MOE World’s Best-performing School System?

Our pupils do brilliantly in Mathematics and Science tests. America students are worse off in examination results but do better in the real world. Students from China, Taiwan, Korea and India outshine anything in the United States academically. East Asian countries top virtually every global ranking of students in Science and Mathematics. It's not just Singapore pupils outperformed America in this area, it's an East Asia and global phenomenon. "Singapore ranked 4th among 45 education systems” – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006.Afterall, this is not something exclusive that Singapore MOE should feel proud of. Singapore's students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids, by contrast, test much worse in the upper primary and secondary levels but seem to do better later in life and in the real world. Why? One belief is that Singapore and America have different types of meritocracies: American is a talent meritocracy.Singapore an exam meritocracy.An exam meritocracy is not able to assess the student well in areas like creativity, curiosity, risk taking, ambition, etc. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore is far behind many first world countries. Some years ago, a friend of mine brought his children back from America and put them in Singapore MOE SAP schools. He pointed out a marked difference in that the American school, when his children would speak up in class during lessons, they were applauded and felt good. In Singapore, they seen as disobedient and weird. The fun, passion and culture of learning is totally absent here. Our MOE system makes learning a chore. Work hard, memorize and test well. After two years of struggles for the kids, he took them out of the Singapore SAP schools and put them into a private, international schools. This certainly provokes thoughts about Singapore MOE education system.