1600
There are 200 days in a Singapore primary (elementary) school year. Students attend 6 years of primary school.
James has 2 daughters. The elder daughter is 2 years older than the younger sister. Both girls complete primary school education.
James walks with his daughter(s) to school every morning while at least 1 daughter is in primary school. The girls never miss a school day.
How many days in total does James accompany his daughter(s) to walk to their primary school?
The above is my tongue-in-cheek attempt to write an (easy?) question for the Primary School Leaving Examination (“PSLE”) Mathematics exam, which Singapore students sit at the end of their 6th year of elementary school (Primary 6).
Renowned for some tough questions that test students’ conceptual understanding, the PSLE math exam typically draws strong reactions from many parents of Primary 6 students, and the students themselves.
We shall come back to this question’s answer later. 🙂
Singapore’s Education System
I benefitted from the Singapore academic system of the late-20th century and should have little to complain about it. At a recent dinner, a classmate I had not seen for years commented that my daughters should have no problem with “the system”.
Singapore society’s academic focus has intensified greatly in the past few decades. I sometimes struggled with whether I should push the girls more, since regardless of the politically-correct message of skills being more important than degrees, the economic reality still does not quite reflect that.
We ended up being very organic with our girls with respect to their academics. We never really drilled them on homework (apart from buying them Math “model method” (h/t Practicle) assessment books), nor sent them for enrichment classes. There were the occasional curriculum questions that were asked — and I did my best to explain and work it out with them.
So we let our girls find their own “academic level” naturally, and paid more attention to character and self-discipline. Most of all, we just worked hard and let our girls see us working hard.
耳濡目染 as we say in Chinese, which roughly translates to “subtly influenced by others’ behaviour or personal conduct (like osmosis)”. So as the girls grew up, they saw first-hand how Mama and Papa conducted ourselves, the seriousness we treated our work, and how we kept learning.
Both girls passed their PSLEs and move on to the next stage of their academic lives. Most importantly, I am happy that they both have an intrinsic love for learning.
We hope they will continue to grow, keep getting better in their knowledge, skills and application, be good friends to their friends, useful to their society and be happy, well-rounded young women.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank the teachers who have taught our girls — for your dedication, patience and love for them and all your students.
Singapore’s education system has its share of critics, but to give credit where it’s due — I think that on the whole we have a very good K-12 education system.
Our K-12 education system has important key ingredients: academic rigour, good pedagogy and well-trained, caring teachers (one of whom I wrote about here).
This means that Singapore’s children on aggregate get schooled very well, and graduate from primary and secondary school with more-than-basic ability to read, write, count and much more, as our consistent good PISA performance attests to. All at very affordable fee levels, with ready financial assistance for families who might need them.
Credit to our Ministry of Education (“MOE”) colleagues, who are continuously adjusting our basic education system to be better for our students and take into account different learning styles. Our academic system today is much different from where I was a child.
Naturally, it is not perfect, but then no system is. What can we do better at? I have only a couple of minor suggestions:
1. More inclusivity for foreign language study
I found out recently that to be able to select French, German and Japanese for 3rd language in secondary school, one needed a single-digit AL score at the PSLE (smaller number means better score).
I found this strange, because there was no such single-digit AL score criteria to take Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Indonesia as 3rd language.
I do not think MOE believes that the European languages and Japanese are superior to Malay & Indonesian such that only academically-stronger students are “good enough” to take them.
So perhaps this is an administrative legacy that was somehow not changed, and can be easily set right by making the admission criteria uniform, since no language should be deemed as superior to another and available only to select students.
2. Make financial literacy & digital skills part of curriculum
Many primary and secondary schools already offer these programmes to their students as off-curriculum subjects.
But since Financial Literacy and Digital Literacy are important skills that every student (and adult) should have, we could put our “money” (pun intended) where our mouth is, and make it part of official curriculum the way Social Studies and Music and Art are done — as part of examinable subjects, but with slightly less academic emphasis than Math, Science and Languages.
This way, students will also treat these 2 subjects with more attention, rather than view them as “good-to-have” off-curriculum enrichment they can ignore.
If no core expertise is available within the teacher ranks, the current model of having industry experts teach the curriculum can still be done (like how some schools’ STEM courses are taught by our investors Tinkertanker’s excellent education arm, Tinkercademy).
It’s not the Education System, It’s Society.
I’m not a K-12 expert, and I think Singapore’s K-12 system is generally good (already we are the model for several countries). There are education and edtech companies that have identified slivers of problems that they are working hard on, and I wish them all success in their work.
