Hi there guys, we're still on the theme of learning foreign languages and being multilingual with this post. I am responding to a comment made by my reader Jon who postulated that learning foreign languages is something that ordinary people cannot handle, that most ordinary, average people could at best master one or two languages. Even when I told him that in other countries like Finland, Belgium and Switzerland where people tend to be a lot more multilingual, he went into denial and postulated that people in such countries may be exposed to more countries through their education system but they really only master one or two language because most people are simply incapable of handling more than one or two languages. I don't want to turn this into a "no you're wrong, I'm right, you're simply unaware of what happens outside Singapore" post to attack Jon, but he is guilty of navel gazing: he is using his own experiences in Singapore (and what he can observe around him locally) as a starting point but failing to take into account what may happen in other countries where conditions are radically different. Instead today, I am going to explore why some countries are successfully multilingual whilst others are hopelessly monolingual. There is a sliding scale: so on one hand, apart from the examples of multi-lingual countries in Europe I have cited above, there are also African countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Botswana where people are multilingual. On the other end of the scale, you have countries like the UK and Japan where people are hopelessly, painfully monolingual. Singapore could be a lot more multilingual but it isn't - we're going to go on to explore why Singapore has become far more like the UK and Japan and less like Belgium and Finland in this aspect.
Why are some countries so monolingual? Are people just stupid there? Or do you blame the education system?
Let's start with the UK as I live in London: oh people are hopelessly monolingual for a variety of reasons. Firstly, English is the global lingua franca, so a British person could travel to anywhere in the world from Argentina to Armenia to Austria and expect the locals to communicate with them in English. So it has led British people to become incredibly lazy in this aspect as they can get away with being monolingual, there certainly isn't any need to learn a second language if you live here - English is the official language of education and business, foreigners and immigrants are expected to learn English if they want to live here. Even though foreign languages are available as part of the British education system, few people take it seriously and it is often poorly taught. The teachers are just not empowered (for example, you can't expect the students to pick up a foreign language effectively if they only have very few lessons a week), the foreign language programmes are simply not given enough priority in the education system and that leads to student apathy and a poor attitude when it comes to trying to master the language. So even if a student is forced to study a language other than English, they often give up before they try - leading to the bizarre situation where most Welsh people can't speak their own language despite Welsh being a compulsory subject in Welsh schools as Welsh people simply default to English instead. Hence the same problem exists in Japan where English is the default second/foreign language in the Japanese education system: Japan's education system is well-funded, the students are hardworking but because Japan is a homogeneous society where everyone speaks Japanese, most Japanese students just don't feel motivated enough to bother learning English to a decent standard and unfortunately, the situation there is as dismal as the UK in this aspect!
Is this a question of money? Is it a matter of funding the schools to teach languages?
I deliberately chose two rich countries, the UK and Japan, who have failed miserably in this aspect. Yet both countries supposedly have very good education systems with some of the top universities in the world - so what went wrong there? The education system in both countries are clearly good at other academic disciplines from engineering to medicine to the social sciences yet they have sucked when it comes to trying to get the students to speak a second/foreign language. Let's look at some of the more multilingual countries in the world like India, South Africa and East Timor, these are much poorer countries where there simply isn't enough money to fund the education system yet somehow, without the help of decent lessons in the classroom, the citizens of these countries are simply learning a few languages on their own, either teaching themselves everything they need to know or learning it informally from their colleagues, friends and family. Now some Singaporeans may point out at this stage, "yes but if you pick up a language informally like that, you're bound to make quite a lot of mistakes and you're just not mastering the language properly." In which case, I need to to point out that in Singapore, English is the official and primary language of education yet so many Singaporeans don't speak proper English - defaulting to Singlish with non-standard pronunciation and using Singlish grammar. Even in the UK, monolingual English people who speak English as a mother tongue often make mistakes as well - that's just a fact of life, not everyone are good at languages but do you chuck the baby out with the bath water just because you're not totally fluent in that language? Hence a street trader in Bangkok may make a lot of money selling his goods to tourists because he can speak some English, even if his English is full of mistakes. This kind of snobbery simply isn't helpful in this context - it is far better to speak a language imperfectly with some mistakes than to remain totally unable to speak the language.
