Singaporean education is the worst institutional scam of the 21st century (thread)

1/ Seriously I could do an actual thread on this but if it isn't fucked up enough that we force singular teachers to focus on massive classroom sizes while undercharging them and understaffing them all the way I don't know what is?

2/ Or the fact that students are slavishly demanded to hit the books on a constant basis and give up their social and hobbyist lives to make sure that an arbitrary number stays high enough for them to graduate?

3/ Seriously Singapore's education system isn't just fucked up, it's a lazy fuck-up. It refuses to outright be the decimated, underpaid state of the American system while refusing to be an actual social system either

4/ Apparently, 'holistic' education means forcing students to give reflections on a constant basis when there is nothing meaningful for them to glean. It means making students have debate where the teacher gives you a side-eye for not being 'neutral'

5/ And don't even get me started on Singaporean debate culture. I have a lot of personal grievances with debate in general - I think it has no utility to any kind of discussion and only serves to help horrible people reinforce their own horrible views

6/ But our humanities - history, geography and economics - are about providing a sanitised, context-free understanding of the world so we can 'debate' it on a constant basis

7/ In geography, my classmates were allowed to use The Emergency in India as an example of a 'successful population control policy'. A fucking mass sterilisation campaign can be used as proof of good policy in this country

8/ In history, you either learn about foreign history or a sanitised version of Singaporean history based around justifying the decision for merger and lying to students about it. The Malayan Emergency, the Labour movement and what not, are erased out of classes

9/ And don't even get me started on the sciences and math. Brutal drilling, almost sociopathic levels of asking students to sacrifice themselves, which is obviously fucking ableist and even on a basic level is unforgivably difficult and notoriously hard

10/ The people who excel in the Singaporean education system are not smarter or more intelligent than you or me. They are the people who both understand how to negotiate a broken system to their advantage and have the innate talent to survive in an artificial competition

11/ This is not a question of 'the real world'. The real world isn't going to ask you to do a quadratic equation you have no idea about in less than 30 minutes. And even if it did, that suggests we have a big, systemic problem we should deal with instead of (continued)

12/ condemening children to spend nearly one and a half decades of their life menially degrading their critical thinking and their conscience to survive in this shitty, shitty system

13/ For every person comfortable with the current set-up I know a dozen that are tired as fuck and just want to do anything else. Sports. Arts. Some hobbies I've never even heard of. No one likes school because it's designed to bore or torture them

14/ And yeah, let's have an honest conversation about the state of mental health in Singaporean schools.

It's fucking shit. end of story

15/ You cannot solve the epidemic of depression, suicide, self-harm, and a litany of mental illnesses in Singapore without first accepting that its education system likes to traumatise people into having those things to begin with

16/ Especially for LGBTQ+ people and minorities. Schools actively cooperate with the state to persecute queer people in this country. Minorities are underrepresented at every stage of higher education, including teaching staff

17/ And the teachers too, hello? Not all teachers are saints, but people like to instinctively blame teachers for how this is set up, especially parents.

Teachers have no control over the curriculums they're teaching, and very little say in how to approach students

18/ they have even *less* control when it comes to examinations and what not. Teachers have to actively plead for their fucking students in front of admin. Let me make this clear. THE PEOPLE RUNNING THIS SYSTEM ARE FUCKING RESPONSIBLE

19/ When I was in a deep depression and my grades took a nosedive, I was lucky that I had teachers willing enough to argue on my behalf that I was pushed forward anyways. Most people aren't so lucky. They leave. They get pushed out. They're punished for not competing

20/ And what even is the point, outside of exploiting students for the education industry? What is the point of forcing students to do worksheets, printed by a school printer teachers have to pay to use, whose contents are dictated by an administration who literally does not care

21/ The only point is profit. The government gets to skimp on teachers. The government gets to skimp on students. In this country we ask thousands of people to sacrifice themselves every year just to maintain a fucking profit margin

22/ The only thing this country is good at, is gaming the broken international education rankings and getting fame for it. If the education system here was graded by its students, it would fail, and fail *miserably* /thread