sister and her sister too. I spent most of my first 18 years reading, and if I didn't become very good at many other things, I can say that I got a LOT out of the thousands of books I must have read.

The point of recalling this peculiar part of my history is that it sets the stage for everything else my mother taught me about surviving school. I'm not going to criticise her or what she did and didn't do, I stopped blaming my parents for how my life turned out some years ago. My mother helped me become a voracious reader, but she also did what every parent with a first-hand interest in his/her child's success did: she made me compete. Not just compete to be better than the other kids, but to be the BEST. All the time.

Skipping through my 6 years in primary school, I will conclude that period by telling you I came out on top in almost every test and major exam but I wanted to kill myself emotionally by the time I left for high school at age 12. I had scored in the top 10% of my cohort nationally and I could have gone to any school I wanted to, any school. I went to Tanjong Katong Girls' School because my mother thought it was exactly where I should go, and it's where I went (it was maybe ranked 8th ot 9th in the country that year in 1991). My mother was a primary schoolteacher and having extensive knowledge of the system, she had coached me all my life until that moment to ace my tests and exams. To say that she dangled all kinds of carrots and beat all sizes of sticks to get me to that finishing line which was the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Exam) is an understatement. Once in high school, I remember not only battling the next four brutal years of puberty in an all-girls school, but having to do it while managing a new sensation I had never experienced before: failure.

Yes, I not only became one of the AVERAGE students in my classes, no longer taking home straight As and 90-something on my Math tests, I started FAILING mathematics. You should have seen my mother's face. She stopped berating me for not aceing my tests, she started calling her friends about finding me a good math and Chinese tutor. Life in high school wasn't all about exam-trauma of course, it was a lot of other self-esteem related issues and puberty-inspired rage against my parents. But I did do extremely well in some areas, in fact, "beating" even the "top girl" (as we call the straight A nerds) consistently. I was pretty darn good in English, English Literature and on good days, Art. I wrote the best compositions (I was known as the girl who was great at essay-writing) and even won a competition or two, even as I failed math and Chemistry and embarrassed myself at the 1993 Sports Day. And I clung to these little achievements like a pauper hoarding his only two gold coins as he starved and shivered in the cold.

Achieving blindly for the sake of achievement

Little known to me as I struggled and raged against the Singaporean education system that takes orgasmic glory in its multitude of national tests which sort the chaff from the wheat from the tender age of 8, American psychologists had already done extensive research on the effects of competition and standardized testing on children. Even today, if you went and told someone in the Education Ministry that the evidence is overwhelmingly clear and consistent that “superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence”, you would not expect that person to ask you where you got your opinion from. He would probably not furrow his brow and give you a contrary opinion and then wait in anticipation for your response. I would hedge $100 that he would not want to have any debate whatsoever about the topic and would likely "refer you to my colleague in the right department handling this sort of thing" and bolt. 

Recently, I read some work by renowned psychologist  Alfie Kohn and much of his arguments about testing children in school is almost intuitive to me, albeit subject to vociferous debate from his detractors (who should be Singaporean, but my preceding paragraph refers). Kohn is dead against subjecting children to any form of competition, be it through standardized tests or through the emphasis on winning (in whatever competitive arena).  A competitive system perpetuates itself by keeping self-worth low and making even the winners constantly needy of more success. He says, “We compete to overcome fundamental doubts about our capabilities and, finally, to compensate for low self-esteem.”

I don't know about other kids, but boy, I sure had a lot to compensate for after being perceived and told that I was the smartest kid in my class and oh so intelligent for the first 6 years of my school life. In hindsight, I never went beyond being the "best" at something and figuring out what that meant for my own personal development, how I could take something I was good at and turn it into something larger than the grade I hoped my teacher would reward me with. For example, nobody, not even me, could understand how I could score an 82 out of 100 for a still life painting of a banana which I had to do for my Secondary 2 art final exam. I remember looking at my banana, which I had done totally on instinct and apathy because you can't study for a painting exam, and I was so pleased I had scored the highest grade in my class that I wrote it off as a fluke (after all, I was always pretty mediocre at art). No one cared to explain to me why it warranted an 82 and no one really asked me to consider doing more of that (art). In fact, I had written myself off as a potential art student because my grades in Secondary 1 and 2 had not qualified me for the Art Elective Programme, a special class where you could do Art as a GCE O Level subject. I had no idea that I had any potential or talent in painting because my grades in the curriculum had suggested otherwise. 

A few years later, I stumbled into the Art class at my junior college. Mrs Mary Choo asked me if I had ever taken Art as an examinable subject (no), and then she asked me to join the class. My jaw dropped. Didn't she want to know if I had any talent? Didn't she want to make sure I could PASS THE A LEVEL EXAM? Didn't she want to TEST me before I signed up for a subject that I might fail in two years and hence drag down her class average score? (They did that at the other junior college I considered going to) Apparantly not. Mrs Choo, I learnt later, believed that everyone could do art and she spent the next two years mentoring me. While I make it sound quite romantic, it wasn't. I spent the next two years wringing my hands over how I could compete with the obviously more creative, talented and experienced students in my class (they, after all, had done their O Levels in art, unlike me) and how I could impress the examiners in Cambridge with my work. On the whole, I never really got to express my abilities without the boundaries of that horrid A Level looming over all of us like a ticking time-bomb about to drop on each of our teenaged laps come November 1999. 

