THEY’RE ALWAYS WINNING

Education occupies prime real estate—in Singapore city and also in the minds of its people. It’s structured rigorously, too, separating, very early on, the wheat from the chaff.

The Hive at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

If there’s one thing I admire in the education system in Singapore, it’s this very simple precept: Every child, regardless of his or her background, will get his chance at a solid education at a primary school that will lead to a decent higher education and then onwards to a job that guarantees a decent income. That is at the core of how Singapore envisioned the trajectory of a student when the country attained self-government from colonial rule in 1959.

Since then, in about three generations, Singapore has built a behemoth of an education infrastructure. In the 2015 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exam comparing fifteen-year-olds across 79 education systems around the world, Singaporean students scored first in Math, English and Science. (They lost their coveted spot, three years later in the next PISA exam, to China.) Singaporean students break yearly records at the A-level examinations, too. At the 2020 GCE A-Level examination, 10,905 (93.6%) of these candidates excelled in their performance. Singaporeans have also been maxing out at the beastly International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. These students emerged as the most perfect scorers with 55 of the 99 perfect scorers in the world, according to the Switzerland-based IB Organization which conducts the exams. Of the 2,228 students in Singapore who sat for the exams in 2020, 97.73 per cent passed. Pit that against a global pass rate of 76.68 per cent. When he waxed eloquent about victories, Mr. Donald Trump, could have stolen these words right out of the mouths of Singaporean students: “We’re always winning”. Unlike him, they were always winning.

Stories of blazing success do not keep repeating by chance. They need entire ecosystems and an engagement—from child, family, community, society and government. If you’ve heard the lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s Love and Marriage, be assured that education and preoccupation most certainly “Go together like a horse and carriage. This I tell ya, brother, you can’t have one without the other.”

In Singapore, education is much more than a preoccupation. It’s a palpable, boots-on-the-ground, animus, really, an everyday thing. When I lived in Paris, I saw that every fifth store in an arrondissement was a nail salon or a hair salon. In Singapore, it’s guaranteed to be, instead, a tuition centre—adjacent, perhaps, to a nail salon—next to an altar with joss sticks. Among the many gods and the myriad faiths—read my post on faith—I also found one bestowing blessings for education at a Thai Buddhist temple where people propitiate the god of education before attempting to ace their exams.

On its way towards becoming a meritocracy, Singapore has encouraged the building of institutions on spectacular grounds—both local and international schools—that loom in the dreams of children and their parents. An international school called Dulwich College evokes J. K. Rowling's fictitious Hogwarts; to get to the mythical platform 9 ¾ to ferry you to this school, however,  the code word is money or a multi-national company that is willing to foot that hefty bill for the parent. Dulwich, like many other international schools in Singapore, costs upwards of $30,000 a year.

International schools in Singapore are inaccessible to Singaporean citizens. A permanent resident (PR) of this country can choose between an international school or a local school but his priority for access to a local school is second only to that of a citizen. As in the United States, residential location matters when a child applies to a local school but greater weightage is assigned to citizenship or permanent residency status.

Singapore’s own local schools which cost very little (even for PRs) are often even more imposing than its international schools; many are historic colleges, like Raffles Institution and Hwa Chong Institution; they are also known to be more accelerated in their pace, especially in math and science. The battle for the celebrated primary and secondary schools in the local system is fierce. With a syllabus set by the ministry of education (MOE) under the aegis of the government, the passage through the school system is crystal clear and awe-inspiring in terms of opportunities both with respect to academics and in the extracurriculars.  Furthermore, school teachers are trained and paid well in this country and, quite naturally, that translates to the quality of output.

The first thing I noticed when I began living here is how many bus-stops on public transport routes were named after educational institutions—primary schools, secondary schools and junior colleges. Consider that Singapore is a country you can cover very quickly by road; a 170 km drive can be done in four hours. In such a place, in 2019, there were 179 primary schools and 136 secondary schools. From where I live on campus at National University of Singapore, I’m surrounded by about eight secondary schools and three international schools of repute within a one-mile radius. The city is so safe that when schools are in session, hordes of elementary and secondary school children in uniform use public transport to get to and from school.

The creators of this nation worried about shaping a national voice and a national identity, and realized right away that education would be a useful tool to build their society. To forge social cohesion, the Singaporean government introduced, early on, a bilingual system with English as a dominant language and Mandarin, Malay and Tamil as a compulsory second language.  They committed to a meritocratic model “in recognizing, cultivating and rewarding talent and merit”.

In the sixties, a large number of primary and secondary schools were built at a rapid clip, and from 1964 to 1969, enrollment into the system doubled. All the schools followed a common curriculum and by the year 1960, the system was conceived as an “exam meritocracy”. The PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination) was set up as an exam taken by all sixth graders prior to entering secondary school. It continues today, giving the heebie-jeebies to families whose children go through it. Many expatriate families who don’t wish to put their children through this early grind opt for international schooling for their kids.

