Mocking Our Education

Certain parties have accused the “ultra-kiasu” of making a mockery of our education system. While I do agree that certain parties are making a mockery of our education system, I think that the responsibility for doing that lies squarely with our politicians such as our Education Minister II.

As someone who has spent more than a decade teaching in one capacity or another, I have had the pleasure to deal directly with the education system and its products. Let me just put it bluntly – it’s broken.

Now, I’m not interested to point fingers and accuse any party of actually breaking the system, simply because I know that the responsibility has to be shared between many parties. The education system is not a simple system that can be easily broken by any one person. It requires concerted effort (or lack of) from multiple parties in order to break it.

But broken, it is.

The mockery is when our politicians continue to live in denial of the broken system. For as long as such denials exist, any efforts that attempt to fix the problem will be half-hearted. As a nation, we need to recognise that the education system IS broken before we can begin the process of identifying fixes and implementing them.

I also know that the Ministry of Education recognises the problems, even if they will not label it as broken. They are also hard at work in finding solutions to the various problems. However, I do not think that they will succeed in implementing any real solutions because such solutions are going to be painful and will lack political will in execution.

Before any healing can be done, we need to embrace the fact that we’re hurt, which seems to be something that our politicians are unwilling to concede.

In the mean time, I would like to ask that our politicians stay away from education. They have messed it up over the years. More political interference will not save it. What we need is for politicians to just stay away and let the educators do their job of educating the people. Leave it to the professionals.

So, let’s stop making a mockery of our education system by making stupid claims about its superiority and recognise that it needs fixing. Let’s stop living in denial and move on.