Jon claimed that for most people, their brains can only learn and maintain one to two languages at a high level. I think that's totally untrue of course and it is necessary to open one's eyes to what is happening in the rest of the world. I would like to share with you the story of the Bedouin children as young as 8 who are working in the tourist resorts in Egypt, selling souvenirs to tourists. Many parts of Egypt are so extremely poor, these young children are working instead of being in school because their parents cannot even afford to pay their school fees and child labour is very common in poor countries like Egypt. These kids selling the tourists souvenirs don't have the luxury of learning foreign languages from a teacher in school - no, they just have to learn it whilst interacting with the foreign tourists. What is their motivation? If they don't sell enough souvenirs, they will not only go hungry, they will get a savage beating by their parents for not putting food on the table - how's that for motivation to become fluent in a few languages before you turn 8? I contrast that to my former classmate who was the queen of excuses - she told me she wanted to learn French but each time I asked her, "how's the French coming along?" She would come up with a new excuse, the course wasn't right for me, the teacher didn't understand my learning needs, I have not been sleeping well so I don't have time to revise, I don't like the way Duolingo works etc - if she had only put in half as much effort into learning French as coming up with excuses for her failures, she would be fluent by now. But hey, she's rich (well she married a rather rich man), so she has no real motivation to work hard to become fluent in French - she's a housewife so she's never going to need French to get a job.
Case study two: the cashier in a cafe in Zurich
So in many European countries, when you ask people if they speak English, the response would often be "a little bit" but they turn out to be pretty darn fluent in English despite being so modest about their abilities to speak English! I present to you a nice cafe in Zurich where I once visited, it's the kind of place where you grab a tray, help yourself a an array of food at the buffet, then go to the cashier. She would then say something like, "Hi there, I see you have a Greek salad, a plain pretzel, a slice of the chocolate cake, an orange juice and a diet coke, so that would be 19 CHF pleas, are you paying together?" As I was indecisive when faced with the amazing display of delicious food before me, I did manage to get the chance to observe this cashier at work and she was speaking four languages with the customers: German, French, Italian and English. She also dealt with questions like, "is there any cream or milk in the mushroom soup? I am lactose intolerant." These conversations revolved mostly around food and money but she was competent enough to serve the customers in all four languages. Would you be happy enough to classify this Swiss lady as quadralingual given that we've just observed her speaking four languages with ease with the customers at work? Or would you raise the bar a lot higher and say, "no she is monolingual, she is only truly fluent in her mother tongue German; whilst she may know the basics in three other language to facilitate her work as a cashier, she is just not fluent enough to be considered multilingual at all thus we must classify her as monolingual despite the fact that she has some ability in other languages.
My point is simple: in the case study of the cashier lady in the nice cafe in Zurich, it clearly isn't straightforward. I would hardly call her monolingual as I know plenty of real monolingual people in the UK, they wouldn't be able to order a coffee in a cafe in another language. This lady was having conversations with everyone in the language of their choice, she had no problem with the vocabulary and her listening comprehension skills were superb. Here are the many shades of grey we need to contemplate: do you require this cashier to have a formal certificate to prove that she can speak French fluently, or would you be quite happy just to get a native French speaker to interact with her and verify if her French is indeed of a high standard? And even if we do that, where do we draw the line to define what you define as 'competent' or 'fluent' then? There is also the possibility that our cashier in Zurich is fluent only in three languages whilst she has only some limited ability in the fourth language. But what about people who have a high degree of competency and a working knowledge in a foreign language but are not completely fluent in it then? By that token, should we then consider virtually all Chinese Singaporeans monolingual, since their mastery of the Chinese language is not at native, first language standard when compared to their counterparts in China then? You can see why this is a problematic and messy issue because whether or not a person has 'mastered' a language or can consider themselves 'fluent' in it really then depends on how high you wish to set the bar. I can't imagine a cashier in a country like the UK speaking four languages so effortlessly. Heck, even in Singapore, I think the cashier in a food court could probably at best manage two languages, yet this cashier lady in Zurich isn't some top graduate from the top Swiss university, she's just a humble cashier in a cafe!
