Educational Edification

AIT Academy has finally closed. Its curriculum has been found wanting and not up to par. And you mean the authorities only discovered this after they had been in business for so many years? What about all the other commercial schools under the Ministry of Education's purview? You mean they get off scott free and the private school section doesn't lift a finger to intervene nor audit?

Why do they even bother registering private schools and leave the audit to someone else? Aren't they the better authority to do so in their capacity as education overseer and education directors? As it is the other body is also immersed in other accreditation schemes and consumer advocacy.

This sounds like the classic case I cited earlier of A Cuckoo Bird Flew Over the Nest. By registering aren't they conferring some degree of authencity even though they flatly refute accreditation?

What about CASETRUST's insistence on banking and withholding the business account? Didn't this precipitate the school's demise eventually? So is education a matter of its curriculum content and delivery pedagogy or is it more a business enterprise so that the latter actually over-rides the pre-eminence of the former?

I am not siding with the academy's management or quality of educational content. I am only saying that controlling a business' cash flow is like tying up the seminal vesicle in a vasectomy, effectively sterilising a red-hot blooded potent male in his prime.

However I think there are a few sacrosancts like education, the police force , basic health and the military (or other security providers and protectors for that matter) that these be not commodified or commercialised. Anyone can trade goods and services like selling yong-tau-foo or hair-dressing.

But let us keep these few remaining sacred turf sacred just for the sole reason that they are not tradeable services unlike the rest. Education involves people and their minds. Imagine still instilling fear of the bogeyman, the policeman and the doctrine that the earth is flat.

Any student taking up a course of study with an institution looks out for the famous name of the school, its track record in producing outstanding students and the facilities it affords. They also want reasonable fees, know who the teachers are , the special features of its curriculum and if it offers them the subjects they want to learn.

It must be a crying shame that anyone took such a long time to notice the decrepit state of private education here. Not that the public education sector is absolutely absolved of this sin in some instances either.

I never judge a person by his race, color, gender, age, wealth or education. What matters is what he has up in his head and down there in his heart. These are the two trademarks that distinguish someone. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be imbued with good common sense , fair judgement and with a big heart to boot. Anyone is capable of this.

Education unfortunately was to enlarge this self of ours. It was to open our hearts and minds, create new vistas, help us be compassionate and enrich our lives.

Somehow many of our love-interests in education die a slow death as we move up the grades. There is something not quite right with not just what is being taught but how it is being flogged to death by the same old pedagogical pedantry.

We know higher education is to prepare us with a skill for the economy. But if the intellectual curios of some of the abler students cannot be met, surely education must have inadvertently missed its noble objective.

We have turned our schools into a cram , "exam-oriented" educational experience. We teach to the test. This does not in anyway test ability, it only measures memorization and exam preparation skills. What's more with a one-examination approach. This must surely be the final nail in the coffin for all of us. It is the do-all-or-end-all scenario if we should ever stub our toe on this one.

Particularly for science education, it is only one half of a whole equation that formalism can teach. The nature of science, the scientific knowledge, scientific inquiry and scientific method. The other equally important half is the informalism. The reflection, the doing , the sense of exploration and discovery.

Sometimes we are made to do our laboratory experiments as we would follow a cookbook recipe, without understanding or knowing why we are conducting them. We have missed out on the context and application of this research.

We used to do many titrations for our volumetric analyses during high school. I have never known what in darnation this was for except to guesstimate that the haemotology department must be doing this in the hospitals.

The scientific literacy of reasoning and rigorous debates must be skills that even the future non-scientist can use for his own personal and larger societal needs.

Students are not only the beneficents if education is made relevant and practical. All the great scientists were not all geniuses in schools but education must have aroused their intellectual curiousity sufficiently to make them want to pursue their lines of interests and inquires further, leading to significant and sometimes earth-shattering discoveries. All it took was a spark to ignite a pyrotechnical fireworks.

With these discoveries, mankind benefit too.

The balloting phenomenon of our primary school education enrolment is run like a state lottery. If at one end of the spectrum we have the few highly-sought after renowned schools and at the other, the enrolment-starved schools, shouldn't we then efficiently re-allocate resources by turning the unpopular ones via a name change into subsidiary branches of the famous ones? So instead of naming it First Toa Payoh Primary, we have instead Anglo Chinese Junior School (Branch 1) and to have renaming extended to all the less popular schools thus?

I am sure this solves declining school population and ensures all applications are successful. The infrastructure , the administrative machine and the instructors are all ready for the taking. All they need is a name change and a spirit of innovation to embrace the brand name's successes.

The focus of schools has veered towards preparing for exams and tests. The true meaning of education has been diluted and somehow lost . Education should be the larger task of preparing students for their life roles of independent learning, discovery and meaningful application in all spheres of their lives.

Francis Bacon : "History makes men wise, poetry witty, science curious, mathematics logic, moral grave, philosophy and rhetoric able to contend."