Daily Lessons from Life 28 December 2010 - MOE to add student-nurturing programmes

"MOE to add student-nurturing programmes - Tue, Dec 28, 2010 AsiaOne

SECONDARY students will enjoy a slew of initiatives to help them discover their strengths and shape their characters during their teenage years.

At the core of its initiatives are teachers who would play a greater role in nurturing and preparing their students for post-secondary education and life.
This comes as part of a review on secondary education, which issued a full report today.

Students will experience form teacher periods, orientation programmes and be under the guidance of the same form/co-form teacher during the initial secondary school years.

Students would also be able to depend on student centres in their secondary schools for emotional support.

Similarly a career guidance portal, profiling tools and overseas learning journeys are at hand to guide the students in choosing careers."

This is great news.

The lessons for me are:

1. looks like a lot of investment on the teenagers. Questions are: are the teachers' resources properly planned? qualified teachers? adequately loaded and not overloaded teachers?;

2. why the need for overseas learning journeys to guide the students in choosing careers? seems like an expensive option to me;

3. what give in the current 'world class' educational system of Singapore? Further improvement or something seriously wrong somewhere within the current system?

For me, educational infrastructural projects are getting more and more high value (or expensive depending on how you looked at it). Minimum to build a school will be more than a few million dollars! I wonder if we are really being productive here.

Anyway, if we have the money to invest, we will. Hopefully someone is doing serious accounting and measuring the productivity here!