The costs, both monetary and physical, of getting an education in Singapore, have been in the news lately. One latest example being a Channel News Asia (CNA) video portraying a primary school student's everyday life.

The video has received criticism from some quarters, mainly parents, as glorifying a "mugger" lifestyle.

A former Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) journalist and photographer, Ian Tan, also weighed in on the issue with a heartfelt blog post.

After leaving SPH in 2007, Tan currently works at an e-commerce startup, Andios, an online marketplace for phones, tablets and mobile devices.

What are we doing to our children?

On May 28, 2016, Tan wrote a piece on his personal blog, "What are we doing to our children", which detailed what he felt was fundamentally broken or flawed with our education culture.

Tan's main disagreements with how the system is set up, and how parents treat their children's learning process boils down to four main points.

1. You parents Nobody has any idea what the future is like.

2. Parents are deciding their children's lives according to what people tell them is right or important.

3. Our education system is good in certain areas but questionable in foundation building.

4. The old ways aren’t always wrong.

1. Nobody has any idea what the future is like

One of the problems he identified was that those who designed the system did not actually know what to teach in order for our children to be successful.

Nobody in the schools, especially the bureaucrats who designed this education system, has any idea what the future is really going to turn out to be.

Many civil servants have never actually sold something to someone, since their pay comes from our bountiful tax dollars. Yet they are tasked to teach entrepreneurship and creativity, an unfair task for anyone who has never worked outside of their gigantic, structured system.

Instead he advocated teaching children the basic building blocks of success.

In my opinion, the only consistent tools for survival are the ability to keep learning, not be held back by outdated assumptions, and to build upon your innate strengths and aptitudes.

Values and drive, that’s our job to inculcate, and our children’s job to demonstrate.

2. Parents are deciding their children's lives according to what people tell them is right or important.

Perhaps in a reference to the CNA video, Tan criticised the idea of sending children for a myriad of extra curricular activities just because other parents do so.

Or are you just reading some kiasu parent forum and wondering if you are missing out? For you unhip parents, the modern term is FOMO, people – Fear of Missing Out.

3. Our education system is good in certain areas but questionable in foundation building

Tan mainly took aim at the way English was being taught in schools, in what he saw as teaching to an end rather than as a means.

Teachers rush through the curriculum, tuition is expected to be a given (even if teachers insist otherwise) and students are suddenly expected to write flowery, pointless passages by Primary 5 or 6.

They never get to know of literary giants such as Asimov, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and all my sci-fi/horror heroes, but read lesser pulp fiction like Mockingjay (This is where I have to flee from my own kids).

4. The old ways aren’t always wrong.

Finally, Tan rebutted the idea that the old ways couldn't be replicated in this day and age.

When I was a child in the 1980s, I had plenty of time to ride my bicycle, explore my neighbourhood, walk the dog, take TIBS buses to town and back on solo adventures, buy dinner for my family, read tons of books and comics, go swimming, watch movies with my Primary 4 friends, chit chat with them for an hour on the corded telephone, doodle on scraps of paper, and watch hours of SBC drama serials to learn the horrors of nasty villains and plucky coolies.

Please tell me what was wrong with my childhood, and those of my peers (many who seem to have forgotten).

Changing the status quo

Tan's main problem with the way we are treating our children was encapsulated in his plea to end the status quo.

Why should I accept and promote a childhood that is spent shuttling between endless classes, never seeing sunlight except during class PE lessons or DSA sports tuition, having not enough sleep (even though schools are now single-session!), being told I’m not good enough despite all that effort and so on.

He ended off his piece by pointing to what he thinks should be the role of a parent.

Frankly, my job as a parent is not to boil the ocean and ask my children to go be the best office executive they can be.

My job is to teach them integrity and values, and to remind them to never stop being the best they can be at what they want to be…. not what I, or some other adult wants them to be.

Top image from CNA Insider's Facebook

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