The pointlessness of tuition in Singapore

I was shocked by the article on Yahoo about how more than half the parents who engage tuition teachers spend over $500 a month. I had recently started my latest education series, dedicated to those starting university this autumn and I had just covered the issue of how some students struggle to shift gears when they try to adapt to life at university. There is a culture of over dependency on tuition teachers and this is ultimately detrimental to the future of your child.

Now this isn't a new topic on my blog as it is an issue I feel very strongly about - the Singaporean education system has gone very wrong. My parents are retired teachers who have taught in Singapore for their entirely lives - so I was able to observe over the years why the system is so inadequate and how the mindset of the parents and educators are wrong. Tuition is pointless. It is unnecessary and it serves very little purpose in the long run. If I am going to stick the dagger into tuition, then I have to tell you why it is so bad and I wish nothing more for this evil industry to disappear overnight so the children of Singapore can be spared the misery of tuition.

Do you know why tuition is ultimately pointless?

I wouldn't be so opposed to tuition if it did actually help the students - but the bottom line is that it doesn't, not in the long run! I am now going to give you 8 reasons why any short term benefits from tuition does not lead to any long term pay off.

1. University, adulthood and beyond

This was a topic I recently covered in my university season series - in part 2 of this series, I talked about Singaporean students who struggled to make the transition from JC mode to university mode because of the amount of spoon-feeding JC students receive in order to maximize their A-level results. Of course, everyone involved wants the best possible results from the teachers to the students to the parents - but there is a very myopic problem going on here.

Universities treat their students like adults, not children. 

At university, the student is expected to function as an adult rather than a child - no spoon feeding, no hand holding, the student has to think independently, solve his/her own problems rather than running to the teacher for instructions every step of the way. In the west, there simply isn't the culture of tuition - it is very much an East Asian thing. The vast majority of students in the UK get through their entire education without actually having had a single tuition lesson ever. I know what my parents would say, "wah these Angmor parents are so bad, don't care about their children's studies, so heartless, don't help their children, so bochup one". Well I actually believe it is far better for the child in the long run to have a more hands-off approach to their studies. Yes you should make sure that they are indeed spending enough hours doing their homework and revising for their exams, but to inflict hours of tuition on them is taking it too far. This is why Singaporean students tend to find university a real shock to the system whilst most British students who have done their A levels in the UK find the transition less stressful.

The analogy I would use is that of cycling - eventually when the students gets to university or into the workplace, the students have to function as an autonomous adult, able to seek the solutions to any problems that come their way without always running to the teacher or the manager for help. Singaporean students have the training wheels on their bicycles all the way up till A levels and when they try to cycle without them at university, some crash and fall pretty badly, never to get up again. Whilst some other luckier ones learn quickly and can adapt to cycling without the learning wheels. Why leave this to chance? Get rid of those training wheels early, the earlier the better. 

Those training wheels have got to come off at some stage. 

I know of this sad story from my mother's church. We knew this guy a few years older than me, let's call him Ben. He came from a very nice family with caring parents who made sure he had everything he needed to become a scholar - including tuition for all his subjects all the way till A levels. He aced his A levels and won himself a place at a top British university on a prestigious scholarship. Well, he crashed really badly in his first year as he was not the kind of student who could function autonomously. He had gone from JC where he enjoyed spoon feeding all the way to NS where all he had to do was follow orders without questioning them to a British university which had expected him to think and function autonomously. He was like a fish out of water - he spent so much time and effort on his essays only to have them thrown back at him by his tutors.

It turned out that Ben did work very hard, spent hours in the library doing a lot of research, was able to quote and cite very sources very well but the tutors accused him of doing no more than "cutting & pasting" (ie. control-C & control-V) rather than applying any critical thinking into his essays. He was too proud to accept reality - he had been the top boy in his JC and was celebrated as the brilliant scholar from Singapore and it was the first time in his life he had failed anything - and now he was failing everything. When he spoke to his parents, he lied and said that he was enjoying life at university rather than confess that he was bottom of his class. By the end of his first year, he knew that he was going to fail all his exams and lose his scholarship, get kicked out of the university and return to Singapore with his tail behind his legs. Rather than accept reality, he killed himself by taking an overdose.

It is a terribly tragic story - there are many people to blame, not the least the scholar himself for refusing to ask for more help when he needed it. The problem was that he was in an environment where students were expected to help themselves rather than buy the help they need via the tuition industry. I also question if his parents knew if they were setting their son up for failure by making him over-dependent on tuition in Singapore? Or has the entire Singapore education system set him up for failure?

Who was responsible for Ben's suicide?

