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For years, Singapore has topped education rankings and inspired other school systems. Among the keys to its success is a playful approach to education and highly paid teachers. But many worry about the pressure the system places on children.
Students at Sri Mariamman Hindu temple in Singapore
SINGAPORE — Every year in mid-October, social networks are set ablaze in Singapore. Upset parents attack the Ministry of Education on Facebook, Twitter and other forums, accusing it of having organized tests that were too complicated for their children. They say their children came home from the math section of the PSLE – the Primary School Leaving Examination – in tears. The results come in late November.
In the Asian city-state, many families see this test as the exam of a lifetime. Performance on the PSLE can affect the quality of the course of study all the way through to university. In high school, children find themselves put in three different "streams," depending on their level.
Parents spend years preparing their children for these tests in math, science, and English. They give hours of homework help and spend fortunes on private tutoring.
According to the latest National Household Expenditure Survey conducted by the Department of Statistics, Singaporean families spend a total of more than $1 billion on private tuition each year, or almost $1 billion. "Nearly 70% of elementary school children now take private lessons," said Jason Tan, a professor at the city-state's National Institute of Education (NIE). In kindergarten, the ratio is now 40%.
In the Terry Chew Academy, in the city center, math tutoring is offered to children as young as 5 years old. Geometric shapes, basic calculations, number series recognition, introduction to cryptarithms… "Kindergarten math skills are the best indicator of your child's future academic success," warns the brochure, which also promises to introduce kindergarten children to the sense of competition. The cost is S$960 (€680) for 12 lessons of 90 minutes each in small groups of up to eight children.
Bills go up with age and when children get closer to the PSLE that they sit aged 12. By then, they have reached a much higher level than children of their age in other developed countries.
In each edition of the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study, organized every three years by the OECD among 15-year-old students, Singapore trumps all others. In the 2015 survey conducted in more than 70 countries, the small nation of 5.7 million people dominated the rankings in math, science and reading.
In 2019, it was relegated to second place behind China, but in a survey deemed unfair by experts. Chinese results were only compiled from selected schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. "On a national scale, the performance of Chinese students in the Pisa tests is rather mediocre," notes an expert.
In the West, Singapore's performance is all the more impressive because it is achieved by an education system that is still very young. When Singapore declared its independence in 1965 after 140 years of British colonial rule, the political party in power, the PAP (People's Action Party) and its leader Lee Kuan Yew inherited a disorganized education system.
Education wasn’t universal and varied according to the different communities that have their own networks of schools operating either in English, Chinese, Malay or Tamil. Curricula, textbooks and exams often differed from one school to another, and no common objectives were defined. "One of Lee Kuan Yew's priority missions was to rebuild school to support national economic development and encourage social cohesion in this multi-ethnic and multi-religious population," says Jason Tan. "These two objectives are still at the heart of the system, even though many reforms have changed the organization of the education system."
Recentralized under the authority of the Ministry of Education, which in 2022 still has the second largest budget in the country, school quickly focused on English, math, and science skills to boost the international attractiveness of a country with no natural resources. Sixty years later, they remain key priorities in primary, secondary and pre-university grades.
Visitors select books during the 2015 Singapore Book Fair in Singapore
Bao Xuelin/Xinhua/ZUMA
In mathematics, Singaporean children have a much more concrete approach to problems than their European peers. Before approaching an operation with numbers, they will visualize, on their paper or on the board, a drawing with fruits, candies, or students, then a diagram with bars and blocks, in a rather playful approach. Each operation, whether it be addition, division, or fractions, will be presented in a concrete scenario before being transcribed into abstract mathematical language. This way, the child experiences multiplication before formulating it.
Throughout their school career up to "Primary 6" (age 12), they will almost systematically model their problems, even the more complex ones. Each stage of learning is then marked by rigorous classroom tests that progressively prepare for the PSLE.
In science, programs similarly encourage learning by doing or playing. Teachers attempt to raise questions by having their students work in pairs or teams on making or assembling concrete objects. They will use small robots equipped with batteries and diodes to understand, for example, the course on electricity.
In Singapore, teachers are very well paid. Recruited from the best universities, they receive very long initial training and are much better paid than their counterparts in Europe. A secondary school teacher will earn S$50,250 per year (€36,000) at the beginning of their career. On average, a primary school teacher with at least five years of experience can expect to earn 3,200 euros per month. They will also receive bonuses and enjoy a high level of respectability in Singaporean society.
In exchange for this recognition, they commit themselves to work hard, but not only in front of their students. As in other east Asian countries, which do well on the Pisa tests, Singaporean teachers manage very large classes (often 40 students) but have far fewer hours of instruction than Western teachers.
