education in singapore is ruthless and idiotic. we mug and mug and mug just to get a good score in the exams. some teachers even result to spoon feeding. and our job, again, is to drive the nail into our heads till we memorize everything so we can show it all off in our answer scripts.
there is neither any creative thinking involved, nor any heart involved. just pure routine and going through the same useless motions of reciting the formulae and whatnot. useless because more than half of what we learn in school isnt gonna be any use to our later life. even gp is mechanical. theyre always looking for the same points, the same structure, same writing style, same interpretations, same stuff. whoever says you cant mug gp just isnt trying. of course in an ideal situation, i wouldnt have to study for gp cos my general knowledge should be sufficient. but no. it isnt like that, cos they have a set of responses that theyre looking for. beats the whole purpose, dont you think?
and dont you hate the fact that people end up sacrificing their childhoods or teenage years just to do all this shit? we dont get enough time to grow in other ways. no space to be creative. no space to think about important things in life. no space to exercise freedom of expression. no space to be human and no space to truly be ourselves.
people always complain that singaporeans are a rude, impolite and dull bunch. thats exactly the result of our education system that requires so much of mindless heartless work that we do in the early and the most essential stage of our lives. we dont develop to be compassionate or even passionate about anything. simply because we dont have any time to do so, in the midst of mugging and trying our hardest to get that A in the next exams. even community involvement programmes have become a blunt way of merely decorating our t3a, our testimonial, or our portfolio. what do we truly learn from cip? for most of us, nothing. sadly.
the worst part of it all, however hard everyone tries, we all end up as finished products by the end of the process, and in waiting for our results to be released, we are cleaning our foreheads so that some old english gentlemen across the globe can conveniently stamp our grades on our foreheads. in other words, we all end up being labelled. however you look at it, our names and our character do not matter when we apply for a university course or a job. what matters is our grades. our grades become our identity. our label. the better the grades, the more valuable, hence we are all products of the education system.
the part the saddens me most is the bell curve. the dreaded bell curve has every ounce of power to change anyone's life completely through the same process of labeling. however hard we al try as a cohort, there will be people at the top getting their As, and there will be people at the bottom who, without fail (pun not intended), end up at the bottom with either a F grade or U grade (pun not intended). because even if youre the last in cohort but your score is 65, you are still going to be labelled as F or U. in other words, you will be labelled as last. what good does this serve to anyone then?
so people, dont blame anyone for anything that goes wrong in exams or in life that has anything to do with education. youre not at fault. just get on top or get a life. really, youre still human. go and get one while you can.
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