My regular readers will know that I used to work for an Estonian company and many Estonians are effectively trilingual in Estonian, Russian and English. These Estonians speak Estonian as a mother tongue but it is a language only spoken by approximately 1.1 million people. So if you're monolingual in Estonian only, it would severely limit the TV programmes you could enjoy, the books you could read and surfing in internet might be a rather dull experience. Hence Estonians learn two foreign languages: Russian and English. Estonia used to be a part of the USSR and thus many older Estonians were in fact educated in Russian (rather than Estonian), the language is also the lingua franca amongst all former Soviet states and so if an Estonian person meets someone from Kazakhstan or Ukraine, they will speak Russian to understand each other. Then of course, it is obvious why they need to learn English as well to communicate with the rest of the world. Thus the fewer people there are who speak your mother tongue, the more likely you are to learn another language (or two) to communicate with the rest of the world. Contrast this to someone in Japan who is monolingual in Japanese only - well they have 126 million people in Japan alone who speak Japanese so they're hardly limited when they turn up in a library in Tokyo looking for books in Japanese. Contrast that to a university student in Estonia turning up at the university library wishing to get hold of some research material, a lot of that material would either be in Russian or English. But it's not just highly educated Estonians who are trilingual, even ordinary Estonians are trilingual because of a simple reason: there's not a lot of entertainment in Estonian. They consume many movies, TV programmes, Youtube videos, reading materials, websites and pop music in English and Russian and so truly monolingual Estonians are rare.
So what is the problem in Singapore then?
This is why Jon believes that it is virtually impossible for ordinary people like him to learn a third language - in the Singaporean system, your first language is English and then you have to do a second language like Chinese, Malay or Tamil. If you're great at your second language, you can opt to do higher Chinese (otherwise known as Chinese as a first language) but only the smartest are offered a third language like French, Japanese or German - in recent years, the options have broadened to include Spanish, Arabic, Malay and Indonesian as well. The current system raises an artificial bar of entry for those wishing to do a third language - to be eligible to do a third language like French, German, Japanese or Spanish, you need a PSLE score of 8 or under. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the current PSLE grading system, allow me to explain: the students can get a score between 4 and 32 for their PSLE, the smaller the number the better your score so the perfect score is 4 whilst scoring 32 means you failed everything. By that token, by setting the bar quite high like this, it is sending out a clear signal to the vast majority of students in Singapore that they're simply not smart enough to handle a third language - this is strictly for the smart students only and if you're average, then you have no business trying to learn a third language, you need to focus on your core subjects. Now in a country like Finland or Switzerland, there are no such artificial barriers to entry when it comes to learning a third or fourth language at school - it is an option open to everyone and all students are expected to learn three languages to a very high standard as that is the norm in those countries and hence that is why the expectations and norms are so different compared to Singapore and it is crucial to understand why the situation and conditions in those countries are different, compared to Singapore.
Is the Singaporean approach right or wrong?
I think it is wrong for the following reasons: if you're using the PSLE results to ascertain whether or not someone is smart enough to study a third language, then we need to look at what subjects are being included in the PSLE - essentially, there are four subjects: English, maths, science and mother tongue/second language. That's when I have to say, hold on: I totally suck at maths, I'm not great at science either but I'm an exceptional polyglot who speaks 25 languages (fluent in 7). I'm truly a genius at languages but by my own admission, I suck at maths and the sciences, so why is the system checking my performance in maths and science to determine whether or not I should study a foreign language? Besides, students in Singapore take their PSLE when they are 12 years old: that's really quite young, there are indeed students who are playful and immature, who did not take their studies seriously enough to get good grades at that age but they do go on to perform a lot better in their studies when they are older. So to categorically declare them "not smart enough to learn a third/foreign language" because of an exam at the tender age of 12 is not only harsh but very misleading. Note that in other countries like Finland and Switzerland where all students have no choice but to study three languages (because it is compulsory to do three languages at school) regardless of how well they perform in other subjects, most of them do go on to eventually become trilingual even if they do fail another subject like maths or physics. Some of the students who did do well at the PSLE may have done so simply because they were forced by their parents to study very hard and had the best tuition teachers money can buy in Singapore - it is not necessarily a reflection of their ability or intelligence, but more their socio-economic status to be able to get the help they need to score well in this kind of exam.