It’s partly to avoid this early exam filtration that Ananya Venkatesh’s parents decided to put her at a British international school. Ananya, 17, is currently in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at United World College (UWC), an exclusive international school which, while it costs a pretty penny, is an offshoot of the UWC movement piloted by Kurt Hahn, a German educator whose ideas on education were formed by the destruction he witnessed during the First and Second World Wars. In Ananya’s experience, UWC brings people of many different backgrounds together. She studies with students from different parts of Africa and Cambodia, and other countries; many of them are able to study there because of a scholarship and they live in the boarding house attached to UWC. Looking back, Ananya, who is hoping to be a lawyer, doubts if at 11 years of age, she would have been ready to undergo the stress of the PSLE in the local system. “My parents recognized that and that’s why they didn’t put me in the local school even though the education you get there is great.”

The MOE realized early on that while children needed a compulsory primary education, some students needed different tracks in order to do their best, that a one-size-fits-all approach may not work for everyone. Today the streams in secondary school are three-fold; one of them feeds into the university system; yet another is a slower pace that can also take students into university; a third stream feeds into vocational schools and directs students into polytechnic colleges of which there are five in this nation. Obviously, a system that differentiates between students and attempts to accommodate every child begins to create divisions over time. Thus I’ve begun to see how inside Singapore’s excellent school system exists a lot of heartbreak, too; a pre-teen on this video who seems so driven says his secondary school choice and his job (his job!!?) depends on how well he does on the PSLE.

A Singapore Chinese friend by name Vicky Chong saw all three of her children through the local school system and she says it was stressful to go through the grind with the first two children (both boys). One of Vicky’s two sons went through to polytechnic and another went to university; her third, a girl was on a “through train”. Those on this frenetic stream enter the institution for A-levels at secondary 1 (7th grade) and assuming that their grades continue to be good, they may skip the O-levels and shoot, directly, later, for the A-levels or the International Baccalaureate. In hindsight, Vicky says that it was worthwhile to put all three of her children through the local school system “because boys are just too lazy and playful, unlike girls.”

Still, the rigor of the system especially early on creates children whose basics are solid. A young woman who was a teacher at a secondary school for a decade told me about the notion of spiral progression, especially in a subject like mathematics. (The mathematics syllabus for the first six years at a Singaporean school can be found here.) The spiral progression approach aims to expose a variety of concepts repeatedly, and with deepening complexity, until the learner shows mastery over the concepts. My sister-in-law, a math teacher in Tampa, Florida, first told me about something called Singapore Math; in a 2010 story in The New York Times, I discovered  that several schools in the United States used Singapore math because the approach, while slower, was deeper and was more systematic.

A conversation I had with Sushma Soma, a gifted musician here in Singapore, alerted me to something that my children always talk about when it comes to their own educational opportunities. The access to education in the United States is often based on zip code because affluent people can often choose to buy homes in the right neighborhoods so that their children can be fed into the right school. Sushma says it’s slightly different in Singapore because many families of varied stripes can live in the same public housing and attend many different schools. Yet, it’s not really that different, Sushma says, because, ultimately, it’s about environment. So many of the educational opportunities arise from the family we are born into: “For my father education was a number one thing because he came from a family that valued education.” Sushma’s parents did everything they could to ensure that she had access to the best resources so that she excelled at the PSLE exam that would fetch her a prestigious spot at the famous 150-year-old Raffles Girls’ School.

Whether it’s India, or the US or Singapore, the children who often ace the exams are also the children whose parents can afford the extra after-school tuition and many other resources. Sushma discovered, when she landed at Raffles, that the rat-race never ends. “I discovered that there was another stream inside Raffles for the really gifted kids!”

In the narrative arc of our existence, it seems that our greatest mentors remain our failures, not our successes. Some people believe that while academic benchmarking tests may put Singapore ahead of most nations, the focus on grades creates a culture where failure is frowned upon in the country, “holding it back from having a risk-taking culture that embraces innovation.” As a tiger mom whose children, now 31 and 27, pushed themselves hard in academics and in other directions, I regret that I didn’t take the long view often enough when I was a young parent. I recall something my son said to me a few years ago. “I want to be happy every day. That’s the hardest thing for human beings to achieve.”

Looking at the historic Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

It turns out that in my frenzied need for my children to achieve, I often forgot that small detail, that the minor components that add meaning to our lives are the simple, everyday things that have nothing at all to do with the material world. Granted that the other extreme, a want of money, is a surefire path to unhappiness but it seems that everywhere, and certainly in Singapore, people live out their lives in mortal fear of that eventuality. Maxing out our potential is important but shouldn’t we strike a balance? When measured by the happiness metric, Singapore’s education system seemed a little off-kilter to me. But I couldn’t find teachers at local schools who would weigh in on the subject. When I set out to interview people for this story, I found very few who would commit their names and identities. Teachers wouldn’t talk to me; when I did speak to some, they didn’t seem to take a stand. That, too, made me wonder about the purpose of all learning.

I recall something a statesman called Pavan Varma told me in New Delhi when I interviewed him for my book on the English language in India: “By all means, take a stand. So many don’t do it.” It was a piece of advice worth its weight in gold and while it’s several years past that interview, it seemed so relevant today when I thought about the larger goals of a sound education. In the end, the people who become consequential in the world are those who take a stand. The fundamental charge of education is to give a child a rigorous foundation in key disciplines. But its loftiest goal yet may be this: To give each of us the courage to hone our individual voices and leave our imprint on the world.