Can Singaporeans analyse and express themselves clearly?

Source: NDP 2008

My British lecturer was giving us pointers on how to score for our microeconomics paper and he recommended us to choose quantitative questions if possible. He commented that in his 14 years of teaching university students in Singapore, most Singaporean students are weak in writing essay answers.

I just think most Singaporean students have trouble expressing themselves in coherent sentences with succinct vocabulary. We are wonderful at science and mathematics (though recently not the top in Maths), but when it comes to languages, we seem to be handicapped. Is that why many students hate taking literature in secondary schools? I used to hate literature too. Now I love the classics.

Back to my lecturer, he demonstrated to us on how to write a concise and analytical answer to an essay question. He wrote out an answer off the top of his head in answering a particular micro question. The model answer is deceptively simple and straightforward. There are no bombastic economics terms floating about. Just some words commonly used in economics such as optimal, utility, constraint, etc.

But what the seemingly simple answer did not say is that you need to have more than just a grasp of the underlying economics concepts. You need to know the basic models and theories, understand the relationships between them, analyse the impact of these relationships and evaluate how a certain policy will affect the outcome predicted by the model.

In summary, you need to be crystal clear about the fundamentals and the inter-connected relationships to write a simple and cohesive answer to a 25-mark essay question. If not, you’ll be lucky to get 5 marks.

Through my personal observations, Singaporean students have a “surface” understanding of economic models and theories. They can follow the lecturer’s explanation rather well,  and able to grasp the basic idea of the model. However, tweak the question a little, suddenly we can’t use the model to analyse the variables. We are thrown off-guard. Why is this so?

I’m tempted to blame my 10 odd years of education where critical thinking and in-depth understanding habits are  insufficiently cultivated or not at all. Instead of learning to question, we learn to memorise. Rote learning replaces the joy of learning and the thirst for knowledge.

Rote learning should not be mistaken for repetitive learning, which is an important part of new learning. Repetitive learning requires understanding of the subject matter and through continuous repetitions to learn. Rote learning simply test how many things you can store in your brain’s short-term memory.

So we should emphasise repetitive learning with understanding as the core of the learning technique, instead of rote learning that regurgitate 10-year series answers.

Is our present education system optimal for that kind of learning. Should we change the system?

If change is needed, should we overhaul our education systems by just changing the syllabuses, or should we train the teachers, first, to be critical thinkers and hungry for knowledge? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with our syllabus, perhaps we just need to train our teachers to be better thinkers.

I’m just starting to discover the joy of learning and questioning after 20+ years. Ahh.. I should stop reading The Republic and using the socratic method.