But there was one thing I learnt during those two years that was better than any education I ever got out of my entire high school career: I was a good artist and I figured that out without being tested or pitted against any of my classmates. In fact, I don't remember ever taking a test although there must have been a final exam or two. I never felt happier than when I was in "class" working on my paintings. I never remembered Mrs Choo saying a single word to any of us in disparagement of our effort (you hear that a lot in the other subjects) or berating any of us for not being good enough at what we did. All the misery I experienced was borne of my own insecurity and self-absorption with not being as good as the others. 

Of course, you might say, Art isn't Math or Engineering or History. It's subjective, there's no wrong or right answer. But I'm not saying that they're the same at all. I'm saying that the attitude of those who teach and mentor us has a direct relationship with how we perceive our learning and what we get out of it. I hated math and science in high school because I was forced to do it and I shunned it in junior college when I could drop them. Instead of struggling in Math as my friends did, I did double the hours as they did in my art class, in fact it wasn't class to me at all. We just went into the studio and worked on our pieces whenever we wanted. Strange, isn't it? That when we got to choose when we want to go to class, we ended up spending more hours in class than fewer? 

So, how did I do eventually? I didn't get an A, even though I was arguably one of the better painters in my class. But we were graded on other aspects and I managed a B despite my weaker ability in design. Years on, I remember having to write down all my grades whenever I applied for jobs. The two years I spent discovering my abilities in my art class were relegated to one letter: B. I would wish in hindsight that I had had more time, that if I had overcome my fear of being graded, judged and written off (as totally untalented since that's what a C in Art meant, right?), I could have gotten that elusive A. My teacher helped me discover that I had the potential to be a good artist. The system kicked it out of me. 

Alfie Kohn would have you know that children do not learn better when education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First, competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with concentration. Second, competition doesn't permit them to share their talents and resources as cooperation does, so they can't learn from one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them from what they're supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical, but when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star or a trophy), she becomes less interested in what she's doing. The result: Performance declines. 

Why Julien will not go to a state school in Singapore

I caught up with an old friend over the weekend, KC has 3 kids and two of them are in primary school. His son goes to a school that's pretty regular, it's not the hothouse for "gifted" kids that many Singaporean parents claw, beg and fight tooth and nail to get their kids into. KC told me that his son would go to weekend classes for extra tuition -- at age 7 -- just to cope with the Primary 1 workload. Before starting school, the teacher told KC that his son had not passed the proficiency tests, he had to take extra classes before he actually began Primary One!  One year on, KC told me, his son's teachers told KC that his son was not doing well at all. KC decided that very day that he would take his son out of tuition school for good. "I tried to play by the rules, and this is what it got us. So I'm not going to play anymore." KC did what no parent would ever dream of doing: he told the system to fuck off.

“One can have the best assessment imaginable,” Howard Gardner observed, “but unless the accompanying curriculum is of quality, the assessment has no use.” I do not know what standards the school had based those conclusions on, but I shared KC's frustration with a system that seems to have lost its perspective and steered the ship into the path of a tropical typhoon. If anyone tells me that I have to make my son or daughter competitive in order to fit into the "real world", I'll tell them that the real world does not reward people according to how well they performed at their task compared to their coworkers or industry rivals. The real world works on multiple sets of arbitrary rules that have unforeseen exceptions called crises and wars and your 25-year-old colleague sucking the MD's dick. The real world is an unequal playing field where the richest and most influential get the most rewards because they are rich and influential and not because they studied really hard and were the best at what they did. The real world is sometimes uncompassionate and sometimes run by the most foolish and inept minds.  

No, if Ju needs to learn anything, it's how to understand how the world really works, and to do this, he needs to learn how to empathize, cooperate, and create something out of adversity rather than compete, imitate and quell his low self esteem by defeating an imaginary enemy or denigrating them when he thinks he has done so. That is an education for losers, not for my son. 

And so this is why my son Julien will not be a part of the Singapore education system. He will not go to a school where all his classmates would come from either a similar social economic background as he does or from one that my peers believe would not offer the optimal socialization opportunities. He will not be subjected to spuriously designed tests that claim to assess his aptitude in anything before the age of 9. He will not be educated in the politics of racialisation, and class elitism while donning his "ethnic dress" on the one day of the year reserved for racial tolerance and rehearsed displays of ethnic harmony. He will not be taught values such as thrift, humility and compassion and in the same vein, imbibed with  disdain for the poor (aka "self reliance over social welfarism") and greed for ever-increasing wealth and social status. Most of all, he will not be told that if he worked really hard, he could be in the better class or the more exclusive school where the kids get to do special things like skip their O Levels and go straight to their A Levels because that's what smarter people get to do after the politicians have run out of ideas to reform the education system. 

And where would Julien go? Back to Germany? Does Germany offer something better? Is any system objectively better, or even close to perfect? Depends on how you define better and perfect. I think I managed to think about a better way to educate my child, and so did my friend KC. KC does not have my option to take his son out of Singapore and quit the system he rejects. But KC has done his own form of rejecting. No child needs to play by the rules of a game that isn't fair, that does more harm than good and there are ways to do it without leaving the country. Singaporeans have done it by home-schooling their kids, and by cheering their kids on even if the majority labels them losers and failures. The Finns have a fine system, they have an economy of a comparable size and they come on on top in a whole lot of things for a country that does not care a lot about which of their people come out on top when they're 8 years old. 

This country's leadership needs to think about the sort of people they want out of their own offspring, and less about who they can get to replace the ones they don't have.