The biggest flaw in the Singaporean system
Furthermore, there's another reason why the Singaporean system is just plain wrong. Arabic is available as a foreign language but the entry requirements are a lot lower - whilst you need to score at least an 8 at PSLE to do French, Spanish, German or Japanese, you need to score only a 24 to do Arabic. This is entirely political of course, because Malay Singaporeans are exposed to some Arabic through their faith thus may have the interest to pursue Arabic as part of their academic curriculum during their secondary education. However, if you set the bar too high, then many Malays with poorer grades simply wouldn't qualify and get to study Arabic even if they are using it regularly as part of their religion. Thus the bar was significantly lowered for the subject of Arabic for political reasons, to please the Malay community but there's a serious problem. As a polyglot who does speak some Arabic (on top of French, Spanish, German and Japanese of course), the hardest language amongst all of those is Arabic! The next hardest languages on that list are Japanese and German, but even then those two languages are significantly easier than Arabic. Not all foreign languages are the same - some are a lot harder than others and it doesn't get much harder than Arabic when it comes to picking a foreign language. The Arabic writing system is radically different from anything we're used to and the grammar is extremely complex. Yet somehow, the entry requirements for the the hardest language on the list is artificially lowered when it should be set a lot higher than for French and Spanish, given how it is so much harder than French and Spanish. Is the MOE simply pretending that Arabic is very easy to appease the Malay community? It makes no sense. The ability to speak Malay fluently doesn't make it any easier to learn Arabic, as the two languages are not related at all.
Since I don't agree with the rationale of only letting only the best students do a foreign language, I think it's not a bad thing to let anyone who is interested in Arabic study the subject - after all, the worst case scenario is that some weak students try the subject, realize they suck at it and then give up. That's fine by me, I don't have a problem with people trying to learn a foreign language and give up - I have done exactly that with Hindi and Korean. But what I don't like is when people are simply told, "you're too stupid to do this, leave it for the smarter people, you're an idiot." In fact I think that the barriers to entry for all foreign languages at secondary school level in Singapore should be either totally removed or at least lowered to the same as Arabic at 24. The bottom line is that the MOE made their own rules and then promptly broke them all to please a community, at the very least this shows that the rules are thoroughly inconsistent and illogical. It is also necessary to recognize that every country will have their own system when it comes to the learning of foreign languages and that's why we have vastly different outcomes from Japan and the UK on one extreme of the scale and Switzerland and Finland on the other extreme. Singapore shouldn't be pursuing the logic of "Singapore exceptionalism" in this regard by claiming that Singapore is so unique that you need your own rules, your own system and ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. Instead, it would be a lot wiser to look at where the UK has failed miserably in this aspect and avoid their mistakes and by the same token, also see what you could learn from the success stories in Finland and Switzerland. This isn't an exam and you won't be penalized for copying someone else's successful formula!
And what does this tell you about ordinary Singaporeans then?
In Singapore, the mindset thus is that learning a third language is something only exceptionally bright students do and most average people are incapable of handling the challenge. Whereas in Switzerland and Finland, the approach is different: no ifs, no buts, you will learn three language regardless of your circumstances and you will become fluent in three languages. Thus how you are judged as a person who doesn't speak a third language will be different in each country: in Singapore, the inability to speak a third language is considered completely normal, that it is something that it is not necessary, that it is merely treated like a hobby pursued by people who have an interest in foreign languages and that there simply isn't a penalty for not pursuing it the same way there's no penalty for having no interest in the music of Adele. Whereas in Finland for example, there is a palpable penalty for not being fluent in Swedish. Allow me to explain the context in Finland: the vast majority of people in Finland speak Finnish as a first language and English as a second/foreign language to a superbly high standard, but Swedish is an official language in Finland because of historic reasons and so in some designated parts of Finland including the capital Helsinki, you can walk into a post office, train station, pharmacy or bank and demand to be served in Swedish - if they are unable to serve you in Swedish, they are then breaking the law. This has created a situation where 'ordinary folks' in Finland who work in the service industry becoming trilingual by default because that's a basic requirement for their work. Is learning a third language easy? No of course it isn't, but when forced to by the law, most people can do it anyway (with a lot of hard work) as demonstrated by the case study of Finland - because their inability to speak fluent Swedish could severely limit their employment options.
