while i’ve heard similar things being uttered from the various sheep that have passed off for some of my classmates (it’s pretty easy, having been to schools that have all-white uniforms), this particular quote from singabloodypore takes the cake:

Well Queenie, god bless her, looked up and uttered the following most philosophical thing I have ever heard a sheep say.

“I didn’t come here to think. I came here for you to think, then tell me what to think.”

She wanted to be a teacher…

it’s not the first time i’ve heard this, or even wrote about this. but it’s not too surprising, really.

such mindsets are sad relics of an educational system that is way past its prime. i suppose it worked well and well enough, back when what singapore needed was warm bodies to fill economic positions, not so much people who question their way through every hoop and obstacle thrown in their way. this is the kind of conditioning that is wrought into us by our teachers - at least, enough of the old guard that remain - memorize and regurgitate, no need to think.

it’s what is expected from us able-bodied males, as national servicemen. an army needs soldiers who are obedient, not men who question orders from up high. the utility of conscription as a social indoctrination tool is then crystal-clear: two (or more) years of military service produces citizens who are accustomed to the chain of command; sheep, who are used to following. having punished almost half the population for resisting the system in what is possibly the two most pliable years of youth, who is going to stand up against the system after such brainwashing?

the faustian bargain of old shows its ugly side - that the cost of rapid development along predetermined lines of crisp, stern policy has been at the cost of stamping out human ingenuity and creativity:

To paraphrase Orson Welles, neighbouring Indonesia had a bloody revolution, 1 million dead, a militant insurgency and three decades of Soeharto’s rule, and yet it produced the fiction of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Singapore had 30 years of peace and stability, and what did it produce? The disk drive of personal computers.

and to update that, it hasn’t been doing too well in making hard disks either. most of the actual manufacturing facilities have packed up and left for cheaper locales, such as malaysia or china. and the so-called pillar of the economy that runs on silicon has been practically driven to the ground in recent years, with glc strongholds such as micron semiconductor running a large streak of ever-mounting financial losses under the august leadership of none less than mrs ho ching, supposedly a president’s scholar and the crème de la crème of the singaporean elite. but this whole issue of scholarships and meritocracy as practiced in singapore is, again, something i’ve already commented on.

in a nutshell, scholars have demonstrated a shocking lack of correlation between academic results and leadership prowess. and since in a meritocracy, scholars are by definition the best in the society, it then follows that either everyone else is even more screwed-up than the scholars; or that singapore is teaching its students for the wrong goals, ended up with defective products, and is blaming them for being defective. and as argued before, the education ministry is de facto the most important arm of a meritocratic government. the conclusion: we need reform; specifically, education reform!

i’ve long been an advocate of education reform, and it’s heartening that in the last few years a whole lot of change has been doled out from the imposing grey-and-green-glass headquarters. but far from the soul-wrenching excercise it should have been, the cowardly bureaucrats of educational policy have done nothing more than to throw more monkey wrenches into a fundamentally exhausted system, hoping for it to reorganize itself into something fundamentally different from what it is today. how can one talk about introducing creative thinking into a lesson plan that has to be drawn up a year in advance, and in flawless detail, down to the pages of the textbook used, homework assignments to be given, and a relentless timetable leading up to standardized examinations that will weed out the next batch of nitwits and lay the paths of those who pass through its be-all-and-end-all weeks of hell? yet it is officially sanctioned ministry policy for teachers to have to do that, and to me it explains the prevalence of oxymorons such as ‘teaching creativity’.

the stories from the frontlines seem to corroborate my view that recent policy changes seem to have little impact beyond stressing out teachers even more. teachers are still overworked, if not underpaid - an average teaching load in 2002 was four to six classes per teacher, two subjects per class, and 30-40 students per class. it is humanly impossibly for any teacher to pay undivided attention to the academic performance of two hundred pupils in the scant eight hours or so of classroom time. tales abound of teachers bringing home assignments to grade in huge paper metro shopping bags, marking at home until the wee hours before snatching a few precious hours of sleep. education policy as it stands today requires lesson plans to incorporate such ‘important’ elements such as ‘information technology’, ‘national education’ and ‘creative thinking’ into every unit that they teach.

but that is not all that a teacher has to do. teachers are expected to be in charge of a class of students and supervise their gestalt development as the school year progresses. for teachers in secondary schools, dealing with antsy teenagers in the throes of puberty (’long pants syndrome’, anyone?) is a delicate matter, to say the least. and on top of that, teachers are expected to be actively involved in at least one co-curricular activity, meaning that at the very least, saturdays have become non-negotiable work days too, and it is work that is on top of their nominal workload. need i comment more on the ‘knowledge-sharing’ wits teams that more than one exasperated teacher has dubbed ‘wasting important time schemes’? is it any surprise, then, that teachers have such a high turnover rate, and that many teachers are drived to the brink of psychological nonequilibrium by their profession?

the response from the teaching force from such hare-brained policies is simpleminded and worrying: science teachers who give worksheets with rebuses that spell ‘SINGAPORE’; mathematics teachers with test problems on working out percentage changes in declining birth rates; old and crusty computerphobic history teachers with powerpoint slides containing video clips of bloody monochrome carnage (ooh, multimedia!), clicking something somewhere that jams their presentation and having to be rescued by their l33t students; chinese teachers holding brainstorming sessions on civic issues such as subject x, and give out model answers at the end of class. (and in a bizarre twist of reverse racism, expatriate teachers seem to be exempt from these exasperating policies to varying degrees, depending on their contracts.)

such linear, reactionary thinking is both outmoded and damaging, considering the fruits of their labor such as the aforementioned Queenie. but who is really to blame for her mode of thought? herself, for not knowing better? the teachers, boxed in from all sides? or the policymakers, with their visions of clockwork efficiency?