The Seeds of Tomorrow's Tragedy of Thailand ?

Below an article from the New York Times describing Singapore's educational
system.

One of my saddest perceptions here in LOS is that the educational system is a
massive failure, and the stage is being set for millions of young people to
emerge into adulthood without the skills and information they need to compete in
what is becoming the "Global Village," let alone the S.E. Asian region + China.

~o:37;

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 16, 2005

Singapore

Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week
its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's
compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could
finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the
Olympics of online war games.

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with
nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why,
although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of
the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been
introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands
that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere,
it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay
ahead of everyone - including us.

Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are
racing us to the top.

As Low-Sim Ay Nar, principal of Xinmin Secondary School, explained to
me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold. No one is going to
outdrill her students. What it is now focusing on is how to develop
more of America's strength: getting Singaporean students and teachers
to be more innovative and creative. "Numerical skills are very
important," she told me, but "I am now also encouraging my students
to be creative - and empowering my teachers. ... We have been
loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas."

She added, "We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making
use of the content" on the principle that "knowledge can be created
in the classroom and doesn't just have to come from the teacher."
Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching
program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai,
India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan,
in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge
University.

With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education
specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were
a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids,
or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math,
wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment
tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to
fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't
it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together
with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any
teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her
classroom? That's HeyMath.

"No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the
world are worried that their kids might be missing something," Mrs.
Sankaran said. "For some it is the right rigor, for some it is
creativity. There is no perfect system. ... What we have tried to do
is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices
for teaching math concepts. So a teacher might say: 'I have a problem
teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in
India or Shanghai?' "

Singaporean math textbooks are very good. My daughter's school
already uses them in Maryland. But they are static and not
illustrated or animated. "Our lessons contain animated visuals that
remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity
for students to understand concepts in a 'hands on' manner and make
connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant,"
Mrs. Sankaran said.

HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google - to establish a Web-based
platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the
"best teacher in the world" for every math concept and to also be
able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.

The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions,
indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising
homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by
animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it
provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath, which has been
adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online
tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on
homework.

Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to
innovation and power in today's world, and American parents had
better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in
math are not resting on their laurels.


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