Thus in Finland, those who aren't trilingual in Finnish, Swedish and English are confined to the worst paid jobs. Such people do exist of course but they are live in a society which believes that being trilingual is the bear minimum for everyone - indeed, many Finnish people do go on to learn a fourth language like German, Spanish, Russian or French as part of their further education. Let's contrast that to the situation in Singapore: both my sisters are fluent in Mandarin but they are forbidden from using it at work because they have Malay and Indian colleagues - speaking in Mandarin during a meeting is seen as a deliberate attempt to discriminate against their non-Chinese colleagues so their communications with their colleagues have to default to English only as not to cause any possible problems or misunderstandings at work. In Singapore, there is no incentive for many Singaporeans like my sisters to become bilingual but in Finland, there is a great incentive to become trilingual to access better employment opportunities and by the same token there's also a punishment for those who fail to become effectively trilingual. So if you live in a country which rewards people who are trilingual and punishes those who aren't, then naturally there will be a far higher portion of the population who become effectively trilingual under such circumstances as in the case of Finland. In contrast, Singapore is a lot more like the UK where everything just defaults to English and thus there's no real punishment or penalty for failing to speak another language to a very high standard - the prevailing attitude towards learning languages is usually characterized by apathy.
Case study: the ability to swim in different countries.
I think people get quite defensive and emotional when it comes to discussing whether or not they should be expected to be trilingual, especially if there is a suggestion that they're either lazy or stupid if they cannot speak a third language fluently. So let me use another analogy to illustrate how different results can occur if the rules and attitude of your society are very different on the subject matter. Like many guys who grew up in Singapore, I can swim. I'm no Joseph Schooling of course, I never swam competitively but I learnt how to swim as a child because there was a public swimming pool within walking distance from my parents' home. I also went to a secondary school where swimming was a part of PE and of course, many guys in Singapore did learn how to swim before enlisting in the army as well since we were expected to know how to swim as soldiers. But when I moved to the UK, I was really surprised to find that a lot of my friends here couldn't swim at all - there were a few reasons: there were far fewer swimming facilities even in a big city like London and swimming outdoors was really only possible during the summer months (it is way too cold for the rest of the year), so even if you lived near a pond, river or beach, most people rarely get the chance to swim unless they were particularly interested in swimming - even then, they may end up traveling quite a long way to the nearest swimming pool. So it was pretty much a personal choice whether you learnt to swim or not here in the UK, there was no real penalty for those who were simply not interested in learning how to swim. I have met many British people who were interested in other sports and regularly exercised but just never learnt how to swim - thus there's no real stigma against non-swimmers in the UK.
Let's contrast London with the neighbourhood of Kampong Ayer (literally: 'water village') in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. It is an entirely neighbourhood built on stilts over the Brunei river; I visited beautiful Kampong Ayer back in 2015 and got talking to one of the locals there who saw that I was concerned when I saw a group of young children playing by the water. The local assured me that all the kids could swim, they were all taught how to swim from a young age so if any of them fell into the water, they would not drown. You can see from the video below how the houses in Kampong Ayer are connected by narrow wooden footbridges and teaching your child to swim was far more important than teaching your child how to read and write or do mathematics! Thus in sharp contrast with kids growing up in a place like London, the parents in Kampong Ayer have to teach their kids how to swim from a very age whilst the parents in London simply do not view it with the same level of urgency and would not consider it a priority at all. Thus in Kampong Ayer, parents who have not taught their children how to swim at a young age would be considered irresponsible and even criminally negligent! But in London, if we find out that someone hasn't taught their children how to swim, the parents are not subject to the same kind of judgment because the chances of their kids falling into the river and drowning are a lot lower when you live in a concrete jungle like London. The kids living in Kampong Ayer have a far greater need to know how to swim than the kids in London, it is this need that as created the situation where they are far better swimmers than their peers in London - this is a good example of how we are a product of our environment and why we need to consider the different contexts in different countries, when trying to understand why such huge differences exist in the first place.
So back to Jon who left that message in the first place.
Jon lives in Singapore and within the context of Singapore, his ability to speak only two languages and not three is considered normal, average and acceptable. However, if he tried to apply for a job in a city like Zurich, Brussels or Helsinki, then his inability to speak a third language fluently would make him look inferior by their standards. Jon struggles to acknowledge the fact that there are very different conditions in other countries which have led to people being a lot more multilingual in those countries than in Singapore. Either he is guilty of being ignorant of what goes on in other countries like Finland and Switzerland, or he hates the idea of being considered stupid or lazy by Finnish and Swiss people so he is refusing to accept that seeming 'ordinary' folks there can master three or more languages to a high standard. Either way, there's a lot of navel gazing on his part and that's not helpful I'm afraid. An important social skill is to learn to accept inconvenient truths that may contradict your view of the world - so in Jon's case, a very simply response to that would be, "just as well I live in Singapore and not Helsinki then! In any case, I have no desire to move to Finland any time soon, it is way too cold there!" Thus what the Finns may feel about his inability to speak a third language fluently is a moot point - it doesn't matter at all. Thus he should be able to just shrug his shoulders at that thought without getting so very defensive about the whole issue. As long as he isn't considered stupid or lazy where he lives and work in Singapore, then what the Finnish or the Swiss may think about him is of no consequences; why is Jon so bothered by the fact that they would probably judge his inability to speak a third language fluently quite harshly then?
