I am sure many Singaporeans have already seen this piece of news dating quite sometime back.
Well, I agree with most of the things that the student had mentioned in the letter:
1) The time we spent in schools is very long.
A secondary three or four student would spend atleast 9h on average in school. That is due to lessons in the morning, afternoon supplementary lessons and last but not least, CCA.
If you add all of this up, you would get about 9h or more.
2) We see our teachers more than seeing our parents.
I am totally for this point. On a vague basis, each of us are atleast awake for 18h. Taking away the time that we use to eat and bath, we are approximately left with 15h? If an ave student spends even 9h in school, that is indeed more than the time we spend with our family. Remember that we have not even added in the time we use to do our homework and traveling from one place to another.
3) we have a smaller variety of subjects that we can choose from.
I am definitely for this point and the subject variety is indeed very small. I take 8 subjects and my secondary school only allows triple science students to take bio. Those who take double sciences or combine science, we are left with chemistry and physics. Other schools that I know atleast allow all students to take biology. Trust me, physics is not an easy subject at all.
Personally, I have an interest in humanities and my weakpoint is science. In this case, wouldn’t it be better if I just took humanities and math instead of having weaker subjects that would eventually make my O lvl report card look bad?
Okay, I know that some people would be saying things like it’s so that we have a balanced education bur why can’t it just be a non examined but important subject in school? Won’t that be better? Why can’t student choose the subjects they want to be tested in?
Putting that aside, I believe that the education system is pretty unfair. I have friends in the last class( supposedly the ‘worst’ class) but thy are smart. Just because their secondary 2 results were not as good as the rest, but they are still generally smart.
Futhermore, why is art considered as a subject for people that can’t do well in other more ‘important’ subjects. This is not the truth at all. Almost every education system has a preference for sciences first, maths the second, language the third and humanities and arts at the end of the pyramid. I truly believe that such a system is unfair. This actually constricts every youths ability as they are sometimes being forced to give up what they love and take sometime that they just do not understand.
As I have once read in a book, we should not stop one from expanding their imagination. As a famous person once said,”Humans don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.”
Well