I daydreamed about what Singapore’s education system could be
A couple of days back whilst at friends’ (yet another teacher) place, I got asked, ‘If you were a parent, how would you like the education system to be?’ For those who know me for years, you’d think I’m an educator at heart, and also cut out to be a teacher. But more often than once, I have declared that I will never teach in the mainstream education system because there are too many things about it that I’m against. People would often tell me I should go and change it; but trust me, you don’t want to get me started. Yet with this license to daydream, I gratefully seized it.
The first warning before I get started is that I think about systems as a collective whole so I don’t see our education system as separate from our economy, our culture and our identity. All of them work together and reinforce each other. This is why I often try to make a case for the idea that culture and education could be the cause of our productivity problems. And that brings me to the second warning that the system of my dreams will probably be ‘far-fetched’ in that what we’ve been doing in our schools is nowhere close to it. But if we can agree on a future society we are striving towards, then we can collectively make that a representation of our vision to strive toward.