2. The Culture of Kiasuism

This culture of tuition perpetuates itself in Singapore because of the kiasu mindset of parents. They do not stop for a moment to think, "does my child really need tuition?" No, instead, their rationale for getting tuition is, "If the other parents of my son's classmates are getting them tuition, then I must do so too or I may lose out." It is this fear of losing out which makes them follow the rest of the flock without thinking if they are just a bunch of lemmings heading for the nearest cliff.

Mind you, the parents often have the best of intentions for their children and they worry that if they dare to go against the trend and reject tuition, then they may not only be letting down their children but may be perceived as bad parents. Add to that pressure from peers, teachers and other family members and a sense of self-doubt, these parents are sucked into a circle they find hard to break out of without incurring the wrath of those around them.

 

Surely parents should have enough confidence to deal with this trend - if some other kiasu parent claims, "I am sending my daughter to Kumon and now she is great at maths!" The correct response should be, "Do you (or your husband) have a really, really small penis? Is that why you are taking your insecurities out on your child? Or did you regret having been a failure at school when you were a student? Why don't you fix the disappointments in your own life instead of taking it out on your kid?"

3. Very short term improvements do not lead to any long term benefits

My parents worked as tuition teachers as well as full time teachers - so I grew up always seeing various students in our dining room having tuition at our dining table. I am going to tell you the story of Priya, an Indian student who was a tuition student on my mother.

Priya had a problem with maths - she couldn't get her head around numbers. She had already flunked her PSLE twice and my mother was trying to get Priya to pass PSLE mathematics. I remember sitting quietly in the corner of the room, having my dinner whilst watching my mother go through problem sums with Priya over and over again, year after year. Eventually, Priya did scrape through PSLE mathematics on the third attempt - even my mother was surprised and we received a big food hamper from Priya's parents to thank my mother for her help. As far as my mother was concerned, Priya was a success story and she would boast about helping Priya understanding mathematics. But do you know what happened next? 

Priya simply couldn't deal with numbers.

Did Priya go on to ace mathematics in secondary school? Hardly. Years later. I ran into Priya at a local shop, she was working there and I'd recognized her. We had a brief chat and I found out that she struggled in secondary school, failing to pass any exams in mathematics despite her parents getting her plenty of maths tuition. In the end, she just reached a point when she gave up - she would refuse to get out of bed rather than go to school. Her parents didn't know what else to do and she dropped out of school. As she was already 16 then, she found temporary work in a shop and had been working there ever since. She told me that she was very happy working in a shop, "as long as they don't make me work on the till and get me to handle anything to do with prices! I am good with customers, I am good with people, I just can't do maths."

There was a lot of wishful thinking on Priya's parents' part - they thought that she could make her way through the Singaporean education system like the other students if she simply got enough help. Well it doesn't work like that. It was painful to see Priya's frustrating struggle week after week at my parents' dining table and I am so glad she had the resolve to drop out of school eventually and get a job. After all, she saved herself - she didn't end up killing herself like Ben. What would you do if you were Priya's parents? This brings me neatly to my next point.

4. Would you love your child even if your child is stupid?

Fact: not all children will become scholars. I refer you to the IQ distribution bell curve. You are born with a certain IQ, some of us are smarter, others have lower IQ. It is a fact of life. If your child is not blessed with a high IQ, no amount of  brain training or tution is going to change that fact. So I put it to you bluntly parents: can you love your child if you find out that s/he has a very low IQ, or for want of a better, just plain stupid?

You are where you are on this curve, tuition cannot change that. 

This is something that my family has had to deal with. I have an autistic nephew who is struggling with the Singaporean education system and it is a battle he is losing - badly. It pains me to see the way he is subjected to so much tuition - but hey, I am just the uncle. I have voiced my opinion and I have been shot down. My opinion is that he should be allowed a childhood - life is tough enough as it is as an autistic child, spare him the torture of tuition please. You know what my family have accused me of? "You're heartless, you are a monster, you've condemned him because of his autism, you've given up all hope on him."

Am I such a monster? I don't think so - but you be the judge. My opinion is that most of my family is still in denial, like Priya's parents. They all love my nephew and care about him but they are very misguided as to what is best for him. There will come a point some day when my nephew will react like Priya and say, "no, enough is enough, I won't do this any more. I don't care what you say, I am saying no and that is final." 

When will my nephew speak up and say no to my family?

Some Singaporeans have argued that there is something seriously wrong with the Singaporean education system - that is why so many parents are turning to getting extra help via the tuition system. Well did it occur to you that the system may be perfectly adequate and this entire industry is simply feeding off the false hopes of desperate parents? Is it so hard for them to accept that their child is not special, not clever, not smart, not talented, not ever going to be good at anything and no amount of tuition is ever going to change that? I blame these terrible parents, not the MOE.

