During the early Eocene period of Earth, the whale ancestor Pakicetus walked. These giant mammals had bones essential for having legs, and with these legs they roamed around land. But as the Earth developed further and environments changed, Pakicetus migrated towards the sea, and its predecessors lost their legs. Fascinating, isn’t it, how they shedded a not-so-useful portion of their body to adapt to swimming? This is, I opine, how tertiary education should be. Like how Pakicetus evolved, our studies this late into our education journey should be focusing on the subjects which help us reach our aspirations, rather than putting emphasis on irrelevant topics we are forced to learn.
For tertiary education––particularly in Junior College (JC)––to be meaningful, there must be a purpose in learning the subjects schools obligate us to. As such, the idea of taking a contrasting subject remains redundant. Learning a contrasting subject is not likely to be helpful in our careers, and thus is purposeless––imagine a future linguist studying calculus, or a future mathematician studying linguistics; a historian will never use integrals in their work, nor will a mathematician suddenly care about how certain words are pronounced. Personally, as someone who is most probably going to work in the medical sector, I find the fact that I am studying Economics for these two years in JC to be incomprehensible.
Too often, the argument for the apparent purpose of contrasting subjects is to let students further explore their interests and prospective career paths. The proponents surmise that at the age group of the average JC student, many are in a limbo with regards to where their passion lies. There is, in fact, some truth in this view, but assuming that all JC students are clueless in this respect is such a myopic consideration. Plus, if that truly is the purpose of contrasting subjects, why make it compulsory? Wouldn’t, say, allowing students to take these contrasting subjects as electives, much like what is done with the H3 modules, suffice?
Another glaring aspect of the Singaporean tertiary education system is the A levels. The white lie that schools and teachers tell students is that they are the best prophets in predicting what is expected from examination candidates, when in reality, no one really knows what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’; everyone is in a giant bingo game, guessing and hoping they call out the correct number. This limits the utility of A levels as a gauge of our understanding in the subjects we study. Oftentimes, we spend too much time trying to find the most suitable phrasing or working step that we sacrifice time which could have been spent deepening our knowledge on our subjects. In order to remedy this, I suggest that the Ministry of Education offer candidates transparency by publicising a marking scheme for A level papers such that we are aware of how we need to structure our answers. The United Kingdom, the home of A levels, has been doing so for years, so why don’t Singapore follow suit?
In addition, the way certain subjects are assessed inherently begs the question of the purpose of the subject itself. Some assessment objectives are questionable in nature and are not applicable in real life contexts. Let us take a look at a subject most JC students take: General Paper. We are taught to first impress our markers before we can articulate our opinions in Paper 1. If I were to be frank, this offers little practical value in real life. In daily arguments, debates, and even high-profile discussions between, for instance, government officials, there is no need for us to start with a personal anecdote, or a quote from a famous figure, or the plot of a piece of literature that makes you sound particularly erudite to make yourself a more ‘reliable’ source of information. Furthermore, the assessment objective of testing our abilities to comprehend passages in Paper 2 fails to exert its utility in real life. The simplistic notion that the ability to comprehend translates to the ability to replace words with their synonyms is flawed. From my observations, the only part of this subject which remains useful for the future seems to be the Application Question where we are trained to think more critically.
Alas, these assessment objectives are ultimately the product of the syllabi from which our education is constructed. I believe that with how rigid our syllabi are, the way we want to learn and what we want to learn are severely restricted. In Chemistry, for example, the syllabus dictates us to apply this particular formula, the Gibbs free energy formula, to solve questions. Yet contrastingly, the syllabus reminds us that the understanding of the Gibbs free energy itself is not required. This is akin to telling a child to solve equations involving fractions before teaching them division; the child knows how to add and subtract fractions but not how fractions form, and thus is restricted to only learning about addition and subtraction but not multiplication or division of fractions.
It is, however, undeniable that a syllabus is important. It functions as a parameter within which a subject will be taught such that the average student can learn concepts that are not too demanding, but not too easy as well. It also acts as a guide to both students and teachers that summarises what needs to be learnt and taught in classes. As such, completely eliminating the syllabi is not an option. But perhaps, to allow us to learn a certain topic in much greater depth such that our learning is not only surface-level, we can split our subjects into subcategories, much like how the American education system is structured. For instance, Mathematics can be compartmentalised into algebra, geometry, calculus, and statistics, each with a different syllabus altogether. Students then can take up the category of mathematics they are interested in, but they are not required to take all. Under this refined syllabus, we would be able to learn more things about the specific branch of subjects. Not only will this prove to be more useful for our future careers (which tend to involve only a specific aspect of a subject), it will also allow us to be more flexible in learning what we want.
In sum, our tertiary education in Singapore, despite being lauded to be the best in Asia, does have several shortcomings, which raises questions on the purpose and meaningfulness of what we are currently studying. However, the situation is not in a cul-de-sac––as long as we allow the education system to evolve, morphing certain aspects of itself into something beneficial and discard what is not needed, I believe that such shortcomings can be nullified, or at least minimised.
Written by: Warren Tanaka (21S70)
Edited by: Ren Yingqi (22S6J)
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