Stepping off a single track of excellence
I was a rat on the academic treadmill at an elite school. At the tail end of 14, I was told that since I had good grades, I should take the Triple Science track.
So I did, and that’s by far one of the worst decisions in my life.
I couldn’t remember what kind of test it was, but the subject was Physics.
Our teacher had asked those who scored below B3 to stand up.
The scoring system goes like this: A1, A2, B3, B4, C5, C6, D7, E8, F9. The less the number, the more worthy you are.
And yes, to stand up. The kind of punishment that’s more often meted out to students who have wronged the system; we’ve wronged the system.
By not scoring A1 or, at the very least, A2.
He then suggested that we should consider going to Polytechnics rather than Junior Colleges after graduation.
The latter is conventionally regarded as worthier. We were not as worthy.
I remembered feeling my face burning with shame.
I was then a rat on the academic treadmill at an elite school; I was supposed to feel ashamed for failing the system; I was marked as an anomaly.
If the present me could return to that moment, I would have asked my teacher:
1) Why did he make us stand up?
2) What did he hope to achieve with the intentional student segmentation?
3) What made him think that not getting A1 or A2 in one subject for a single test means that you probably can’t make it to the highest education?
When I was telling this story at a team learning session for Singapore’s Ministry of Education, I realised that chances are, my then-teacher only knew one way of excellence.
After all, he was the standard product of this very education system, fed back into it to produce more copies of him.
So of course, he applied centrifugal separation to distinguish those that looked like him on paper and those that didn’t – the latter shouldn’t go to where he came from; they wouldn’t be able to.
One way of existence, one definition of success, one worldview.
The alarming singularity in an elite school environment.
