Singapore will no longer rank children based on exams

Anoushka Beh: Well, students take [a test] when they are in their sixth year of formal primary education and they get an aggregate score. Once this is achieved, then it determines what secondary school they’re streamed into. So, you can imagine, it’s very important in a culture where tests are considered a very high priority.

It comes off the back of a change in sentiment, which is very much an emphasis on the joy of learning, which I can tell you wasn’t prevalent when I was growing up, going to local school here, which I did for some years.

If you look at some of the statistics there, have been increasing instances of kids speaking out about stress levels. You’re looking at an average of 2,400 new cases at their clinics each year, [according to] the IMH, the Institute of Mental Health in Singapore. These are new cases of students coming in because of school-related stress. You have instances of very, very, very sad cases … I think there was a case in 2016 of a young boy who committed suicide. He jumped from his 17th-story apartment after failing his midterm exams and being incredibly frightened to tell his parents.

It’s a really good question. Anxiety is twofold — what you have is an impact on the child’s emotions, so you may have children who present with depression, helplessness, fear, anger, irritability, and a lack of motivation. On a physiological level, though, because the body is essentially perceiving that there’s a threat — this threat can be the threat of failure — the body goes into fight-or-flight. What you can experience is a racing heartbeat, sweating, sleep disruption, panic attacks, difficulty concentrating, and, in the long term, adrenal fatigue. So, it’s very damaging on a physiological level.

To be clear, it’s not that I don’t endorse it — I do. I just feel that there is perhaps a bigger shift that’s required. I went to local school in Singapore for 10 years. I then shifted into an international school and went to America for university. And it wasn’t until I went to the United States that I understood the joy of learning that is really at the heart of why we go to school. And that’s essentially to learn and not purely about how you’re performing on a test. Now, obviously, the shift away from taking tests to evaluate students is an important thing that’s happening. But that shift also has to occur in the hearts and the minds of people on a cultural level.