I opened the Straits Times on August 5 to read a letter from Mr. Anthony Lim about how learning Chinese was getting more difficult and how his sons had had to make sacrifices because of poor Chinese results. It’s not a new issue, the government has been reducing the importance of Chinese / Mother Tongue results in school application procedures for quite some time now.
I do really feel for Mr. Lim and his sons’ situation, but I feel further revising the Chinese syllabus or requirements is not the solution. Neither is spending time and money on tuition to do better. Rather, we should look at the entire education system – we need to make changes at the roots so that we don’t wind up treating school like an endless series of exams to pass and prepare only for exams.
Here’s the letter as I sent it and this is what made it to stforum.com – I’ve saved a version on my site.
Also, there are two new letters today about education in the forum: by Yong Yun Seong and Ms. Ho Peck Leng talk about tuition and whether it is necessary. I’m not too keen on summarising them now with my headache, but you can read them anyway.