I think bigger issues lie in society’s continued fixation on grades and academic qualifications as a non-negotiable filter criteria.
Fundamentally, many in Singapore still only pay lip service to “Many pathways to success”. Degree(s) still count first and foremost today.
Here’s one example:
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I found out recently that at two of our autonomous universities — to be an Associate Faculty, one needs to have at least a Masters’ Degree.
This means a person with no working experience but went directly to Grad School can qualify to be this university’s Associate Faculty. But someone with decades of experience, but no Masters’ degree, e.g. Apple co-founder the late Steve Jobs or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not qualify.
I don’t discount the value of a post-graduate degree. In fact, 2 of ArcLab’s advisory board members are PhDs, so we recognise fully that there is much value in academic research.
It is not right that our Higher-Education system continues to discount real-life experience in favour of a certificate.
To put it bluntly, having a Master’s degree only means I can study, and perhaps write well. It doesn’t mean I can do the work and produce results. Yet the Master’s alone is enough for me to teach someone else.
Whereas someone who’s spent years doing the work but has no certificate isn’t deemed qualified to teach at these universities.
That’s wrong.
But as a wise friend once told me: “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”.
The university’s business is awarding degrees.
So despite all our political leaders’ pronouncements about lifelong learning and giving greater recognition to skills rather than academic qualifications, we know which way the universities’ leaders are voting.
Making “Many Paths to Success” Real
Employers in Singapore place too-strong an emphasis on head skills vs hand skills. This is manifested in salaries that are paid to PMETs, and the in-my-view unjustified pay gap between university graduates and non-graduates, and between office vocations and the trades.
Incentives drive behaviour. So the change needs to start from Employers.
ArcLab plays our own small part by never discriminating against non-university graduates. We employ both grads and non-grads, and we do not set pay based on degrees. But we are a small employer.
The largest employer in Singapore is the Public Service. If Ministries and Statutory Boards can start to reduce the pay gap between grads and non-grads, and not exclude non-grads from general roles, I think this would move the needle much more.
I also think that for all our government’s messaging on mid-career conversions, the public service can do more in this regard for her own hiring.
Obviously there are other factors to consider, and many roles do need specialist education. I had written several pieces previously, so I won’t rehash them here.
Just one additonal point — many of today’s white-collar jobs are a “Gen-AI” step away from being taken away. But try “AI”-ing a blue-collar job like construction, or F&B service. That is still some ways away. So we as a society should do more to respect these occupations, and start paying these workers the wage they deserve. This can only be funded by consumers being willing (and able) to pay higher prices for your plumbing work, for example.
If we all work at it together, we can hopefully one day achieve success at creating a society that is truly inclusive, and truly recognise “Many Paths to Success”.
That’s the world that I hope my daughters grow up to live in, and play an active part to create.
Here’s my worked out answer to the Math question at the beginning:
James’ elder daughter spent 6 years in school.
James’ younger daughter is 2 years younger than her sister, so after elder daughter graduated, younger daughter still had 2 more years of primary school.
2 + 6 = 8
James walked to school with at least 1 daughter for 8 years.
8 years x 200 days = 1,600
In total, James walked with his daughter(s) to their primary school for 1,600 days (also the title of this piece). 🙂
I didn’t quite walk the full 1,600 days with my girls to school. Some days I had to travel (especially this year as we launched ArcLab Malaysia), there were some public holidays, sick days, and of course — COVID-19 induced lockdowns resulted in Home-Based Learning in 2020 (thankfully, a distant memory now).
But the actual number of days I walked with my daughters to school is quite close to 1,600.
I made it a point to leave my phone at home during those walks. Time that I’m glad I was able to spend with my girls, those few minutes early in the day, those ~1,600 days. When they were younger we talked a bit more, but as most parents know, puberty happened and I wasn’t quite the favourite person any more in their upper primary years, heh.
But hopefully, we have laid the foundations for them to excel in whatever they do, to be so good at what they did that people around had to pay attention to them.
Most of all, I hope we have laid the foundations for them to be good, useful, happy people - to lead fruitful lives, be good at what they do, and leave the world a better place than they found it.
Ayla didn’t try to call attention to herself, she just went ahead and did what she wanted to do, but she was so good at what she did, people had to pay attention to her — The Mammoth Hunters (Jean M. Auel)
N/B — Do read my Earth’s Children fan-fiction piece if you are interested in an offshoot of my closing quote!
