In TODAY's weekend edition, there is an article written by an expat mum who placed her kids in a local school only to pull them out and enrol them in an international school a few years later. See below. The article raised the question, "What kind of educational system best prepares children for today's challenges?" I don't have an answer to that but what I feel is important for my kids is to develop creative thinking and good communication skills. I'm not sure the local education system with the high student teacher ratio and emphasis on academics provides the right environment for students to cultivate the habit of speaking up nor develop an opinion about specific topics. And if the classroom provides for effective learning, why is it so many kids of normal intelligence are having private tution? If a child fails to understand a lesson or does not have a love for learning, is it a problem with the child or a problem with the system?
Like the writer, I was hopeful about changes to the local education system but I realise now that MOE's ambitions are one thing and implementation is quite another. Whether the local education system would ever sort itself out is anybody's guess. As for me and my girls, we are not sticking around to find out.
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SCHOOL EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED
Weekend November 17, 2007
How will their kids fare in a local school? One expat mum finds out
Noelle de Jesus
THOSE who had watched the international schools defeat some of the best local schools in televised debates earlier this year found much to discuss across their dinner tables and at cocktail parties.
The key question: What kind of educational system best prepares children for today's challenges?
For my husband and I, these discussions took place much earlier. When we moved here eight years ago, our major concern was how best to educate our daughter and son - Filipinos carrying United States passports, now permanent residents of Singapore.
We wanted strong academics, of course, but we also wanted them to be life-long learners with confidence, creativity, responsibility, self-respect and awareness of the world. Neither did we want them to be set apart from the youth of the country which we had chosen to make our home.
Seeing groups of expat teenagers skateboarding in the youth park off Orchard Road, I sensed alienation and a lack of belonging. Somehow they seemed cut off from society. We did not want this for our children.
So we sent them to local schools. We were aware of the strengths of the school system - the solid foundation in science and mathematics and the remarkable self-discipline that would be so efficiently instilled.
We had read of a few foreign students who had emerged triumphant from local academic rigours, securing admission into fine universities abroad.
But we also understood potential pitfalls - the largely authoritarian system, the single-minded rote approach to learning and the high student-teacher ratios.
Many raised eyebrows at our choice. A colleague at work said: "You have a choice, why put them through that?" She spoke of the way the system can kill the joy of learning, the ability to think "out of the box".
But we had taken to heart the news that the Ministry of Education (MOE) was slowly but surely changing the system. It was allowing the teaching of simplified Chinese, establishing support for more creative as well as more critical thinking, and promoting the arts and sports. Anything else our children needed, we figured we would be able to provide at home. We were hopeful.
After sending them to a local Montessori pre-school, we found ourselves living 1km away from two of the best primary schools, one for girls and one for boys. That single kilometre was critical. Our son went through the ballot, but they both made it.
Our first frustration was foreign language learning. Anxious that they learn Mandarin, we (and they) quickly found it was next to impossible in the local system, due to the pace and depth of the classes - classes that proved too difficult even for Singaporean students.
I soon discovered that all the students in my daughter's class were taking extra Chinese lessons. As one tutor said: "Children don't learn mother tongue at school; they learn it from their tuition."
With no Mandarin background, my children tuned the classes out; the rote system of learning did not work.
"Why can't they take Mandarin as a foreign language?" I asked an MOE administrator. There was no ready answer. Instead, my children were invited to take French, German or Japanese.
When my daughter told me she had to prepare for her science exam, I told her to study her textbook. She replied: "There's nothing in the book."
The girls were told to "read on their own"; what to read was not specified. Later, I found out parents bought old science exam papers for their daughters to study from.
I also found the rather quantitative methods used in my kids' English classes highly suspect. If my daughter tried her hand at a complex sentence with modifying phrases and she made a mistake, the entire sentence was marked incorrect and points were taken off. This made her decide to stick with easy noun-verb sentences.
As for my son's compositions, they were edited subjectively. His quirky, still grammatical sentences were red-penned and in many cases, falsely labelled incorrect.
But the high teacher-student ratio - 1 teacher to 40 students - proved to be our utmost concern. It rendered the simplest dynamics of question-and-answer explanation difficult to say the least. In the boys' school especially, teachers struggled to maintain order, let alone teach.
My son, a square peg in a round hole, was labelled a trouble-maker for inquisitiveness. The reputation followed him from Primary 1 to Primary 2.
One day, his teacher called me to report him as "the mastermind" of some class bullying, saying his own friends had fingered him as the culprit.
When I spoke to my son, he denied he was solely responsible, saying: "What's the point of saying I'm not; they'll all say it's me, anyway. So I just took the punishment."
When we heard this, all our doubts crystallised in one decision. Despite all our hopes, this wasn't working for him. Creativity, language, even writing - we could teach ourselves. But we felt unequal to the task of constantly undoing daily institutional damage to his self-esteem. And we had no desire to fight the system.
We withdrew both children from their schools and placed them in an international school.
There, they could at least learn Mandarin as a foreign language. They would be able to have a real relationship with their teachers, enjoy inquiry-based learning and be encouraged to express themselves. They would each be in a class with no more than 25 students and that ratio would only make things better all around.
It is by no means perfect. No education system is. And we were disappointed that our experiment failed.
Cost, of course, is one issue. To pay the price equivalent to that of a small diamond, when once we paid the price of an apple for a year's schooling, will not be easy.
We also continue to seek opportunities for our children to interact with other Singaporean children, grateful they have maintained some of the friendships they forged at their old schools.
But on his first day at the new school, my son told me he had the best day of his life. My daughter came to me and thanked me for moving her. "Here," she confided, "I feel like I am learning something every day." How can you argue with that?
At the end of the day, the root problem of the local school system is the high teacher-student ratio which demands more control from the teacher and gives the students less opportunities for variation.
Many foreign families make it by dint of playing the game we did not play: Filling the children's time with extra classes, buying old exam papers and willingly allowing their children's uniqueness to be efficiently rubbed off so that they could fit themselves neatly into the system's uniformly round holes. We did the only thing we could do.
At least, you can't say we didn't try. And it was a learning experience.
Ultimately that's what education should be about.
Noelle de Jesus is a freelance editor and writer who believes parents
should be responsible co-educators of their children.
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