If I had a child, I would not subject her to mainstream schooling in Singapore. Perhaps if we were living in a country like Finland, I would happily send her off to school there. But not in Singapore. In Singapore, we don’t have enough of an emphasis on play, and way too much emphasis on high-stakes examinations, to the point where even young children have problems with managing stress. Unlike other (potential) parents who may have a harder time making such a decision, my fiancée and I are (happily and fortunately) uniquely qualified for the challenge of homeschooling; she is naturally better with young children and has a training in psychology, and I am naturally better with teenagers, being a private tutor and all that. I imagine that my child would be an elite performer (if not a prodigy) in any academic area, given the combined knowledge and experience of her parents.

My main concern with schooling in Singapore is that it tends to kill the love of learning and encourages instead the habit of slavishly looking for the “correct answer”. With so many of my students, I have to repeatedly remind them to trust their own instincts when answering questions, even after we have successfully demonstrated that they already have the ability to think for themselves (I sometimes tell them: haha, you got your brain hammered out of you by Singapore’s system). It is in early childhood that parents and teachers can make a pivotally significant impact on a child’s learning process, and I don’t trust the system here in Singapore to do the job for me. The teacher turnover rate remains worrying because it means that my child would be less likely to have the good fortune of being taught by a well-trained and experienced teacher. I was lucky to have a very experienced teacher myself in Primary One — she was perceptive enough to realise I wasn’t enjoying primary school — but I wonder how many of such teachers are left in the system in Singapore.

The love of learning and developing a “bullshit detector” (Neil Postman’s words) would form the bedrock of my homeschooling approach. A story my father enjoys telling is instructive. As a young child, he would play near and in longkangs (storm drains), catching guppies and spiders and whatnot. One day, he saw a creature swimming in the water, and wondered: what’s this strange fish with legs? Upon arriving home, he asked his father what that creature was, thereby learning what frogs are. This is exactly how I want my child to learn. Of course, my father was wrong when he labelled the frog a “fish with legs”. In schools here, instead of spending a day outdoors developing his innate curiosity and fulfilling his need for play, he might have been asked to label a series of black-and-white drawings of animals on a worksheet. He might have labelled a picture of a frog as a fish, and gotten a huge red cross on his work for that (WRONG WRONG WRONG screams the red ink). But he already loved learning, as children naturally do when given a loving, nurturing environment. As children get older, they also need to develop the ability to judge thoughts, ideas, beliefs, statements, and so on, against evidence. They need to be able to tell what is trustworthy, and what is not. Again, with mainstream schooling’s obsession with getting the “correct answer”, this ability is often hammered out of children. The heuristic students often end up using is the question: does the teacher think this is right? My father might have thought that all creatures that swum in water could be called fishes, but he could have asked himself: I swim in water, but I’m not a fish, so what is this? In a larger sense, the question we want children to ask when engaging the world is: does this make sense? (Does it make sense to label all things that swim in water “fishes”?)

Beyond the pedagogical concerns, there are extremely mundane objections I have with the system here, including school start times. There will also be other concerns with homeschooling (Where will my child’s friends come from? Will we go crazy? Will I still be able to work as I do now?), but the mainstream education system here is one that I am loath to send my child to. It inflicts all kinds of unnecessary pain on children here and avoids inflicting the necessary disciplines on them. For now, the decision whether or not to homeschool my (theoretical) child remains theoretical; I can only hope that the system here improves in the meantime.