5. Couldn't the money be better spent developing other aspects of the child?

I am shocked that parents spend over $500 a month on tuition for each child. Good grief. That means $6000 a year is spent on the child's tuition teachers a year with little evidence of any long term benefits. Are you parents mad or blind? Think of what you could do for your child with $6000 a year. It could lead to some amazing experiences. I am 36 today and as I look back at my childhood memories, I remember the highlights - go to camp with my friends, catching crabs on a beach in Malaysia, taking part in gymnastics competitions. I think about all the money my parents wasted on needless tuition and piano lessons and think about all the things that I would've done with that money - I would've loved to have travelled a lot more and see the world. I could've had far more interesting experiences that would've built my confidence and nurtured me as a young person.

How much are you spending on tuition?! 

I have to find it in my heart to forgive my parents' very misguided ways - it is terrible being the child of a teacher, never mind two teachers. Teachers have a double whammy - they are cut off from the real world, the business world and spend their time interacting with children rather than other adults. Their students look to them for direction, permission and instruction - thus fuelling the impression that what they are doing is actually important. What that meant was that my parents took my education way too seriously, forgetting that the whole purpose of education is to prepare the young person for the working world - they forgot the destination and focused instead on the journey.

Honestly, no employer in the right mind is going to go through an applicant's academic record with a fine comb and pick out some random result from secondary school and find fault with that. In short, nobody gives a shit flying fuck what you do at school - it's not important at all. So the next time your teacher gives you grief about not doing your homework, tell the teacher that none of that really matters in the big scheme of things. The only people who give a shit flying fuck about shit like homework and tests are the teachers and fucking hell, imagine having teachers as your parents who believed that it was a matter of life or death whether or not I scored an A in Chinese in some mid-term test. Really, my parents were oh so deluded it was unreal. No disrespect to my parents, but fucking hell, as teachers, they really didn't understand the whole purpose of education.

Most teachers don't understand the purpose of education.

The only thing that matters is whether or not you get into a really good university and if you are not of that kind of calibre - then you should be focusing on training yourself to learn a trade that will lead to gainful employment, such as becoming a chef, plumber or electrician. And if you do want to help your child do well enough to get into a good university, then inspiration is the key. Once your child is inspired to do well, half the job is done. Give the child a sense of aspiration - and no, this cannot be found at the fucking tuition centre.

6. Inspiration vs slave driver

I am going to say something that is going to get me hate mail but fuck it, I'm going to say it anyway. I hated studying Chinese so much as a kid. Yeah I had nothing but straight As for Chinese and have a better command of the Chinese language than most Singaporeans (Limpeh has worked in China in places where nobody spoke a word of English okay?) - but I hated the way I was taught the language. My dad was one of those fathers who was a slave-driver when it came to teaching Chinese - he was a Chinese language teacher himself so he felt that it would be a personal insult if his own children were scoring anything less than top marks in Chinese language.

There was no inspiration - there was no other motivation apart from "if you don't get an A I will cane you very hard". Talk about motivation, he made me hate Chinese so much. In fact, I would sometimes deliberately pretend I can't speak Chinese any more and speak to him in a mishmash of English and Mandarin just to wind him up. I know saying things like, "My French and Spanish is so much better than my Chinese today" and "I have forgotten how to speak Chinese" (NB: both statements are not true) would make him angry but fuck it, he asked for it. Message to you parents out there: don't fuck with your children's minds or they may decide to fuck with yours in the future just for the hell of it.

My dad made me totally hate the Chinese language despite the fact that I was very good at it.

Given how badly I was taught the Chinese language, I am surprised I didn't reject it totally and end up like many of my peers who can't speak any Mandarin today. Parents, you cannot bully your child into studying anything - they will only reject it in the end if you push them too far. You need to make them interested in the language and give them the inspiration to want to learn - once they are inspired, you just step back and allow them to find their way. And if they need help, they will come to you for help but you need to inspire them, not be a slave driver.

7. Finally, fuck tuition - it doesn't work.

It is 2012 today and I am 36 years old - I started primary school in 1983 and completed my A levels in 1994. How many adults in 2012 had tuition in the 1980s and still ended up in dead end jobs? Thanks to Facebook, I am able to track down many of my former classmates from Singapore. Some of them have gone on to do amazing things and are multi-millionaires today with amazing achievements and some are either unemployed or in dead end jobs earning peanuts. But what do all these people have in common? They all had tuition. It made no freaking difference whatsoever in the long run - which is what really matters: it is not what you score in your primary 5 exams, it is how your career develops as you approach your 40s. Are you a millionaire, home-owner and financially comfortable? Or are you struggling to make ends meet in mid-life? And yes, some of my former classmates are struggling a lot today despite having had tuition back then - it didn't ultimately make any difference at all in the long run. 

