Give them time to explore!

The mid-year exams are almost over, thank goodness.  Have been feeling very sorry for the kids, who have to study so hard.  The questions these days are insane.  My reaction to most Primary 5 maths questions is “seow arh?  So difficult!!!”.  The education system is really going bonkers.  My daughter is in school from 715 am to 1 pm.  But almost every day, she has supposedly “supplementary classes” at school until 3 pm plus.  And every day, she has homework which can often stretch to 10 pm plus.  And if you know my daughter, this is not because she is lazing around and taking her time.  She is really working.

And the maddest thing just happened – we got a letter from school informing us that for the first week of the holidays, there will be supplementary lessons for all students and all four subjects from Mon-Fri, from 0730 to 1200.  Basically, no holiday for that week lah.  ???!!!

I think this is what happens every time MOE says they will go for a more “rounded education” with “values” etc.  In theory, it's great.  But basically they pile on this extra stuff, find that they have no time for the ton of existing academic stuff, and then instead of reducing the academic load, decide that they’ll just make the students all do homework till 10 pm and come back during the holidays anyway.  MOE – if you add something, must also minus lah.

My son is of course going through the same thing.  My wife and I are going mad trying to help them both answer what appear to be quantum mechanics maths sums.  It’s really no wonder we don’t want any more children eh?

It wouldn’t be so bad if I thought the kids were actually enjoying themselves.  But the load is so heavy that everyone is forced to rote learn and apply standard techniques.  There is no time for kids to experiment.  Have you read the compositions that kids write these days?  They all sound the same.  The teachers all teach the students to use the same “good phrases” and clichés.  Why?  Because there’s no time for the kids to explore for themselves.

I remember when I was in primary school, the opening sentence for the composition was something like two kids walking home from school, then they heard a meowing sound – continue from there.  Today, if you gave any kid this composition, they will tell you that it was a beautiful day, there were “azure” or even “cerulean” skies, a cool breeze was blowing etc etc all the STANDARD phrases they learn, then come up with some generic story about an injured cat to bring home and nurse back to health, and probably end with a cliché like “all’s well that ends well”.  TERRIBLE.  But amazingly, that’s what gets you the good marks.  I distinctly remember having the same question when I was in primary school.  I wrote that the kids brought the cat back, the cat revealed itself to actually be an alien, who was a scout for an impending alien invasion, the kids were abducted and finally they destroyed the mothership.  SO FUN.  I absolutely loved my English lessons.  It was almost like playtime.  But I don’t think kids can get away with this nowadays.  What a pity!

My daughter once wrote that "the sun hung in the sky like an angry yellow eye".  The teacher came back and said the sun is not an eye, so that’s wrong.  WHAT???!!!!

And don’t get me started on the gifted programme.  It’s great that we try to nurture these gifted kids.  But the system picks out kids when they are NINE years old.  Then they get a massive advantage, with small classes, all the resources etc ALL THE WAY THROUGH SECONDARY SCHOOL.  Crazy.  Especially when it’s obvious that the programme has a bias towards math and patterns.  Why do they define success and intelligence so narrowly?  It forces parents to ram their diamond shaped children into circle shaped holes, just so their kids get the chance to benefit from the disproportionate advantages given to the mathematically gifted.

The definition of success is becoming narrower and narrower because kids have no time to explore alternatives.  Everybody’s heading to the same door, which naturally makes competition to get through that one door unnecessarily fierce, and in the end you have 1 bright spark who was simply the best at working the system, and 99 people who all only know how to get through that one door and don’t know what to do now that the door’s closed (and 1000s of tuition centres teaching 100,000s of kids the SAME THING and churning out robotic clones).  Where are our Steve Jobses, Larry Pages, Kazuo Ishiguros and Lionel Messis going to come from like this?

And worse, because everyone now is so reliant on tuition centres, social mobility decreases dramatically.  If you don't have tuition, you're left behind.  The teachers have SO MUCH to teach that they have no choice but to rely on the kids to have their own tuition.  The days of the poor kid rising above his circumstances are dwindling away.  They've become the rare exception that proves the rule.  This is a massive massive problem, and horrifyingly unfair.  Education is supposed to be the greatest social equalizer, but we are turning this on its head!

I won't pretend to know what the perfect solution to our education system is.  All I'm doing is sharing what I think is a serious problem.  But if anyone who has the chance to make a difference in our schools reads this – PLEASE, give our kids the chance and more importantly, the TIME to experiment.  And for the avoidance of doubt, this DOES NOT MEAN YET MORE EXTRA CLASSES.  Let them explore!  We all want them to work hard and be successful.  But success doesn’t all have to look exactly the same for every kid, and the incentives for the kids who are smart in one particular way shouldn’t be so outsized that everyone piles onto that same bandwagon.  This is the very definition of the cliché “putting all our eggs in one basket” – a phrase I just saw in yet another “model” composition.  Horrors.