COVID may have been the hot topic in 2021, but education was not far behind in terms of issues discussed. Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) was in the headlines throughout the year for all the wrong reasons. From sexuality to school safety to student and teacher well-being, education played second fiddle only to COVID with at least one newsworthy happening every other month.
Starting the year off with a series of undesirable mentions in January was a Reddit post that directed accusations at MOE for interfering in a transgender student’s hormonal treatments that went viral. The MOE denied the claim.
Mothership published a headline on Jan 16, ‘MOE says it did not stop transgender student from hormonal treatment following viral Reddit post’, which then brought the issue to the common man. This was swiftly followed by a protest in front of MOE’s Buona Vista HQ on 26 Jan in which 3 people were subsequently arrested. For breaking the law, 6 people were eventually issued with warnings for their involvement in the protest.
Mounting Pressure n MOE
By February, WP’s Jamus Lim was questioning then Minister for Education Lawrence Wong in parliament as to whether MOE intended to systematically compile preferred gender pronouns for students, subject to the consent of parents, and to ensure that teachers respect such pronoun usage in class.
By now, the main critique of the left and pro-LGBTQ groups was that MOE was being abusive or harmful toward transgender children. The debate raged for a couple of months online with pro-family advocates being cancelled and naysayers doxxed online in tit-for-tat keyboard wars.
Coffeeshop talk of the transgender debate had barely died down when the next damaging headline, ‘Primary school teacher jailed 8 months for sexually exploiting 14-year-old former tuition student’ appeared on 25 May. Teacher’s trustworthiness and integrity was once again called into question, in what seemed like a commonplace affair of educators involved in sexual misconduct involving students making the local news. Who needs The New Paper’s sensationalism when major news outlets routinely publish similar stories.
Quick on the heels of this was the most tragic incident for education yet, on 20 Jul, with the murder of a 13 year old River Valley High School student in the hands of his 16-year-old senior in the school toilet. The unimaginable had happened in Singapore schools, and a panic of parents ensued with questions on school safety and security.
Foreign scenes of school shootings and stabbings in the US started to flood the imagination of the public here in Singapore and suddenly mental health and well-being of both students and teachers came to the forefront of discussions with Channel News Asia reacting swiftly with a Talking Point special on dealing with trauma 3 days after the incident on 23 Jul, by convening a panel of experts for a panel discussion with host Steven Chia. The fallout was huge and Minister Chan Chun Seng had to address parliament in a ministerial speech on 27 Jul.
MOE was swift to respond to the RV incident with student well-being lesson packages and new SOPs developed for schools. Minister Chan got out in front of the issue of teacher well-being in his Teacher’s Day speech on 2 Sep and cited the old adage, ‘one cannot pour from an empty cup’, emphasising to teachers that ‘Your own well-being matters too.’ A slew of new initiatives to care for teachers followed from MOE’s yearly School’s Workplace Seminar in September.
MOE’s woes were not over however. On 22 Sept, The Straits Times published ‘More than 80% of S’pore teachers say Covid-19 pandemic has hurt their mental health: Survey’. ST subsequently published a heart-wrenching forum article, ‘My wife’s a teacher. Can I have her back with the family please?’ in which a husband detailed the woes of losing his wife, an educator with MOE, through her constant managing of COVID situations in school. It further highlighted the burnt out and overworked education sector reeling from two years of COVID style schooling. Fortunately, measures are in place to address this pressing concern.
Anxiety of Conservative Parents
While the year started with the political left haranguing MOE about transgender rights, other Singaporeans keenly sensitive to western culture-war attempts at prematurely sexualising children in schools also took sharp issue with MOE. November was the month in which conservative chat groups exploded with forwarded WhatsApp messages claiming that MOE had started to teach the recognition of homosexuality and bisexuality as part of normal sexual orientation in its Secondary 2 Sexuality Education syllabus.
The accusations against MOE included the lack of consultation with parents, sneaking in a controversial syllabus without public knowledge and forcing religious schools and teachers to teach the curriculum with no alternative or choice. How the message originated remains unknown, but with a quick fact check online, one could easily verify that this was not the truth. Unfortunately, paranoid parents had already caused the message to go viral and the excitement only quelled after about a month through some good Samaritans sending corrective messages countering the accusations.
What an eventful year for MOE and we had not even mentioned the 17-year-old student who was convicted in court on 17 Dec for uploading multiple screenshots from upskirt videos his schoolmates had filmed of his teacher whom he deemed had not cared enough for him. That last article basically summed up the year for education and schools in 2021.
These and all the other yet unmentioned articles on school COVID clusters and student infections and vaccinations. And let’s not get started on the CCE lessons.
The Singaporean obsession with education apparently doesn’t end with just good grades and academic success nowadays.
Taking a Step Back
So what is happening with Singapore education? Is our system broken or failing? Is MOE really the bad guy?
Let’s take a step back and re-examine what’s been going on. For a start lets roll back to 2020. When COVID first hit, many countries instituted a hard lock down. Schools closed, public gatherings ceased. You couldn’t even visit your dead relatives at the cemetery. Singapore initially resisted but then eventually we turned to our own circuit breaker. But in all this, we were one of the few, if not, the only education system to keep schools running, both online and in person. We had schools running for the past two years while some countries have yet to conduct a lesson in the same period. What it tells me is that MOE and our educators were adaptable, flexible and quick to respond to changes and needs. By 2021, every secondary and junior college student had gotten a personal learning device (PLD) to ensure continuity of education. With money and sheer will, we made the impossible possible while other countries continued to argue whether allowing schools to reopen was safe or not.
Beyond that, the accolades must go to personnel in schools. From the management to the teaching staff and the uncles and aunties who do everything from maintenance to cleaning and running canteen stalls. A whole army of sacrificial individuals who kept an entire ecosystem moving despite the circumstances. Do you see any bad guys here?
While the left is continually bashing our conservative education system for not opening up quickly enough to catch up with Western notions of diversity and recognition, the ones on the right are quick to lay accusations of wrongdoing by MOE that go against their values. What this really tells me is that MOE is right where its supposed to be a centre-neutral entity. Fending off growing political pressures from both sides of the divide, MOE is trying hard to stay its course of walking the middle path. There is no illusion here. Indeed as Freire eludes to, all education is political. In MOE’s case, the goal is to be politically centred.
A Personal Appeal
I would like to reason with the left, lend your sway somewhere else. Let the educators do their jobs of developing critical minds. In time to come, when those minds grow up, they can decide for themselves where they stand on issues. A constant politicising of the education system doesn’t do anyone any good. An observation of the current divide in the US is a window to what our world could potentially become. Is that what you really want?
To the conservatives, especially the parents, let me plead with you. Parent well. MOE is not the parent of your child, you are. A good foundation at home sets your child up for life. Studies have shown that. The biggest influence a child has is their parents. That’s why you can go to a mission school and still use swear words; or come from an ordinary public school and still be a successful businessman. Parents set the example, right or wrong, and schools cannot replace parents in the teaching of moral or ethical values. Students who have a parent who smokes is more likely to be a future smoker, regardless of the school stand. Same goes for lying, cheating, heroism or kindness.
To all of us, let’s give MOE a break. Let’s take time to applaud our educators rather than put them down. This isn’t a perfect system, but at least lets we have a system that’s up and running and trying to do its best in difficult times. It doesn’t need additional political pressures pressing on an already strained system. Maybe you would like to take some time to say thank you by visiting the Gratitude Portal at Thankyoucher.edu.sg and submit a message of appreciation instead.
