Channelnewsasia.com reports Mr. Tharman Shanmugratnam’s - Singapore’s Education Minister - remarks on how the new fuzziness in Singapore’s education system is a good thing. An excerpt:

The Singapore education system is going through a major shift, from one that is heavily standardized to one that provides more room for different talents to grow.

And you don’t have to be exam-smart to get ahead in such a landscape.

As the system moves from one that is based on exam meritocracy to one that is based on talent meritocracy, fuzziness is the new buzz word.

“A certain fuzziness that comes when you move from a system that is about efficiency, to a system that is about choice. And I think that fuzziness is good, it blurs the identity, blurs the definition, no one is about a label, no one is about which stream he is in. He or she is about a set of talents that need to be nurtured,” said Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, in an exclusive interview with Channel NewsAsia.

Normally, I would say that exercises such as these tend to increase the workload already put on students (such as Singapore’s shift from a six-day week to a five-day week). But, given the Mr. Tharman’s remarks, it is nice to see that I could be wrong:

But the Minister made it clear that schools have the flexibility to decide if they want some of these changes.

He explained: “We want schools to decide, we want students to decide. These are not top-down initiatives, they are ground up and we will support them from the top.

Mr Tharman also said more electives, ranging from digital media to business classes now available at the polytechnics and Institutes of Technical Education, will soon be offered to secondary students.

Yet, why do I feel so discouraged when I see these kind of sentences cropping in:

And if all goes well, they could start earning polytechnic diploma credits from secondary one.

Mr Tharman said: “We are not keen on accelerated learning, in other words, having students study early what they will otherwise study later on and then graduate earlier.

“But we are keen on providing enrichment and providing opportunities for you to learn more within the same period of time.”

But in modern education, I would say that more fluidity is an improvement over rigidity, even if the “…choice can be a little confusing.”:

Aside from fuzziness, the Education Minister says flexibility and fluidity will be other defining characteristics of the Singapore education system.

Mr Tharman said: “When you add it all up, it becomes a more complex picture because you are not just talking about three or four streams with thick black lines drawn between them.

“You are talking about more intermingling, more fluidity between the streams. And choice can be a little confusing.”

The later parts of the article concern the potential elitism that arises from schools that exercise talent meritocracy:

Another key education change is that there are now more pathways to secondary schools.

43 secondary schools exercised Direct School Admissions or DSA this year, up from seven last year.

This meant that over 2,000 primary school students got a confirmed place in these schools on the strength of their special talents and aptitudes, even before sitting for their Primary Six Leaving Examinations (PLSE).

For these students, the PSLE results were not as important as before.

And the DSA was not limited to just the integrated programme schools.

Ten mainstream schools took in 5 percent of their students based on discretionary admissions and this number is set to go up in the coming years.

Mr Tharman said: “The DSA has been a major innovation and it is working well. It is about moving from an exam meritocracy to a talent meritocracy. If we stick only with the national exams as a means of entry into secondary school, it is transparent and simple but it will tend to narrow our definition of talent and it will tend to narrow our definition of success.”

Mr Tharman also responded to feedback that some feel the DSA scheme is elitist, with top talents getting a head start in top secondary schools.

Mr. Tharman answers this with:

He pointed out that after the DSA exercise, well over 80 per cent of the places in these schools were still available for the main secondary school posting exercise after the PSLE results were out.

But the NUS High School, which specialises in maths and science, was the exception.

It took in most of its students through the DSA.

Still, Mr Tharman pointed out that 130 of its Secondary One students next year come from over 60 schools.

This, he said, was “a very broad representation.”

Mr Tharman added: “So these are not elitist schemes, they are schemes to find students with talents wherever they come from. And the students who got into NUS High using the DSA value this scheme. Not all of them would have done outstandingly in the PSLE. But they have a special talent in science and maths.

“So that’s the way to go, we have introduced flexibility and fluidity but keep the PSLE as the mainstay for admission into secondary schools. The balance is about right, we will review it in a few years’ time. But it is working out quite well so far.”

Well, he has a point. If schools do really start basing admissions on other than intellectual talent, i.e. not maths and science, I’ll accept this new fuzziness as a good thing. At the moment, there are just too few schools doing so.