Did you know this cleaner had years and years of tuition?

I ask my regular readers to forgive me for repeating this story but I so have to tell it again. I worked as a Chinese translator & Chinese culture consultant on a BBC documentary last year called "Meet The Tiger Mums" - the documentary followed three Chinese mothers in London who subjected their children to endless tuition and extra lessons to ensure their children had a good start in life. Part of the justification for their choices was, "Well, my Chinese parents made me do all this when I was a child, so now I am a Chinese mother, I am doing the same thing as well for my child."

Being me, I asked the production team an awkward question. "None of these mothers are particularly successful. Two are in dead end jobs earning peanuts and one is an unemployed housewife. Of the two working, one is a receptionist and the other is a building facility manager (ie. if the lights or the toilets are not working, you go and tell her and she is responsible for sorting it out). None of them are doing jobs for graduates - they are barely paid above minimum wage. Only the housewife speaks intelligently and the other two mothers are clearly not particularly intelligent! Surely these mothers demonstrate the fact that you can't polish a turd, all this tuition isn't going to turn a low-IQ below average human being into a scholar."

What if I told you she had years of tuition and still flunked all her exams?

The director and producer looked at each other and after a long pause, they just said, "Ah... Oh. Erm, the programme is focussing on the children really, not the mothers... I think." They didn't know what to say. It was clearly something they had never thought about yet. It wasn't a great programme for the title was "Meet The Tiger Mums" - rather than "You can't polish a turd, but the Chinese insist on trying!" I challenge you, look at the adults doing the dead end jobs around you in Singapore - are they there because they didn't have enough tuition when they were students? Or are they there despite having tuition as students and it still made no difference whatsoever? The bottom line is this: no amount of tuition can increase a student's IQ. You are born with what you are born with - get used to it. Life isn't fair, some people are born smart and talented, others are not and tuition isn't going to change any of that. Tough shit. Told you life was unfair, didn't I?

8. But what is new? Such is marketing.

Well, what's new? I do wonder what tuition teachers tell the parents. Are they honest and tell the parents, "Well I'll try my best but to be honest, your kid is really stupid and I don't just mean kinda stupid, like your kid has seriously low IQ okay? I can't fix that, nobody can. I can't deliver a miracle. I am a tuition teacher, not a magician you know. You're better off taking all this tuition fees and betting on the roulette wheel at the MBS casino, who knows? You may win big and then your very stupid child will never ever have to worry about trying to get a job in the future."

Take a look at the ads for some products out there - look at this ad for example. It gives the impression that if you use this shower gel, you will automatically attract women and get more sex. We all know that is not going to happen - but it doesn't stop advertisers from making such claims.

 

Let's look at some of the marketing used by tuition centres. I found this tuition centre Mind Stretcher in Singapore and this is what they proudly claim on their website, "27 Mind Stretcher students topped their schools in the 2011 PSLE." They go on to make more claims with similar statistics from past years but let's just focus on this one claim. Now I am sure that this claim is 100% true otherwise they wouldn't dare to make such a bold claim, but can you see the similarity between this claim and the Lynx shower gel ad above? It would give the impression to some parents that if they sent their child to Mind Stretcher, they could expect similar results. Or could they? After all, this is all hinted, or at best implied - but it takes a parent to make that implication. Mind Stretcher are just stating their past achievements, it takes an element of wishful thinking on the parents' part to believe that their child has the potential to top his/her school. So you can't blame Mind Stretcher for misleading the parents - the parents have in fact misled themselves because the option was always there to accept the truth that is staring at them in the face.

I would be very interested to find out what a tuition teacher today (over to you Alan Heah!) would promise parents of below average students - do they promise miracles? Do they even promise results? Or do they promise nothing and all these false hopes are supplied entirely by the parents' wishful thinking? Certainly, I can see a lot of wishful thinking on my family's part when it comes to subjecting my nephew to all that tuition. Quite frankly, I don't believe it would make the slightest bit of difference but that's just my lone voice against the rest of my extended family. What is the missing piece of the puzzle? Why am I the only one who can see that tuition won't help my nephew in the slightest - the same way Lynx shower gel isn't going to get me more sex? Why is my family subjected to this blind spot?

Answers on the postcard please - or just leave a comment below. Kum siah, thanks! I would like to leave you with a song I really like - it is the Grasshopper Song by Sunny Hill. I have found a version with subtitles so you can appreciate the meaning of the song even if you don't speak Korean - it is a profound statement about what the hell we're doing with our fucked up education system and work ethic in East Asia.