Instead, they spend almost half of their professional time communicating with parents via email or text messages, preparing their classrooms and evaluating lessons with their colleagues. They regularly observe each other's classes before exchanging best practices and receive nearly 100 hours of in-service training each year to adapt to the country's changing needs.
While it is held up as a model for other countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, Singapore's system is questioning its own shortcomings. The pressure on children to pass tests at a very young age that will affect their destiny. The hours spent in classes and tutoring to the detriment of extracurricular activities and free time.
The growing inequalities between wealthy families able to finance heavy private tutoring programs and poorer households, often from Tamil or Malay minorities, who can only rely on supplementary classes sometimes subsidized by the state.
"Our overall success tends to mask these inequalities," admits the NIE researcher. "And that highlights the elephant in the room. To what do we owe our performance in international rankings? To public school or private tutoring?" he asks. "More and more, our model based on meritocracy is being challenged by a form of parentocracy," worries Jason Tan.
For years, Singapore has topped education rankings and inspired other school systems. Among the keys to its success is a playful approach to education and highly paid teachers. But many worry about the pressure the system places on children.
Students at Sri Mariamman Hindu temple in Singapore
SINGAPORE — Every year in mid-October, social networks are set ablaze in Singapore. Upset parents attack the Ministry of Education on Facebook, Twitter and other forums, accusing it of having organized tests that were too complicated for their children. They say their children came home from the math section of the PSLE – the Primary School Leaving Examination – in tears. The results come in late November.
In the Asian city-state, many families see this test as the exam of a lifetime. Performance on the PSLE can affect the quality of the course of study all the way through to university. In high school, children find themselves put in three different "streams," depending on their level.
Parents spend years preparing their children for these tests in math, science, and English. They give hours of homework help and spend fortunes on private tutoring.
According to the latest National Household Expenditure Survey conducted by the Department of Statistics, Singaporean families spend a total of more than $1 billion on private tuition each year, or almost $1 billion. "Nearly 70% of elementary school children now take private lessons," said Jason Tan, a professor at the city-state's National Institute of Education (NIE). In kindergarten, the ratio is now 40%.
In the Terry Chew Academy, in the city center, math tutoring is offered to children as young as 5 years old. Geometric shapes, basic calculations, number series recognition, introduction to cryptarithms… "Kindergarten math skills are the best indicator of your child's future academic success," warns the brochure, which also promises to introduce kindergarten children to the sense of competition. The cost is S$960 (€680) for 12 lessons of 90 minutes each in small groups of up to eight children.
Bills go up with age and when children get closer to the PSLE that they sit aged 12. By then, they have reached a much higher level than children of their age in other developed countries.
In each edition of the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study, organized every three years by the OECD among 15-year-old students, Singapore trumps all others. In the 2015 survey conducted in more than 70 countries, the small nation of 5.7 million people dominated the rankings in math, science and reading.
In 2019, it was relegated to second place behind China, but in a survey deemed unfair by experts. Chinese results were only compiled from selected schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. "On a national scale, the performance of Chinese students in the Pisa tests is rather mediocre," notes an expert.
In the West, Singapore's performance is all the more impressive because it is achieved by an education system that is still very young. When Singapore declared its independence in 1965 after 140 years of British colonial rule, the political party in power, the PAP (People's Action Party) and its leader Lee Kuan Yew inherited a disorganized education system.
Education wasn’t universal and varied according to the different communities that have their own networks of schools operating either in English, Chinese, Malay or Tamil. Curricula, textbooks and exams often differed from one school to another, and no common objectives were defined. "One of Lee Kuan Yew's priority missions was to rebuild school to support national economic development and encourage social cohesion in this multi-ethnic and multi-religious population," says Jason Tan. "These two objectives are still at the heart of the system, even though many reforms have changed the organization of the education system."
Recentralized under the authority of the Ministry of Education, which in 2022 still has the second largest budget in the country, school quickly focused on English, math, and science skills to boost the international attractiveness of a country with no natural resources. Sixty years later, they remain key priorities in primary, secondary and pre-university grades.
Visitors select books during the 2015 Singapore Book Fair in Singapore
Bao Xuelin/Xinhua/ZUMA
In mathematics, Singaporean children have a much more concrete approach to problems than their European peers. Before approaching an operation with numbers, they will visualize, on their paper or on the board, a drawing with fruits, candies, or students, then a diagram with bars and blocks, in a rather playful approach. Each operation, whether it be addition, division, or fractions, will be presented in a concrete scenario before being transcribed into abstract mathematical language. This way, the child experiences multiplication before formulating it.
Throughout their school career up to "Primary 6" (age 12), they will almost systematically model their problems, even the more complex ones. Each stage of learning is then marked by rigorous classroom tests that progressively prepare for the PSLE.
In science, programs similarly encourage learning by doing or playing. Teachers attempt to raise questions by having their students work in pairs or teams on making or assembling concrete objects. They will use small robots equipped with batteries and diodes to understand, for example, the course on electricity.
