Singapore Education and the Role of the Parent

Hi Steemians,

Team TUDA here to send out our next post. We take our trip to Singapore and see how things are going on over there, where they seem to just about excel in all things academia. And away we go!

According to the OECD, Asian education systems dominate the upper echelons of the PISA test results tables - accounting for the top seven places for math, with Singapore followed by Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan, China and South Korea in 2016.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) provides education rankings based on international tests taken by 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. The tests, run by the OECD and taken every three years, have become increasingly influential on politicians who see their countries and their policies being measured against these global school league tables. Asian countries continue to dominate, with Singapore rated as best¹.

It is worth noting that Singapore has the highest achieving students in international education rankings, with its teenagers coming top in tests in math, reading, and science. OECD education director Andreas Schleicher said Singapore was "not only doing well but getting further ahead."

In this article, we would like to discuss the Singapore education. How is Singapore so successful at education?

Singaporeans are consistently ranked top when it comes to international education rankings (Today News)

After gaining independence from the UK in 1963, Singapore became an independent country in 1965 by separating its sovereign nation from Malaysia. Thus, Singapore created one of the world's highest performing education systems in five decades. During the last five decades, Singapore has always been focused on academic credentials, based on merit. This centralized system helped Singapore to create social cohesion, a unity of purpose among its schools and an ethos of hard work, which are the main factors on the superior results of the Singaporean educational system.

While emphasizing the students’ performance, some schools' websites list photos and names of their top scorers. A website, kiasuparents.com, has crowdsourced a list of PSLE top scores in some schools - to the scorn of others.

In the straits times; Singapore's highest-selling paper, opinion editor Ms. Chua Mui Hoong said: “I am sympathetic to the views of those who argue that the past laser-like focus on top scorers has created a culture where parents, children, and society look at merit in purely academic terms.”

Chua Mui Hoong (Opinion Editor in the Straits Times)

This competing education system in Singapore has been criticized as of its characteristics such as a top-down culture of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, age-based cohorts, and standardized exams². Merit-based streaming is applied at the age of 10, although the talents of many of these young children may have not yet blossomed. While not every student has enough chances to find their talent, some students have better social and economic status, which benefits their grades. The resources from families better off have succeeded in preparing their children for examinations.

However, the pressure not only comes from the system, but much of it also comes from the parents.

A former Singapore primary-school teacher turned private tutor, Mr. Howard Tan, says he has encountered parents who put undue pressure on their youngsters. He has seen many parents who express disappointment with their children for scoring less than 90 percent in tests. “As a teacher, I hardly push my students that way. The system necessitates that from the parents,” he says³. The obsession among some parents for grades and exams is putting undue stress on children.

As a result, the Singaporean concept of kiasu: A Hokkien word meaning “afraid to lose,” explains why parents enroll their children in extracurricular academic lessons in the hope they will excel in test scores.

We understand that many parents find it difficult to keep up as their children are inundated with homework and exams in a highly competitive education system. Thus, from the case of Singapore, we confirm that a service that allows parents to keep up the curriculum and to participate in an education system is necessary. Parent participation will be helpful to understand the point that their child is having difficulties on.

In our TUDA platform, teachers, students, and parents can actively participate and interact with the problem-solving platform. Also, as the TUDA platform accumulates data, we are offering data analysis on students’ performances (big data-driven AI chatbot and feedback/suggestion engine to guide parents). From the lesson learnt from the Singaporean case study, we are developing our system to be accessible for everyone, including parents within the ecosystem.

Team TUDA

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References:
¹ https://www.bbc.com/news/education-38212070
² https://www.todayonline.com/daily-focus/education/why-spores-education-system-needs-overhaul
³ https://www.nst.com.my/world/2017/09/282189/downside-singapores-world-class-education-system-stress-segregation-suicide

Image Sources:
OECD
https://www.todayonline.com/daily-focus/education/why-spores-education-system-needs-overhaul
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/when-grades-define-worth