My stint my new school, which is quite unlike a-certain-school I attended not too long ago, just confirmed what I had suspected all along, that not all is well with the education system.

A major problem would be the fact that there is a current emphasis on moving away from traditional learning(i.e mugging). Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with mugging. This is perhaps the best kept secret among the better schools. They have lots of out-of-classroom learning, educational gimmicks, but the boys don't believe in them. At the end of the day, after lots of fun in school with the new website in class, everyone still goes home, takes out the thick books and mugs. How else do you think they consistently get the scores? Because they are smart?

Anyway, the point is, getting the scores is hardly education, you might argue. Which is a fair enough view. I can understand the purpose of the policy, even if I do not agree with its implementation. I have always thought that it is an elitist policy, geared towards the top schools. You can make them work in top schools, but there is no way in hell you are gonna impress a bunch of under-motivated kids with abstract ideas about education.

Plus, at the end of the day, the same system that pushes for a more liberal approach to education is gonig to judge these kids, the ones in my school, based on their examination scores. Their immediate futures (i.e, ITE, polytechnic, JCs) are going to be decided by their O level scores, and for me that settles the debate. Yes, CCA plays a part, for that miserable two bonus points, but hell, I'll be damned if you can convince me that joining a CCA for two bonus points is any closer to an education than focussing merely on exam scores.

Which is symptomatic of most Singaporeans. Singaporeans are desperately incapable of living with the intangibles and unquantifiables; they have an almost obsessive need to quantify and rank everything. As long as success is defined by the number of points one gets for O's, the system can have no pretensions to moving towards a less myopic ideal of education. And it is unfair that while the judging criteria do not change, the teaching systems in schools are expected to, because the ones who will bear the brunt of it will be students in schools like __________. The ones in top schools will play along, but will always have the sense to realize that, at the end of the day, academic results always come first and you will always be judged by that, at least in this part of the world, and, unlike fickle policies, that is not something that will change anytime soon.