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  PL: Oh!... Wow… wow... whoa!

  Luckily Petunia’s little boy is OK as he has a sensible mother who is an expert in child psychology to shield him from the negative effects of this exam pressure, but others aren’t so lucky. A survey by Singaporean Press Holdings in 2000 of 1,742 children between the ages of 10 and 12 (when children are approaching their PSLE) found that more than a third of students were more afraid of exams than of their parents dying.117 One in three said they sometimes thought life wasn’t worth living.118

  Of course, the Singaporean government doesn’t want this either – they are not child-hating monsters, far from it. Education policy in Singapore is formed with great thought and care, with an awareness that educational changes will have their effects many years down the road.119 But now that such a competitive culture exists, it is a very difficult situation to address. And when they have tried to change it by advocating more of a focus on character, or by ceasing to publish the names of the ‘top scorers’ in exams, it is not always welcomed by parents.

  I met with Monica Lim, author of The Good, the Bad and the PSLE, and mother of two school-age (and polar-opposite) children to discuss the origins of this pressure.

  ‘The majority of Asian parents want their kids to do really well. But for our kids to do well, it means that others will not do as well. That will always be a problem.’

  ‘Is that inevitable?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes it’s inevitable, because the Asian parent will never believe that there’s enough for everybody. Somebody has got to be at the bottom, and as long as it’s not my kid I don’t really care, right? So long as my kid’s on top. But the question is, how do you define what it means to be on top? Because the minute the Ministry tries to say, “OK, we will reduce the focus on academics and introduce other things like character”, then you suddenly get these parents who will jump up and say, “OK, how do we measure that?” You know? Because then they want to make sure that their kid comes out tops, in character, or whatever it is.’

  She went on: ‘As long as parents don’t embrace the idea that, you know, there’s not a limited amount of pie, and they don’t move on from that mindset that if somebody else gets it my kid doesn’t get it, it’s really really hard to change. Because you will find that there are always parents who are trying to get the better of the system, no matter what it is.’

  ‘So where does that mindset come from?’ I asked. ‘Why do they think there’s a limited amount of pie?’

  ‘We’re born into a society that embraces that idea. And I think because, historically, the government has always drummed into us this point about scarcity and how you’ve got to look after yourself and nobody owes you a living – I mean we heard that to death when we were kids – and because of that, somehow, they’ve unconsciously groomed a whole generation of Singaporeans who think that if I don’t look after myself then no one else will.’

  So you have a situation where, educationally, there is only a limited amount of pie – only a certain proportion of children are allowed into the Academic Stream to take O levels, no matter how well they all do – and where parents rightly believe that if their children don’t get well-paid jobs, they will struggle to get on with their lives in the world’s most expensive city.120 One of the Academic Stream students I spoke to after an English class told me: ‘You feel compelled. If you don’t do well, you might not be able to get a proper house, you might not be able to get a car, and these kinds of things do pressurise us. I guess our parents are one of the main things that press us for greater successes.’

  This is, of course, an area of huge concern for parents because they care about their children’s future happiness and well-being, but there is a financial element too; someone needs to support them in their old age. I saw frail old ladies cleaning up in burger joints – if you don’t have the support you’re forced to keep working. Parents can actually sue their children for not financially supporting them in their later years, but this is no good if their children aren’t earning anything.

  The Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore recognise the amount of pressure on students is a problem, and have taken some steps to address it, including introducing classes and assemblies on mental health for the students. I happened to be in school for one of these assemblies, and had a chat with the presenter, Billy, afterwards in the canteen over a cup of ‘kopi C’ (hot coffee with evaporated milk). Billy is a psychologist, and has a clinic where he sees children that are referred to him due to stress.

  He told me, ‘Stress is a problem in Singapore even for the little ones, because their parents put a lot of pressure on them, and some go to tuition for a different subject every night. Some students I see are too anxious to set foot in school.’ I asked him if anything could be done to address this problem, and he responded, ‘I would get rid of streaming, as it affects the kids’ well-being and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I would also reduce the focus on academics and make school more holistic.’

  Inequality and Elitism

  Coming back to the concept of meritocracy, what effect does all of this pressure have on the fairness of the Singaporean system? Petunia Lee concluded her blog on the textbook/exam difficulty gap thus:

  Hopefully, parents who read this post will realize that to get an “A” in school exams, there is a need to expose the child to reading material at least 4 or 5 years beyond that written in the textbooks. Not all parents know this. I surely did not.

  Does this not go against the MOE’s [Ministry of Education] stated intention to use education to lift people out of poverty? Lower income parents have little means to pay for the enrichment classes to fill the gap between textbook and exams. Lower income parents also have not the skills to coach and help their children to bridge the gap between textbook and exams.

