1. Students who don’t do well enough in their first year are forced to drop an A-level subject ‘for their own good’: they are told that they cannot cope with more than three subjects. Wanting to learn the subject was not a valid reason for wanting to stick with a subject.
2. CCAs are closed down on the basis of not earning enough CCA points.
3. An outdoor rock wall was built in full view of a major road. Everyone who drives by it is impressed. Unfortunately, the rock wall is structurally unsafe and cannot actually be used for climbing on. The school had built it despite being advised by rock wall experts that an indoors rock wall would be cheaper and more practical.
4. Students were prevented from taking ‘S’ papers if they didn’t meet certain standards. There were standards for taking any ‘S’ papers at all, for taking 2 ‘S’ papers, and for taking 3. Wanting to learn the subject was not a valid reason for wanting to take an ‘S’ paper.
5. Applications to Oxbridge colleges were strongly regulated. With the exception of those in the elite humanities programme, students were not allowed to choose which college to apply to. They were assigned colleges to apply to so as to spread out applicants from the JC uniformly across all colleges. This would minimise competition between students from that JC for admission to Oxbridge, and maximise the total number of students from that JC admitted to Oxbridge. Requests from students to apply to a college other than the one they were assigned to were rejected.

It should not go unnoticed that each of the policies above maximises the Top JC’s KPIs. The question of whether educators should, amongst other things, actively discourage enthusiastic students from pursuing their interests is left as a exercise for the reader.

A critique of A*Star’s scholarship schemes is up on Singapore Angle. This has been in the works for many months. It took a bout of insomnia to set my adrenaline going strongly enough to squeeze out the final product.

Koo Tsai Kee, Minister of State for Defence, argues in the ST op-ed section that “Singapore’s education system works”. On the way, he demolishes straw men and makes glib leaps of reasoning in order to deliver his three messages.

The first message is that “The elites’ children do not have a monopoly on good grades.” This is a straw man. No one ever said that it’s impossible for “non-elites” to get good grades. The question, instead, is whether the undeniable correlation between being elite and having good grades is strong enough to be worrying (or whether any such correlation should be worrying in the first place). The fact that this year’s top PSLE student came from a “non-elite” family indeed destroys that straw man. But who cares?

The second message is “the multiplying strength of diversity and social harmony.” Koo’s justification for this:

Children of all races and religions, across economic profiles, study together happily in the same environment. St Hilda’s Primary did not pre-qualify only Christians. If it did, it would have lost Natasha. Nor is the school exclusively for members of the establishment and the rich. Natasha’s father is a technician and her mother a full-time housewife.

The curious thing about this paragraph is that it seems to lack any instances of how the education system demonstrates “the multiplying strength of diversity and social harmony.” It does state that children from diverse backgrounds study in the same environment, but since this is to some extent engineered by the education system itself, it can’t be cited as evidence for its success. Or perhaps it’s the word “happily” that’s crucial here. Perhaps it’s because these children are actually happy studying with peers from different backgrounds that we are entitled to see the “strength of diversity and social harmony” in education. But Koo cites no evidence that these children are happy to study with their peers (are there any surveys that ask kids if they would be happier to study in a less diverse environment?).

“Nor is the school exclusively for members of the establishment and the rich” destroys another straw man. No one argues that good schools contain only the children of “members of the establishment and the rich”. The more common and reasonable position is that students in good schools come disproportionately from rich/establishment families. One exception to the trend does not refute the existence of the trend.

Koo’s final message is that “the system works”. Why? Because

If it didn’t, if it only produced exam-smart kids, then how does one account for the success of modern Singapore? What fuels this metropolis? The answer is smart Singaporeans. With limited natural resources and limited human resources, it is the quality of the people that matters. Quality education delivers quality people. Nothing else does.

As if the earlier setting up of straw men had not already given us some hints, this passage demonstrates that Koo is simply not interested in addressing critics of Singapore’s education system on their own grounds. Instead he sets up his own grounds and expects critics to nod sagely in agreement. Many critics would not agree that

1. Modern Singapore is “successful”. They could fail to accept this either because Koo’s definition of success differs from theirs (and we will never know since, to make it all the easier to knock down straw men, Koo does not define “success”), or because even if they accept that Singapore is successful in a certain sense, they don’t accept that this kind of success can be credited to our education system.
2. The only way Singapore could be “successful” is through having “quality people”.
3. “Quality people” can be delivered only by “quality education”.

But Koo rides on these premises to come to his grand conclusion. Such an argument is unlikely to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced, and hence is nothing more than the literary equivalent of patting yourself on the back.

At the end of his essay Koo inserts a couple of somewhat disconnected points that are also worth taking down:

In the Natasha story, her score of 294 is outstanding, but it is the average score of the average PSLE student that vindicates our system.

Here, it should be noted that the average literacy level in Singapore is very high. And the average Singapore student has consistently done well in international benchmarking tests.

Again, this presumes that the international benchmarking tests referred to and literacy level are good measures of the quality of an education system. As I understand it, most critics do not accept that premise. One of the most common criticisms of the Singapore education system is that it is overly obsessed in getting students through the pipeline of examinations, instead of building up other aspects of a student’s skills, knowledge and character. In fact, Koo himself had implicitly acknowledged that exams alone are not a good measure of educational quality in writing “if [the education system] only produced exam-smart kids, then how does one account for the success of modern Singapore?” Yet three paragraphs later he proceeds to use exam results as the fact that “vindicates our system”.

As of 0850 hours on 1st Nov 2007, Singapore time, Wikipedia had Hitler’s photo displayed on Lee Kuan Yew’s
Wikipedia entry. Screenshot: