By Andrew Yeo Zhi Jian
In 1943, the author C.S. Lewis delivered a series of three lectures that would become The Abolition of Man, a classic text on public education that considers both the domains of moral philosophy and political elitism. In it, he issues a firm rejoinder to the prevailing caution against imagination in favour of methodical intellectualism, remarking that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”
This statement reflects public attitudes towards education in Singapore today. Parents, employers and educators have called for a more lifelong approach to education, and the government is studying how it can enhance skills-based polytechnic and vocational education, and support skills training programmes for working adults. This aims to promote learning beyond educational institutions and into the workplace, which will help create a workforce more resilient to the changing needs of the economy.
There, however, remain traditional mechanisms by which we arguably “cut the jungle” more than “irrigate the desert”. The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is one such example. It has been around since 1960 and views are split over whether it should or should not be the mechanism by which the academic ability of students is assessed before they are dispatched to secondary school.
The PSLE serves two objectives — an economic function and a national imperative.
The economic principle behind the PSLE is an uncomplicated one: How do we allocate the scarce resources most efficiently, in this case places at elite secondary schools? To dull the impact of what seems to be a high-stakes competition, the Ministry of Education has ramped up efforts to make every secondary school a good one by introducing two programmes — the Applied Learning programme and the Learning for Life programme — to connect academic knowledge with the real world and to promote life skills. This position, however, assumes that good schools are viewed as such due to either specific programmes or infrastructural superiority; in reality, school reputation often transcends these assumptions.
The second objective is ancillary to achieving state objectives; Singapore’s bilingual policies are arguably accentuated by the presence, or pressure, of a conclusive examination. The second objective, however, is a less pressing one because of the carry-forward of our language classes and examinations into secondary school, although debates over whether or not secondary school education should be made compulsory in Singapore are still ongoing.
Any alternative to the PSLE will have to serve these objectives, as well as with the competing motivations of the different stakeholders in the examination.
*Read the rest of the article at http://www.ipscommons.sg/the-case-for-doing-away-with-the-psle/