The shifts in education policy announced in last Sunday’s National Day Rally (NDR) must catalyse mindset changes among parents or they will have no impact, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat said last night.
“If parents’ mindsets don’t change, whatever changes we make will not have any impact,” he said, rounding off a public forum on the Rally held by government feedback unit REACH.”
Heng Swee Keat and his master the PAP is the one who needs a mindset change. The failure of the Singapore education system in relation to a global economy and practicality in real life had been highlighted in numerous analysis on the INTERNET. Despite MOE claiming that the Singapore education system is one of the best in the world, the city state failed to produce any local entrepreneurs or talents.
According to the Academic Ranking of the World Universities, NTU and NUS did not make the top 100.The ranking was conducted by the Centre for World-Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
They ranking system had ranked Harvard as first. NUS came in at 145th while NTU wasn’t even in the top 200.
A separate list for Universities in the Asia Pacific ranked Tokyo University, Japan as 1st and Kyoto University, Japan as second. In this list, NUS was not in the top 10 and NTU was ranked somewhere between 44th and 68th.
Lets take a look at the west i did my university studies. Their education system is based on reality and practical applications. Not some rote learning stuff in a book written by some fool a decade ago. In fact when i went to the west, i found difficulty adapting myself initially to the new education system in the western university because my mind had been damaged considerably by a communist style education system the Singapore had given me. It is only then i found out the uselessness of the system. All the system does is teach one to read and write, not to think creatively or come up with solutions.
Singapore authoritarian education system makes one rote learn the books similar to what one may find in communist countries like China and North Korea. The problem with this is that the books only teach a theory and they do not present practical applications or how to use the theory in situations. Real life is dynamic and is not a theory like in the books. What u get in Singapore is a certificate that u have studied the books, not education, because the purpose of an education system is to train people to come up with new ideas and solve problems, not to wield a certificate in front of others and claim that u know everything.
This is why we see in Singapore scholars educated in the system can’t think of the box because they follow a book theory ideal. They give unconvincing excuses and they can’t even campaign properly in elections resorting to gutter techniques like Vivian Balakrishan.
During Singapore’s founding era, Singapore was engineered by Singaporean politicians and skilled people who were educated in the west. MR Lee Kuan Yew and Mr Ong Teng Cheong and Goh Keng Swee were fine examples. This is why Singapore was successful, but by looking at the current ministers and MPs who were educated in the local universities, they cant even hold a candle to the old generation PAP.
During the 70s to 90s the Singapore government bowed down to the demands of exploitative and unscrupulous neo liberal multinationals in training slave labor for the economy and this is the reason why we see so many brainless drones from the past generation. Since then the education sector in Singapore failed to move up the value chain for a new global creative economy. And ironically people educated overseas or foreigners are holding high value added jobs in Singapore compared to locals. So what happened to Education Minister Heng Swee Keat and his wonderful world class education system?
Today we see many Singaporeans unfit for employment in many MNCs because the multi national sector had changed considerably since the days in the 70s-90s.Only after we have made serious changes to the local education system, then and only then will we be able to truly develop a world class education system.
But with PAP at the helm, this is unlikely to happen.
SG parent
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