So what do you think? Why are people like Jon so surprised that different conditions in other countries have made being trilingual quite common? Are you capable of speaking three or more languages? Do you think this is only something reserved for exceptionally intelligent people or do you believe that circumstances can force ordinary folks to learn three or four languages? Do you think that the MOE in Singapore should change their stance and make a third language compulsory or should things stay as they are? Have you ever visited a truly multilingual city like Helsinki, Brussels or Bern? Why is Singapore so odd - so many languages are spoken in the city, but your average resident is usually only bilingual and would simply default to English in most cases? Why aren't Singaporeans more multilingual then? Have you ever been to Kampong Ayer in Brunei? Can circumstances really force people to become trilingual then? And finally, if Jon wants to feel great about being bilingual, then please my friend: come to the UK as most British people here are hopelessly, pathetically monolingual - he would be a genius in the language department compared to most monolingual British people! Do you have friends who are trilingual or multilingual? Leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
You don't have to be a genius. That's ridiculous. You just need immersion. People in Europe get to practise different languages because there are opportunities. I'm thinking of Switzerland in particular.
ReplyDeleteNo, MOE should not make it compulsory to leatn a third language. It should be an option. There are more important subjects to learn. Financial literacy. Life skills. Even auto repair! Global citizenship for sure.
Oh the MOE is really fucking stupid to put so much emphasis on maths and ignore the need for foreign languages. As if anyone needs maths in the real world. I work in investment banking and we're forbidden from doing any maths in banking, everything is done by computers these days to avoid human error. But what I do when I speak to the client in their language, that kind of social interaction cannot be replicated by robots or computer programmes and that's why I am earning a princely sum for what I do with languages, not maths.
DeleteHi Lift, reading your post make me change the belief that intelligence is the only factor in learning multiple languages. Motivation is a big factor too.
ReplyDeleteI can speak basic Malay, Hokkien and Cantonese but am not motivated to learn to speak those languages fluently. However, I can speak Chinese fluently as I enjoyed watching Chinese TV programmes and that is the language I speak often to my parents.
Totally agree why most Japaneses and British are monolingual. For most of them, they find no motivation to learn a second language.
I believe if MOE does not make learning a second language compulsory, SG will soon turn to another UK or Japan. I can see many Singaporean having no interest in their second language, let alone a third.
I think why MOE only allow the brightest to learn a third language for fear it will affect the grades of the core subjects.
Hi Jon, thanks for your reply. If I may make one more point please: I live in a painfully monolingual country and I've met loads of intelligent British people who are professionals in their respective fields (banking, engineering, IT, medicine etc) but they are monolingual. It's not like they are stupid and can't pick up a second/foreign language, it's just that they were never taught a second language and the system here doesn't penalize them for being monolingual. So you can have very intelligent and monolingual people here as well and I've met multilingual people who really aren't that smart. You have got to break that link between intelligence and being multilingual which I think is in your head because you're a product of the Singaporean education system.
DeleteThe key is motivation - my Mandarin sucked when I had zero motivation to learn it but when I started selling loads of fixed income products to the Taiwanese and Chinese markets, I realized, "improve your Chinese and your sales figures will increase, then you can make money money." Suddenly, there was a direct incentive for me to improve my Chinese and I made sure I studied hard to improve my Mandarin in order to earn more money. If you were in a job where there was a direct incentive to earn more money associated with a language, then you will definitely improve that language.
I think the MOE is so totally wrong in only allowing the brightest to learn a third language - for crying out aloud, maths is like the most USELESS subject in the world and yet for some stupid reason, it is considered a core subject?!??!?! Like who the hell needs maths anymore? Only a tiny portion of people need maths - I failed maths and I now earn in a month what my maths teacher earned in a year because I excel at languages and work in investment banking. The MOE is totally wrong about what should be considered core subjects.
