Whose problem is it?

When I was doing my master in early childhood education in the year 2004, I had to write a paper based on a research project that I did. The paper "How to teach low-income Malay parents mathematics to their K2 children" was an unpublished report, but I gave a copy to Mendaki, as Mendaki assisted me and my research partner by giving us four families to research on.

I don't know whether the paper was ever read, or made any significant impact to Mendaki. Having four case studies is definitely not a significant sample size, but it was enough to draw some interesting conclusions. In fact, the families that we had to work with were not really low-income. At that time, they were known as the "new poor", a term coined by our community leaders to reflect those breadwinners who have lost their job during the economic downturn.

In my report, I also reported some previous research done by Mendaki, AMP and Sinda especially in the 80s. Apart from the similar problems like low income, low education, big family size, small flat, Sinda also reported structural problems in our education system. The report by Sinda, if I can remember correctly, was spearheaded by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

When Mr Tharman became the minister for education, I believed he made significant changes to the education policies. Perhaps it was his way of removing some of the structural problems that his team had identified in the report. I felt that during his reign, he actually created many new opportunities and paths for the diverse abilities and talents in Singapore. I believed he understood that "no one size fits all", and that not everyone is gifted academically and being talented in other areas like the arts and sports should be considered a gift as well. Now, by removing some of these structural problems in the education policies, Mr Tharman allowed low-attainers and low-scorers to have other avenues to move forward. He did not do it simply to create opportunities for his Indian community but for all low-achievers in this country. Now, the Indians have made significant progress in the range of 70% passes in mathematics but we have not. Why is that so?

Let's remove the racial categorisation for a while, and figure what should and could be done to these low-achievers. Isn't it a national problem rather than a racial problem eventhough the profile of these low-achievers are somewhat large in the Malay community? What should our ministry of education do to make the number of low-achievers small, and the drop-out rate even smaller?

Whose problem is it? A national or a racial one? Let's not even bother to point fingers but let's work on this education problem of the low-achievers together.