Education – I had a dream

I dreamt that in the future all our students would turn out to be scientists and engineers equipped to live in a futuristic world with all the skill sets they need embedded in them by a microchip. No need to go to school to learn anything anymore except morality and moral values. And they will live through their lives like perfect human beans, with no sickness as this will be taken care of by the microchip that regularly dispensed medicine and supplements needed for their good health. And their intelligence will be several notches higher than the average beans around the world.

Then I woke up to a rude shock. The plight of the PMETs are still around where many are still unemployable as they no longer have the skill sets to fit into the workforce. What is happening? We are trying and planning for the future but forgot about the Now, the people that are living now and turning obsolete, falling down the economic and social ladder of the society.

Then I read the papers and was again filled with hopes and promises of a greater future as the govt are tweaking the education system again to be the best education system in the world, to teach and educate our people to be the brightest and best all rounder, and most important, to be employable again. But the result is in the future and we will have to wait for that to happen, maybe in SG100 when Singaporeans will be the happy people, fully employed and leading a good life.

Then I started thinking, what is the point of the future when the present is a failure, when our people from our education system are no longer competitive and no skill sets to even get a job. So, before we embark on another wild goose chase, another untested experiment, we need to know what is the basis of our futuristic education system, proven or modelled after some successful model or just another trial balloon? Because someone took some drugs and hallucinated that this is the best way to go?

Why don’t we do the real thing, the logical thing, look at the successfulo working models and copy what people have done successfully, no need to reinvent the wheel when the wheel is another trail and error, unproven game of hope? Look at all the talented people that are coming to Singapore to replace our no skill set PMETs and young graduates! Does that ring a bell, that these are the products of a good education system, to be able to produce the graduates and professionals needed by our industries? If our education system can do the same, there is no need to keep tweaking and toying around our education system and telling the people it is really good.

Be real. Look at the countries that are producing the talents that we need. The most talents we are getting are from India. This is the hard truth. You can see them all over Raffle Place, MBFC and Changi Business Park, or is it now called Chennai Business Park?  What does it mean? It’s so simple. The Indians are doing all the right things in their education system.  No need silly and expensive foolish ideas. Just get the basics of education right. That is why we are hiring all the Indian professionals with the right skill sets to replace our no skill sets PMETS and young graduates. It must be. We can’t be hiring them if they are no good unless we are so hopelessly stupid. We can’t be employing fakes and cheats to replace our PMETs right?

So, with this understanding clear and bright, the solution is very simple. Stop mucking around with our education system and pretend that we are doing the right thing. And those people who have no idea of what education of the young is all about better shut up and don’t pretend they know. Go to the experts, go to the countries that have done it, and done it well. And no country has done it better than India. The results showed. Walk around Raffles Place and MBFC and you will know where the foreign talents came from.

I would advise the MOE to stop mucking around, send our MOE staff to India to learn from them. They know best and are producing the best talents that are in our industries and govt services too. And in the interim, before waiting for the result to be seen in 20 years or 30 years down the road, quick, send our A level students to the universities in India for their undergraduate and post graduate studies. Forget about NUS, NTU, SMU. Forget about the Ivy League universities in UK or USA. Send them to India, University of Mumbai is one of the best in India. That would be a good start.

The success of India’s education is no fluke shot. Look at the number of Indian nationals helming big corporations in the USA, the UK and also Europe would be enough testimonies to logically conclude that India is doing the right thing. They are producing the world’s current and future honchos in the corporate world and do not need all the silly university rankings to feel good. Their universities are unranked, many several hundred notches down the ladder of infamy according to those ranking agencies. But the Indians are soaring to the sky. And this is real, not magic!

Stop all the funny tweakings and experiments using our young as guinea pigs. Haven’t we wasted a whole generation of our graduates with no skill sets from our world best universities?

Stop smoking. I too have woken up and seen the reality. We have an education system that looks good on paper but cannot be eaten, not worth a cent but the students have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete the highly flawed system that at best is dysfunctional, the graduates good to be taxi and crane drivers or hawkers.  We need another 30 years to produce top finance and banking professionals!!!! What kind of shit is that? What are we going to do in the meantime? What have we been doing in the last two or three decades?

Would anyone dare to say that the Indian graduates we hired are rubbish and we are hiring all the rubbish and to say what I wrote is rubbish?