Like don't get me started about the MOE's rationale and system, it is created by a bunch of idiots who have no fucking clue what is necessary to get a job in the real world. The MOE are staffed by a bunch of fucking losers earning pathetic amounts of money - please don't try to defend a broken system that's so flawed. I've already showed you in my article how they quite happily broke their own rules to please the Malays over Arabic as a third language, their rules make no sense and they still break their own rules. The MOE is fucking stupid. Don't defend them. Mock them. Call them fucking idiots. Insult them. But don't defend them. They are fucking losers.
I believe if you had the right motivation, you would had aced Maths. I remembered you mentioned having a horrible Maths teacher.
DeleteCould've, would've, should've - who knows. I struggled with maths because I remember being constantly being called stupid by my secondary school maths teacher. This was because he placed the blame entirely on me for not acing maths. Rather than, "oh I have failed this student, I have not done my job as a teacher in communicating the concepts to this student, I have to take responsibility for my failure and help this student do well in maths." Nah, he just 100% blamed me. Now that's just a horrific attitude to have (no matter what subject he was teaching) and fast forward 3 decades, my nephew is undergoing the same shit in JC now with horrific teachers who are calling him stupid and lazy instead of doing anything to actually help him. They are just shaming him into seeking private tuition instead of helping him. Then again, given the number of students in the class, if the teacher were to go out of their way to help every weak student, there just aren't enough waking hours in a day to help every single weak student.
DeleteHence you can see why I am angry with the MOE. I just want Singaporeans like you to accept that there are shortcomings in the system, there are many flaws and there are many cases where students are let down by the system. Defending them when they let down students doesn't help the students, it only allows those in power to get away with their terrible mistakes, creating a consequence free environment for those in charge to keep letting down the students. That's why I got upset when you tried to defend the MOE's rationale when I felt that the right thing to do is to call them out - don't defend them, say "they are wrong, the students deserve better, it is time to reexamine the system and figure out what young students need to adapt to a very different world in 2021. Let's start by talking to those in the working world who are doing the hiring and finding out what skills they are looking for in young people these days, instead of just talking amongst the teachers and others in the MOE who are so far removed from the real working world." Now that's me writing a calm and measured response with no swearing!
I think maths is important as it is useful in tech subjects eg encryption. Of course, as taught in schools, it is hard to see its usefulness in the real world
ReplyDeleteI wrote a longer comment but lost it when my internet crashed, so let's just do bullet points.
Delete1. Shouldn't we be teaching more IT type subjects like coding rather than pure maths then, so we can then include maths as part of the curriculum and easily demonstrate how relevant it is to coding and encryption rather than expect the young students to connect the dots? What if the students wanna do a job that has nothing to do with a field that requires any maths (such as what I do), should you force such students to do maths because you consider it a 'core subject'?
2. In any case, even if say I slept through all my maths lessons at school and I failed maths but I wake up one day as an adult and wanna go into encryption - I can still teach myself everything I need to know about it as an adult if I am really passionate. We're definitely NOT reliant on our teachers. Let's not overestimate the values teachers add to this process. When my family asked me to tutor my nephew for his A level economics, they asked me if I remember what I have learnt in 1993-1994 for my own A level exams and I told them, "it's like asking me to recall what I had for lunch on the 28th November 1993, there's no way I can remember, no way." But I took the time to read up on his syllabus, armed myself with all the information I need after learning everything I needed and then taught my nephew. I don't need a teacher to teach me, I roll my eyes at that thought as I think I am far more intelligent than all the teachers I have ever encountered in my life.
I still remembered during my time, in order to graduate A levels, will need at least an AO level pass in Maths, even if one is an Arts student.
DeleteI think that is unnecessary.
Aaaah you're definitely younger than me because in my day, I did 4 arts subjects + 2 S papers + GP + CL2 and yeah, I got away with avoiding maths altogether. Of course, by the same token, the science students got to avoid economics or anything to do with the arts (with the exception of GP + L2) - your situation is more like my nephew who is clearly a science student being forced to do economics.
DeleteY'know this discussion makes me think there is a certain element of "sales" to teaching, which is independent of what topic is being taught. In my case, I'm a typical nerd who loved math class growing up, but hated physical education/arts/music/etc. It is very important to be physically fit and entertaining, but I never mastered those skills growing up because sport/art/music weren't immediately interesting to me, similar to how the average child isn't immediately interested in abstract mathematical theory. Alex, I think what you're saying is that a teacher should look at a student, find out what things they like (sports/videogames/hacking into computers/etc.), then explain how the topic is related to that interest in some way. It is relatively easier to do that with one student, but not so if one has a classroom of 20 different students to teach which all get the same lesson. I see why people pay for private tuition, customized lessons to hold the attention span of the student.
