The Today newspaper has beaten the ST to an obvious and most important story like this. Kudos to the bosses of Today and for sending Ng Jing Yng to Finland to research and write this article.
Many envy the Finnish education system but conveniently forget that what we do with education is circumscribed by our culture. They have an egalitarian tradition, but our predominantly Chinese background is elitist. They are confident and act thus. We are fearful (kiasu) but put on a brave confident front. We cannot do what they do but we can draw lessons from them where we had gone wrong.
So I don't envy the Finnish. Perhaps if I were north European, I would. Instead I am very angry with our system. It is a soul destroying system.
The Finnish system focus is on its citizens. Our system is on bringing glory to institutions and country. It is all about making a stupid name which history shows time and again is fleeting. Our priorities are misplaced and our leaders without the right values and wisdom are too intelligent for their own good.
If every country in the world have a kiasu and huge tuition industry like ours, wouldn't they also do well? In fact those that do; like Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan were more than credible by PISA assessments. In time our education system will implode like the Soviet economy had before. Like them our approach is extractive and not sustainable. Every year we are more tired than the year before. I think we are no far from reaching our limits. We did not become more able to live with our system. We had simply taken time and money from other priorities and throw them into education (tuition).
In 1776, Adam Smith, an economist published his work "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations".
ReplyDeleteThe book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth and is today a fundamental work in classical economics.
So whither Singapore's wealth?
Does our wealth lie in our sovereign wealth funds?
Or does it lie within the capability of the individual Singaporean?
Or does it lie within the small, self appointed group of ruling elites?
Obviously, the Finns believe that 'when Finns do well, Finland will do well".
--> The citizens make the country strong
Our PM Lee believes "we want Singapore to do well, so Singaporeans will do well".
---> the country makes the citizen strong
What do you think?
Not only the MSM,but PAP can learn hell of a lot from those "welfare" countries,PAP is known to be extreme generous in going places to learn,but their main target seems to be Communist China,a country of yesterday.what is wrong with PAP leaders?
ReplyDelete