Singaporean Students Glad Education Is Just Memory Work
A study released Monday has shown that local students from all levels of education are satisfied that the education system of Singapore continues to advocate conventional rote learning, a memorisation technique based on repetition.
Temasek Junior College teacher Kevin Png agreed that the current education system is perfect as it is, especially at the junior college level. "Here, great emphasis is placed on students to memorise large chunks of theories and information in a short two-year period. There's no time for students to practice analytical thinking or to ask the 'Whys' and 'Hows' so we strongly encourage them to remember information by heart and understand it just sufficiently enough to regurgitate it for the final papers."
Final year Singapore Polytechnic Marketing student Venus Ng told reporters: "I'm damn happy studying for my mid-term is just memorising the points in my textbook," adding that it was almost impossible to fail when all she had to do was make use of acronyms and abbreviations to memorise concepts without actually having to understand them.
"To recall Maslow's hierachy of needs, just remember Aesop, short for A.E.S.S.P., which means self-Actualisation, Ego needs, Social needs, Safety and security and Physiological needs," she demonstrated.
Many has criticised Republic Polytechnic's way of teaching that uses the PBL (problem-based-learning) method intended to promote critical thinking in students.
“There really isn’t any point in having the students develop problem solving and teamwork skillsets because at the end of the day all that matters is scoring the best possible grade and students must diligently commit themselves to committing every single graph and chart to memory," the PHD qualified lecturer continued.
"Is there some God-forsaken reason why these students need to waste their time making sense of concepts since test questions simply demand “model” answers that could be easily rehearsed and spat out?"
Sources report that MOE was looking into distributing portable hard-drives to secondary level school students by the third-quarter of the year so students could efficiently store information and really ramp up the intelligent learning process.