In Singapore, teachers are very well paid. Recruited from the best universities, they receive very long initial training and are much better paid than their counterparts in Europe. A secondary school teacher will earn S$50,250 per year (€36,000) at the beginning of their career. On average, a primary school teacher with at least five years of experience can expect to earn 3,200 euros per month. They will also receive bonuses and enjoy a high level of respectability in Singaporean society.
In exchange for this recognition, they commit themselves to work hard, but not only in front of their students. As in other east Asian countries, which do well on the Pisa tests, Singaporean teachers manage very large classes (often 40 students) but have far fewer hours of instruction than Western teachers.
Instead, they spend almost half of their professional time communicating with parents via email or text messages, preparing their classrooms and evaluating lessons with their colleagues. They regularly observe each other's classes before exchanging best practices and receive nearly 100 hours of in-service training each year to adapt to the country's changing needs.
While it is held up as a model for other countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, Singapore's system is questioning its own shortcomings. The pressure on children to pass tests at a very young age that will affect their destiny. The hours spent in classes and tutoring to the detriment of extracurricular activities and free time.
The growing inequalities between wealthy families able to finance heavy private tutoring programs and poorer households, often from Tamil or Malay minorities, who can only rely on supplementary classes sometimes subsidized by the state.
"Our overall success tends to mask these inequalities," admits the NIE researcher. "And that highlights the elephant in the room. To what do we owe our performance in international rankings? To public school or private tutoring?" he asks. "More and more, our model based on meritocracy is being challenged by a form of parentocracy," worries Jason Tan.
After having announced Poland's rupture with Hungary, Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki has reversed course. It is a sign that Poland's ruling conservative government may be ready to bet on an alliance with Moscow.
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during the V4 Summit in Cracow, Poland
-Analysis-
WARSAW — Mateusz Morawiecki lasted only a month without Viktor Orban. Now the Prime Minister of Poland is back on the anti-EU war path, back in step with his Hungarian counterpart.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Whatever integrity Morawiecki may have had got lost "somewhere in his contacts with Moscow." This is what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said about the pro-Russian prime minister of Hungary a few months ago. Orban, despite Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine, maintained economic ties with Moscow, resisted European Union sanctions, and refused to provide support to the invaded state.
Orban justified Vladimir Putin's actions and questioned the veracity of the reported crimes committed by Russia in the occupied Ukrainian cities. On Saturday, he was the only EU leader went to Moscow for the funeral of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It's a clear gesture. Orban is Putin's Trojan horse in the European Union and he does not hide from it.
Just over a month ago, Morawiecki announced that Poland and Hungary had parted ways. It sounded credible. A country that supports a struggling Ukraine as best it can — by sending tanks and howitzers and providing shelter to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees — cannot fraternize with a country that is close to Putin.
Now, however, Morawiecki has apparently changed his mind, announcing in the pages of the weekly magazine funded by the state treasury, that he is returning to cooperation with Orban.
This phrase is not accidental. The European Commission has taken a hard line against Poland and does not want to disburse billions from the reconstruction fund until the conservative PiS party-led government begins to respect the rule of law.
Therefore, in July, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński announced a tougher course toward the European Union. "The end of playing nice," he said.
Zdzisław Krasnodębski, PiS's chief expert on EU policy, said he considered the West, or European Union, to be a greater threat to Poland than Russia. Such indiscriminate rhetorical attacks on the democratic community during the war against the Russian regime must be called by name: it is treason.
Russian President Vladimir Putin with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the Kremlin on Feb. 1
Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin Pool/Planet Pix/ZUMA
After Russia's attack on Ukraine, the quieting of the anti-European trend in the politics of the PiS lasted only for a while. Kaczynski and Morawiecki are returning to the positions they held in December 2021, when, despite American warnings of an imminent attack, they received Putin in Warsaw with the same honors of any European allies.
It remains to be seen if, after Orban, Morawiecki reaches out to the leader of the French far right, Marine Le Pen, to whom Russia has lent money for election campaigns, or to the leaders of the Italian far right, who are allied with the Kremlin.
Kaczyński is right, the stakes of next year's elections are enormous. The Poles will choose whether they want to stay in the European Union or, together with Orban and other allies of Putin, inevitably drift towards Moscow.
Looking back, the announcement of Prime Minister Morawiecki that Poland and Hungary had parted ways, offered real hope. It had sounded so plausible.
After having announced Poland's rupture with Hungary, Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki has reversed course. It is a sign that Poland's ruling conservative government may be ready to bet on an alliance with Moscow.
Caught between a natural disaster, an economic crisis and poor governance, flood-affected Pakistanis contemplate a future in ruins.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform via ZUMA Press Wire
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.