Education, Time and Being the Best

“We all make choices—but in the end, our choices make us.”
-- BioShock, by Irrational Games

I had a look down at the Youthrepreneur kiosks at the Central Library last week. What I saw almost knocked the breath out of me; students were being encouraged to take up part-time sales jobs manning the booths by night, while hitting the books by day.

Now is it just me, or is this another competitor for our kids’ time and energy?

Let’s have a look at the time demands on students today. First they have to endure five or six hours of lessons daily, then reinforce what their teachers have crammed into their heads with as much revision as they like. In the case of my own schooling, this easily translated to ten-hour days, and the last thing I wanted to do was deal with budgeting, cranky customers and long, long stretches with only a stool and a public toilet for comfort. Throw our endless projects and co-curricular activities into the mix, and what do you get? It’s a wonder if we’ve any time to ourselves.
And all that while trying to prepare for an exam.

Now apparently this is a way of teaching kids responsibility and the realities of running a business. It tells us that entrepreneurship is somehow good, that by daring to strike out and risk it all you just might make it big. Might. Somehow this translates into adults telling kids they can manage their studies and a booth by the library, without telling them how or even why such a project should be done. There are plenty of other, better ways to teach responsibility, ways that begin at home. I want to be the one who does that, not some initiative thought up by adults who have absolutely no idea what kids today go through in the seemingly-endless rat race an education in Singapore has become.

And business skills? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Again, business skills aren’t hard to learn. It just takes a long time. Any private college can prepare you in the theory part far better than a few months squatting over your textbooks outside the library will ever be able to, and a real, fixed, online or bricks-and-mortar establishment, more so. And here’s where you can really put theoretical knowledge to use.

Here’s a comparison. Suppose you had to learn to drive a car after a long, hard day at the office, plus you still have some work to finish up at home before you can call it a night. How many instructors simply place you at one entrance to the East Coast Parkway and tell you to drive down it? Not just today, mind you, but every day and every week after you finish at work.
And no, you can’t quit. You still owe the instructors their course fees… even though you’re expected to drive, down an expressway no less, with no preparation for handling what’s about to come your way. And if you crash… what’s that going to do with the rest of your life and work? The syllabus writers, the ones that decree what you must know in order to drive, can’t care less.

If you are someday able to work and drive, great! But don’t expect to learn both on-the-job simultaneously—our bodies are simply not equipped to deal with the workload, and it’s a rare soul who’s able to thrive on both. What scares me is that one day a success story who combines business acumen with a steady stream of A’s can and will emerge, who (of course) thanks the programme for all the experience it has given him or her, urging all kids to give it a try.
Final result: the education officials getting all excited and thinking that just because it worked for these one or two people, the cost (98 or 99 others getting disillusioned, burned out and angry at school and life) is worth it. So they have everyone, on pain of penalisation, join in the latest programme on top of their ten-hour days of schoolwork, CCAs and projects.
We want students to be developing kids who will one day grow up to be responsible, mature adults, not miniature chrono-juggling businessmen. Childhood is a time of magic and wonder, one we only go through once. There’s plenty of time to learn hard reality later… and in smaller, more helpful doses.

I’ve nothing against kids signing up for the programme. They can go ahead, even. But when it comes to the crunch, friends, what will you choose? Your business, or your academic future?

Which brings me to another aspect of our education system I find most unfortunate. Whatever happened the role of education in moulding our young, and thus the future of our nation? I hate to say this, but our country’s bottom-line-first-always-and-only ranking system produces too many scholars and too few passionate, hardworking and responsible members of society. Which looks better on paper—two students out of forty scoring A1s and thirty-eight scoring B4s or less, or all forty scoring A2s and B3s?

What we do is sad. We lionise our top academic achievers, giving them leadership roles on top of that, and expect the world from them. In fact, large percentages of our budget goes to developing top talent and demanding that it shine, but you never see anything in the newspaper describing methods for helping those in the middle or tail-end of the pack maximise their potential. How do our educators know that creative thinking and experiment-assisted learning won’t help slower or average kids?

Instead, what do we see? Top students doing time in biology labs working on nanotech and stem cells. Spanking-new campuses erected for our top talents to mature… while everyone else is stuck with the same, tired old approach of endless mugging, mugging, mugging.