  Unfortunately, but inevitably, not all parents have the same amount of time or the same amount of resource. Some children start P1 in Singapore having already had three years (or more) of high-quality, but expensive, preschool. One of my youngest interviewees in Singapore, a six-year-old girl in Primary 1, told me conspiratorially that she had Grade 5 piano and Grade 7 violin! (The reliability of this source remains questionable.) Others have not been to preschool at all, due to a lack of affordable high-quality provision, and are starting school from scratch.121 Some children continue to get intense support out of school from private tutors, others have to go home and look after younger siblings. This makes it a challenge for teachers of P1 to cater for everybody (despite putting considerable time and effort into this), and means that some students never catch up with their peers who have enormous head starts.

  This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that, because education is a competition, out-of-school tutors are often used to ‘get ahead’, rather than to catch up in a subject you struggle with. I talked to a lot of the students I met about the tutorial system, and although some said they went because they struggled with certain subjects, many of them wanted to go even though they were already top of the class. At Chinese New Year the schools broke up for four days, and I asked a couple of teenage boys in the playground what they had planned for the holiday. The more confident of the two replied with a grin and a roll of the eyes, ‘I want to relax, but I have to keep studying because I don’t want the others to catch me up!’

  The manager of one tutorial centre I visited explained to me that the children had to take a test to get in – this means some students get tutoring to help them get into the tutorial centre. And at the other end of the educational spectrum, a trainee teacher I chatted to told me she’d gone to a tutorial centre during junior college to help with her biology, but they went too fast for her to keep up. A comment I overheard in the staffroom on this topic tickled me (though wouldn’t if I taught there). ‘Marcus is refusing to buy the textbook because he says he’s learnt it all already in tutorial’.

  This reliance on the shadow education system, which is only available to some, then makes it rather unfair that a test at
12 determines your future. How well you do in that test will not only be due to how clever you are or how hard you have studied – it will depend on how much money your parents have invested in private tuition too. I went to visit the offices of a charity that works with disadvantaged communities in Singapore, at the bottom of a tower block on an estate, and learnt that 40 per cent of the children they work with (those from low-income communities) fail the PSLE. There are a few schools specifically for these failures (and yes I’m consciously calling them that because that is what defines their education), and about half of these children come from families with a monthly income of less than 1,500 Singaporean dollars.

  The risk of elitism in a society that separates children of different abilities (and often of different backgrounds) at a young age is one that is often discussed in the Singapore press. Some students in the top streams look down on those who haven’t made it, believing their success to be all of their own making (and not recognising the help they have often received from family and tutors). Raffles Institution, one of the most prestigious schools in Singapore, has had unwanted publicity recently due to the blog rantings of a student (also the daughter of an MP) who wrote, ‘we are a tyranny of the capable and the clever’ and described a man she disagreed with as being from ‘the other class’. When her father intervened due to the ensuing uproar, it was to say that ‘some people cannot take the brutal truth’.122

  This is an extreme case, but Associate Professor Irene Ng from the Department of Social Work at the National University of Singapore (NUS) explains that ‘As you put students into finer and finer categories, their social circle becomes more and more isolated… Even if they have good intentions to do so, their social circle is just so limited they will have limited empathy and understanding to help effectively people who are different from themselves.’123 It is in response to this phenomenon that David Hoe has set up his mentoring programme – not only to help disadvantaged students, but to help the privileged undergraduates that are mentoring them to understand some of the issues these students face before they go on to become the next policymakers of Singapore.

  If we come back to PISA results, we can see that in 2009 and 2012, Singapore did extremely well overall, with average scores for maths, reading and science that put them at second, third and fourth in the world for these subjects respectively. If we look at the impact of socio-economic background on the scores, though, Singapore performs at or below the OECD average (depending on the measure), with a one-point increase in socio-economic status being associated with a 44-point rise in PISA score (which puts them in the bottom ten countries in this measure). This suggests that despite the MOE’s best efforts to mitigate the effects of background by offering a financial support to poorer parents for their children’s education, the structure of the system is not meritocratic.

  And Yet…

  Even though Singapore’s educational system does not produce equitable outcomes, they do very well at getting a high proportion of their young people to reach baseline levels in reading, maths and science. Fewer students score very poorly in the PISA tests here than most other places. So although how well you do compared with your Singaporean peers does depend to a significant extent on your background, even those at the bottom of the PISA scale by Singaporean standards outperform many other students internationally, and those who are socially disadvantaged by Singaporean standards often do better than disadvantaged students elsewhere. The latter have been dubbed ‘resilient students’ by the OECD.

