Of chocolates and sweets.

I've been asked by BlogTV, goodness knows why, to write a piece about the recent PSLE Math "fiasco". Why I put fiasco in inverted commas is that this fiasco occurs every year and every year, parents get incensed. Granted it's usually the next batch of parents who have kids nearing the exam taking age who look at the paper and panic.

Heck, my twins are two and I panicked, rapidly running their academic options through my mind. When I showed it to Packrat, his response was severe annoyance on both a personal and a professional level. One of our favourite experts on education is a British academic by the name of Ken Robinson. I first discovered him on Ted.com and was spell bound when he talked about how schools killed creativity and a wonderfully apt term that he discusses called "academic inflation".

And academic inflation is something that Singapore is so severely suffering from. When I was 12 and taking the exam, I was extremely stressed about the Math paper. Even at that point, the Math paper was difficult. I distinctly remember trying to explain my way out of the problem rather than present a working for it because I couldn't figure out how to present it mathematically. Even at 12, I was more comfortable using words than numbers. Anyway, it was difficult then. And more than 20 years on, it's even worse. It's harder than ever. Packrat swears that if this continues and is worse (which I suspect it will because it's just an upward spiral) when the twins hit 12, we're outta here. Call us quitters if you will but we value ours and our children's sanity more than a label that the government brands us with.

I took days to do it. I finally figured it out with the help of a 13 year-old, a PSLE veteran. When I asked her how she figured out how to do this last year, she said that she that she did sums everyday and was tutored everyday in Math because her mother wanted her to score a distinction and score it she did. And that's the problem isn't it? Everyone's mom and their dog wants them to score distinctions in Math, or Science or Language or Moral Education for that matter. And because that's du jour, there becomes a real need to separate the ones who truly can from the ones who can because they've been drilled to be able to and spend every waking hour at the Learning Lab or any of the other juvenile greenhouses that have flourished all over the island. Hence, the need for the spiralling out-of-control difficulty. But if this isn't academic inflation, I don't know what is. Being good isn't enough and that's just plain ridiculous. And it's just one of the MANY things wrong with our system and needs to be fixed.

We are a nation of complainers and we're good at kicking up a fuss. So that's what we do. Do we need to change? Or as Bob the Builder (I am watching far too much kid television!) asks, Can we fix it? But oh! Why would we do that? Why fix something that gets us clever kids? Oh, never mind if a truck load of them fall by the way side, it's just natural elimination and we are after all a system that is built on meritocracy so you need merit and if you don't have it, well, you don't deserve to be here.

Cruel? Yes. Should the kids, including mine suck it up and just get through it? Well, I think it will do them good and the truth is, I think my twins would get through the system fine. They'll survive, children always do. Will we, as parents survive? Now, that's a different matter. And that's what I worry about. I don't want to end up being a parent that whips the child because he only got 98 when he could have gotten full marks. As a teacher, I see too many of those parents around me and I see how bad it is for the child. At the end of the day, I think that scares me more than my children having to figure out how many sweets Ken started off with.


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