SINGAPORE: By one metric—albeit a significant one—Singapore’s education system is very successful indeed, and the country’s top universities consistently rank high on global lists. In March, a professor in the United States even asked if Singapore math could be “a fix for U.S. mathematics education?”
Nevertheless, high scores come at a high price, and some have asked if young students in Singapore are under too much pressure to do well, at the expense of school-life balance.
An American writer who lives in Singapore and who taught at one of the “highest-rated independent all-boys secondary schools” in the country wrote an essay for Business Insider, published on Friday (17 May), where he said that he worried about the amount of stress his 14-year-old daughter has been under in her experience in Singapore schools, in comparison to his own experience growing up in the US.
In a piece called “I have fond memories of high school in America. I’m worried my daughter won’t feel the same in Singapore,” Jason Erik Lundberg said that he looks back fondly on his high school years but his daughter, now in Secondary 3, “is far more stressed out than I remember being at the same age.”
“When she was 11 and in Primary Six, Singapore was still under heavy COVID-19 restrictions, which was taxing enough for a young student. However, she also had to take the standardized Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), which would determine the secondary schools she’d be eligible for the following year.
“From where I sat, she spent the majority of that school year studying for that test, and felt intense pressure — along with the rest of her cohort — from the teachers to do well. This led to prolonged neurosis that year, and as a result, she lost over 10 pounds, when she was a slender kid to begin with,” Mr Lundberg wrote.
Writing about how proud he is of his daughter, he acknowledged that part of the pressure she is under comes from the high standards she has set for herself, “much of which has come from her school environment,” and added that Singapore has had a “shift in the focus of education away from purely academic grades and test results.”
Other voices have called for changes as well. In Parliament last year, Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim brought up a “Flexible Through-Train Program for Schools,” designed to help students who find tests stressful and learn at a pace that is suitable for them.
Fellow WP MP Gerald Giam has similarly called for reforms, underlining the tremendous stress students are subjected to.
“When stress becomes toxic, it can have negative effects on learning and knowledge retention and, in extreme situations, could become chronic,” Mr Giam, a father of two, who has helped his children through the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), said.
Associate Professor Pak Tee Ng from Nanyang Technological University, talked to Spanish newspaper El País last year about how important play is to learning.
Saying that assignments are being reduced in Singapore, he added, “We want to create spaces for the students to learn new things, and play is part of learning… Of course, you need to practice a bit; otherwise, you quickly forget, but there can be an excess of practice to the detriment of other areas of development, which we also care about.” /TISG
Read also: US Professor: Could Singapore math be a fix for U.S. mathematics education?