  Lovely as this measure is for politicians who have evidence of many ‘resilient students’ in their countries, I’m not sure this would particularly comfort the ‘resilient students’, were they to ever hear that they had earned this moniker. Resilience as defined by the OECD does not necessarily mean that you’ve come from a disadvantaged background and scored higher than your advantaged peers in your own country. It doesn’t even mean you’ve scored higher than more advantaged students elsewhere (although some of the poorest in Singapore do). It just means you’ve done well compared to children of a similar background internationally. So because students in Singapore generally score significantly higher than many other countries in PISA (more on this in a minute), many teenagers in the bottom quarter of the Singaporean socio-economic spectrum will score in the top quarter in PISA when compared with similarly disadvantaged teenagers elsewhere, and be classed as ‘resilient’. But it doesn’t mean they have better academic opportunities, as their advantaged peers in their own country are still ahead of them, filling the places in the junior colleges and forcing them onto less academic courses.

  However, although the Singaporean system doesn’t necessarily overcome the difficulty of getting those from poorer backgrounds to perform as well as their more affluent peers, once children are streamed, it does make sure nearly all reach a certain minimum standard. And despite the fact that sorting into different streams and schools is based on an academic test and therefore some routes are specifically for people who have failed this test (in the most extreme cases), the subsequent response is to train them up in genuinely useful vocational skills, and recognise the ‘many peaks of excellence’ (albeit with some peaks much bigger than others), rather than to continue to put them onto ‘faux academic’ courses or vocational courses that don’t lead to employment opportunities.

  The Singaporean government recognised in the 1990s that ‘Singapore will be poorer if everyone aspires to and gets only academic qualifications but nobody knows how to fix a TV set, a machine tool or a process plant.’124 They took steps to tackle the negative perception of vocational and technical training as a ‘dumping ground’, and put a huge amount of money into vocational education, into developing their polytechnic courses and their ITE and ensuring they had cutting-edge facilities. The courses at ITE are designed in collaboration with businesses to suit their needs, which contributes to Singapore’s enviable youth unemployment figures (just over half the global average).125 These courses are still not as respected as A levels by the population at large – or by elderly aunties interrogating their nieces and nephews at Chinese New Year family gatherings – but perceptions are changing, with some students who qualify for junior college choosing to study at polytechnics instead. Due to the money put in and the careful development of courses, they give genuinely useful qualifications to students that are respected by employers.

  I met Alan, a polytechnic graduate and youth activist in a very noisy hotel lobby in town, where they charged us 24 Singaporean dollars for two cups of herbal tea (that’s a lot). He too believes that academic qualifications are not everything.

  ‘People develop at different paces at different life stages. Many of us are late bloomers. Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Ray Kroc? Sim Wong Hoo? These are famous personalities who have made it big in life despite not having a university degree. They made many mistakes but they did not give up. They worked hard. They persevered. Each and every one of us are born with unique strengths and talents. When someone is not good in academic studies, it does not mean that he is also not good in other areas. And so in my opinion, academic grades are just one way of measuring a person’s ability or knowledgeability.’

  The Singaporean system seems to recognise this, even though academic routes are considered the most prestigious. Let’s take NorthLight, the school for the children with the lowest marks, as an example of how Singapore’s education system treats those at the bottom of the educational hierarchy. I met the deputy head of this school at their school sports day, in a huge stadium complex filled with excitable teenagers. We sat across from each other on a picnic bench, and she gave me her take on the children’s outlook. ‘Look, these kids are the lost, the last and the least. They’ve failed their exams, they’ve been the bottom of the pile in their primary schools. But here they have a fresh start, with friends that are like them, where they won’t be looked down on.’

  Unlike other teachers in Singapore who are placed in schools by the government, NorthLight directly em
ploys its own teachers, and they are employed because they are passionate about turning these young people’s lives around. Some of them teach the children the academic skills that they need (though these don’t lead to any particular qualifications), some come from the ITE and teach them a variety of technical skills to prepare them for technical college, and still others are employed directly from industry to train students up in skills that are useful for the world of work. All final year students complete an eight-week Industry Experiential Program where they work in retail, hospitality, mechanical services or facility services before they graduate. In a similar school, Assumption Pathway, there is a fully-functioning restaurant on site run by students studying catering. I’m told they do excellent fish curry.

  Selection at the age of 12 into more academic and more vocational schools and streams has benefits as well as drawbacks. In Singapore, it interacts with an already competitive culture to lead to intense pressure on children at a young age, as parents try and ensure their progression into academic tracks at 12. It leads to the reinforcement of social class groups and a lack of understanding between them. But, although it increases the inequality of educational opportunity, it does prepare people well for the labour market. This is not just the case in Singapore – recent research by Dutch researchers Bol and van de Werfhorst carried out an analysis on the extent of selection into different courses, the vocational education provision and youth employment situation in 29 countries, and found that there seems to be a trade-off between educational equity and youth employment.126 Selecting early into academic and vocational streams leads to greater inequality but, in countries where the vocational education was work specific, also appeared to lead to greater youth employment.