DeleteHi Amanda, isn't this where parents should step in and take hold of that process, to try to help make the classroom syllabus relevant to the interest(s) of the child? A school teacher may have 100 students to handle (think 25 students x 4 classes), the teacher can barely remember the students' names but a parent probably only has a small number of children and is in a much better position to do this. In an ideal world of course, a caring parent would do this of course but we live in an imperfect world where parents are clueless and irresponsible, they're hoping for the teachers to step in and perform the task they can't do themselves. That's wholly unrealistic and irresponsible and the victims are the children.
DeleteMaybe because you had already passed Additional Maths during O levels? If I remembered correctly, if you had done that subject during O levels, then there is no need to take AO Maths for A levels.
DeleteWhy forced your nephew to take economics when he is clearly a Science student?
When I was in University as an engineering student, I was being forced to learn irrelevant subjects such as economics and life sciences.
Jon you have to bear in mind the fact that the system has evolved and changed a lot over the many years. I had also classmates in my JC who didn't do A maths at O levels but there simply wasn't the requirement for them to do AO maths at A levels - that's something that was implemented after my time, I took my A levels in 1994 and that was an awfully long time ago. The world was a different place then. As for my nephew, sigh, I didn't see the point of him being forced to do economics - he struggled with it, he spent so much time on it and he's not going to get a good grade for it. All that time could've been spent focusing on his sciences and maths so he could have aced his A levels, but that's just the way it is in Singapore these days. He's never ever going to become good at economics so why force him to learn that subject?
DeleteThe Singlish phrase that comes to mind is "last time mata wear shorts one" - literally, it referred to the fact that the police in Singapore used to wear shorts as part of their uniforms, which was khaki brown instead of the dark blue you see today. We use that phrase to point out that Singapore has changed a lot and what used to be true many decades ago is no longer true today, because conditions, circumstances and rules have changed a lot over time. Would it surprise you? After all, did you really think the current system was the same system that was used a few decades ago? No, the MOE's system has evolved and changed slowly over the years, hence "last time mata wear shorts one". You probably weren't even born yet in 1994 when I took my A levels and Singapore was a very different place back then!
DeleteMind you, that old khaki uniform was really hideous. Thank goodness they redesigned it to give our police force a bit more dignity by giving them a nicer uniform!
DeleteOh yeah London is full of people from other places who have come here for work - there's this lady in my gym whose mother is Polish, father is French and she works here, so she speaks 3 languages fluently. But people like that are in the minority but more to the point, she grew up in France and was educated there, not here. The British education system doesn't penalize people who are monolingual-English speaking quite unlike other European systems. If you're a local attending university in Slovenia for example, you can't expect all the research material in the library to be in your local language Slovenian - you are expected to master English to a high enough standard to be able to access books, research materials, news reports, research papers etc in English to widen the sources of your knowledge.
ReplyDeleteBut when I encounter British people who were brought up here, with two British parents and educated entirely in the UK, it is really rare that they are totally fluent in even a second language. The usual response was, "yeah I did some French at school but I can't remember any of it as I've not had to use it in years, so I'm effectively monolingual today I suppose." But people like that aren't penalized at all in the UK, they are perfectly okay within the UK. Yeah multilingual people are indeed rewarded by employers but monolingual people (who are in the majority in this country, rather than cosmopolitan London) are in the majority here and they're not penalized for being monolingual.
Oh there's another guy at my gym: father is Polish, mother is English, but he is completely monolingual today because he didn't get to do Polish academically as a subject at school (it just wasn't available back in the day as a second language), so his father did speak to him a little in Polish but he never really picked it up and his father wasn't a good language teacher in any case. So in the end, he just ended up totally monolingual and his vocabulary in Polish is limited to the basics like saying hello, please, thank you, good bye and that's it. His father didn't really make an effort to pass the language on as he didn't see the value of it. Kinda sad really but that is the kind of situation that one would find in the UK.
ReplyDeleteOh and the irony about this monolingual guy who is half Polish, his father gave him such a Polish sounding name full of those big Polish consonant clusters szcz grz tch djz etc - if you looked just at his name + surname, it screams Polish Polish Polish.
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