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The S$1.4 billion question: What is tuition really costing Singaporeans?

That Singaporean families spent S$1.4 billion last year — up from S$820 million a decade ago — should give us all pause for thought and provoke us to ask further questions of what is increasingly a structural feature of our education system: The so-called shadow education industry.

Where exactly is the S$1.4 billion being spent on tuition a year going, the author asks.

Where exactly is the S$1.4 billion being spent on tuition a year going, the author asks.

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That Singaporean families spent S$1.4 billion last year — up from S$820 million a decade ago — should give us all pause for thought and provoke us to ask further questions of what is increasingly a structural feature of our education system: The so-called shadow education industry.

Certainly, we can do with more details on the pattern of spending on a phenomenon that is a source of anxiety, frustration and ire among Singaporeans, and which is bundled up in the broader discourse on inequality, privilege, meritocracy and competition in society.

According to the latest Household Expenditure Survey released by the Department of Statistics in late July, the average monthly amount spent on tuition is S$88.40 as compared to the S$70.90 of six years ago. But this is not particularly instructive.

Far more useful would be information such as the range of what families spent. It is likely that the highest amount spent in some households is probably, by several orders of magnitude, greater than the least amount spent. Motivations also matter: Is it to get a child from a failing grade to a decent pass, or is it to turn the 90 mark into 99?

And when you consider the fact that some households cannot even afford to be in the tuition arms race (although I acknowledge that many households who can afford to be in the game eschew tuition as a matter of choice), one starts to see how education has come to be one of the fronts on which the battle for fairness and access is fought.

I use the term “arms race” deliberately because it describes any competition in which there is no absolute or intrinsic objective to attain, but only the relative goal of staying ahead of your competitors.

I find the metaphor apt here because an arms race takes on a life of its own and naturally escalates, and “winning” the arms race takes the form of outspending and bankrupting your competitors, and yet the winner finds himself in a position that is usually no different from if he had never triggered the arms race in the first place.

The economics of it aside, the more important question is where exactly the S$1.4 billion is going. What is it being spent on? Is it mostly going towards procuring more of what the schools are already providing, that is, more English, more mathematics, more science, more Mother Tongue, and so on?

In other words, more is better. And why might this be the case given the repeated assurances from schools that what is taught in the classrooms is adequate?

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Tuition has ballooned to a S$1.4b industry in Singapore. Should we be concerned?

Or is more of it going to new subjects that have just been introduced in the education system?

By this I mean the soft skills and traits that we all agree our children need but currently lack, such as creativity, imagination and so on. Hence, more is different. If the latter, and if we assume that the price tag on these avant-garde skills is significantly higher than "plain vanilla" tuition, then it invariably raises the question of access and advantage.

How mainstream can these skills and traits be — which we now deem necessary for the brave new disruptive world — when the acquisition of them may well be beyond the means of many households, and indeed those who might need them most?

The perennial and now billion-dollar question in all of this is the purpose of education. I suppose that, especially in these disruptive times, education ought to, on the one hand, develop skills and knowledge, and on the other, impart this far more elusive thing which we could call wisdom.

Education must balance between pragmatism and idealism. It ought to ready our youths, or whoever avails himself or herself of the education system at whatever age, for working life. But it also ought to be formative: Forming our students as whole human beings, as socio-cultural and political beings, beyond being mere economic agents.

True, Singapore is reforming the education system by moving away from rote learning, de-emphasising examinations, and tweaking how we stream students. But the deeply-embedded societal operating system based on competitiveness is difficult to uninstall.

We remain largely wedded to practical and immediate outcomes, such as getting that first job, getting quickly re-employed if retrenched (ideally you would even pre-empt retrenchment), and so forth.

In Singapore, we have clearly gone all in with skills. The watchwords in education policy these days are “lifelong learning”, “skills” and variants such as “re-skilling” and “up-skilling”, and “relevance” — and rightly so. The world is becoming such a complex place that the baseline technical knowledge needed to survive, if not thrive, increases exponentially. The entry barriers are getting higher all the time.

But while technical skills, usually taken to mean the easier-to-examine Stem subjects, are necessary, they are not sufficient. A technocracy sans wisdom, imagination, and critical thinking would not only be soul-crushingly dull, but outright destructive.

With fake news, the ability to evaluate arguments in order to reasonably assent to or dissent from them becomes even more important. How would critical thinking be taught in a tuition classroom that is driven mostly by the economic imperative? Or, for that matter, in a school classroom?

Or take imagination. Imagination can start out chaotic, unstructured, individual, irreverent, and neither right nor wrong. And, worse, it can stay that way too. All these qualities are highly inconvenient to an education bureaucracy whose work in large part consists of assessing and ranking.

Imagination requires space and time to stew and simmer, to explore and to emerge; imagination dies in the crucible of intense competition. It is ironic that we might have tuition classes for imagination driven by a spirit of competitiveness.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Adrian W J Kuah, a father of three school-going sons, works in the higher education sector. This is his personal comment.

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