Daily Lessons from Life 24 August 2014 - Too much tuition in Singapore: PM Lee

"Too much tuition in Singapore: PM Lee - AsiaOne Aug 24, 2014

SINGAPORE - At the youth dialogue held last night, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gave his take on the tuition situation in Singapore after one student expressed concern about parents sending their kids to tuition and other extra classes from a young age.

The student said his niece in her second year at kindergarten is going to so many classes - including one on leadership skills - that he fears that she is losing her childhood. He was one of about 350 young Singaporeans aged 12 to 35 who attended the post-rally dialogue, organised by the Youth Executive Committees of Ang Mo Kio GRC and Sengkang West, and held at St Nicholas Girls' School.

In response, PM Lee acknowledged the situation and noted that many parents are overzealous in arranging for tuition classes for their children.

"Why are K2 students going for leadership training programmes? It's partly because our system is competitive, I think it's [also] partly because parents are very anxious for their kids. And I think sometimes their kids also want to make sure they get the few extra points and they ask their parents to arrange tuition for them," he said. "But I think it's too much.

He said that from his observations, teachers make an effort to teach the whole syllabus in class most of the time and put in extra hours to teach students who need extra help. "If you need more tuition or more help, many of the teachers I know stay back in class and in school. If you get detention class, the teachers also stay back in order to help you to pass the exam," he noted. "So I think that actually, we are doing too much tuition in Singapore," he concluded."

A century old issue! OK, I exaggerated. An issue that had been around for the last few decades. I wonder why we are no successful in stamping this out with the many heavy weight Education Ministers we had over the last few decades too.

Lessons for me are:

1. I won't have much preferred to learn what PM Lee has in mind, or through referring to Minister Heng, the current MOE, the measures the government is trying or had tried to stamp out excessive tuition in Singapore;

2. for me excessive tuition creates many challenges: a. it create an uneven playing field when the well to do can compensate their kids' progress in education with heavy and expensive tuition classes; b. the knock-on effect unfortunately is the less well-to-do families will 'steal, beg and borrow' to fund their kids' education progresses in tuition classes too. They figured they could not afford to 'lose'; c. some indiscriminate and dubious value tuition classes are sucking more money from the parents, thereby adding more pressure at work and the need to have a steady livelihood regardless! e.g. the leadership skills class the participant asked at the PM's dialogue. How can these sticks? what are the measurements?; and d. full time teachers getting demoralised and wondering why should they be doing it when they can get a lot more pay from just doing a few tuition classes a week!;

3. Minister Heng, as I have repeated on many occasions, and his team are trying hard to 'right' the educational system with many good initiatives. Starting with the vision of: 'Every School is a Good School', the focus on: 'Learning to learn', and the recent: 'Use your hands to keep the school and the community it is located in clean', etc. Also, in the talent deployment area where MOE moved successful principals to schools that need their help to become better. So, I am quite positive about the changes in the MOE.

Having said that, the multi-million or billion dollar industry of tuition in Singapore was left largely untouched. I wonder WHY?

I did raise a radical solution of banning tuition in Singapore! That will be a start as most parents will not heed the call to not over-burdening their kids with excessive tuition work on top of the school works. Of course, the ideal way is to resolve the demand issue. If there is no demand i.e. all parents trust the MOE schools and the teachers to do a good job of helping their kids learn according to their academic prowess and potential, they will be happy to NOT have tuition as the cost is a big burden to many of them.

An age old problem with no solution in sight? Sigh ...