Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Commentary on Loss

Commentary on Loss

I do agree with Grayling’s point about how loss is inevitable and we must be prepared to lose in order to gain- that is, to embrace life and not limit yourself to perennial paranoia. Also, I agree with how one should not resort to apathy as a means to solve conflict.

In Grayling’s article, he offers a perspective of how loss is inevitable and it is precisely because of this that we must be prepared to lose. However, we cannot be afraid and remain in paranoia all our life; instead, we should let go of all our reservations about fearing loss and take daring step in all endeavours. Indeed, loss happens to all of us and it is inevasible, hence, we must life preparing to lose. It is only when we lose and experience failure of the modern world that we can gain invaluable lessons in life. For example, modern day Singapore is facing an array of losses, namely loss of local brains, loss of culture, loss of political will, loss of compassion, loss of values and loss of freedom. Of course, these are but a few of the losses we have faced. Despite the government’s best efforts in attempting to retain native intelligence, scholarship bonds for example, local talents still stray away from the Singaporean route and instead go to other countries to live and work. Thus, because of such a loss, the Singaporean government has more than willingly been accepting the influx of other countries. This is to the extent that the social image of Singapore is depicted by a Caucasian family as shown in “Time”.

However, this attempt to tackle the loss of native intelligence has taken yet another toll in Singapore- loss of culture. With the massive onslaught of citizens from around the globe coming to live in Singapore, it does not take a genius or even a truckload of them to understand why Singapore has one of the most unfiltered social influxes. As such, these global citizens manage to bring their own cultures from around the globe to Singapore.

And again, to deal with this problem, the Singapore government introduces a common ideal in Singaporeans, National Education. With this implementation, National Education educates Singaporeans about living in harmony and that we are all equal despite race and religion(perhaps skin colour) by the means of National Education messages, of which I can only remember one: No one owes Singapore a living. I regard this as an extremely interesting ideal to tell every Singaporean to be individualistic which unifies a common sentiment in Singapore and this is in the hope of resolving cultural conflicts.

However, does this not let us lose our political will and identity? This is where and when Singaporeans become so individualistic and apathetic such that we do not act upon our political ideals. Modern day Singapore is where it is now because it has our government pushing it forward. Should these people who make up the parliament not exist, there would not be the Integrated Resort springing up on our skyline.

As such, we can see such a loss-solution-loss-solution method of reacting to loss is inappropriate because other losses will spring up as a result from the solution to the initial loss.

Returning to the apathetic Singaporean, this is what we see as a result of fear to experience conflict. National Education only serves the superficial exterior of living in harmony. It highlights only skin colour and race as differences but if we delve deeper, we will realise things are not as simple as the government puts forward to us. To neglect the depth of racial conflict and understanding is to equip Singaporeans with the bare minimum of harmonious survival. However, I do acknowledge that with more understanding, there is the probability of more conflict. And this is what the Singapore government is afraid of. The perceived (perhaps too commonly) paradigm that conflict will only result in war, riots, strikes, or protest movements has to be reconsidered. We cannot trade our political and social ideals for economic growth, which is what Singapore is doing now. Instead, we must understand that conflict is good if we intend to have a resolution. We have to realise that apathy is but a short term mean to deal with this. However, if we have conflict, we can, through conflict, reach a resolution about a particular loss. And this is long-term. The Singaporean government is unwilling to educate Singaporeans about a deeper understanding of racial differences because of their fear of losing economic stability. However, as established previously, we cannot be afraid to lose. We must accept it as part of life and from the loss, move and reach a resolution. To be afraid of losing economic stability is to be cowardly. Instead, we should educate the people about such differences to advocate a better change in society in the long-run. Although this might hold true, we must first accept and understand that allowing conflict comes with faith; Faith that could turn out for the better or take the less desirable path. Simply put, a risk factor is present. But, and this is a big but, we must accept loss if the undesirable happens and learn from it. We cannot be seeing that such a risk is too big to handle and avoid it. We must dare to take chances.

In conclusion, I feel that a loss is inevitable in life and we must definitely be able to understand the risk and the price of allowing loss to occur and learn from it. The current political and social situation in Singapore cannot remain apathetic for long if Singapore wants to prosper and grow in the long-term. Singapore must experience loss and experience conflict, and from there, emerge a stronger and deeper Singapore, with a brighter future of modern day survival.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Loss by A.C Grayling

Loss

A.C. Grayling writes dd

1 It is a grateful fact of human psychology that we forget our suffering. We do not forget that we suffered, but we do expunge the felt quality of the experience as it actually occurred. Life would be unbearable otherwise, beset by too-readily rekindled pain as sharp as its first appearance. Perhaps the agony of Borges’ character Funes the Memorious, the man who could not forget nothing, lay as much in his capacity to relive the raw quality of suffering as in the burden of his inability to erase millions of trivial memories.

2 But we do not forget our losses, because loss- especially of those we love, or of crucial places or things- reshapes our world, and obliges us to learn again the task of navigating it. Absence is a large presence; a gap in the familiar array of people who matter to us, or in the usual events which make the pattern of our lives, is a far bigger space than one imagined possible until it appears. For that reason bereavement, divorce, loss of a job, loss of a home- the major losses- are the most stressful and distressing of all experiences. And they can happen with such a cruel suddenness that they make us lose other things besides: faith in the world, confidence in ourselves.

3 Common wisdom sees that a preparedness to lose is a necessary condition of gain. Naturally enough, most hope they can escape the condition, which makes loss more bitter when it occurs. It is hard to accept that to live is to lose- and that the only way to gain what matters is to accept these facts with courage.

4 It was against the devastating effects of loss that the Stoic philosophers of antiquity tried to arm people by their teachings, given the uncertainty of everything in life except the inevitability that we will lose some of what we most cherish. When we fall in love, for example, we do not think that we will one day lose the beloved; but so we will, as surely as the sun rises every day- through death at last, if our loves are deep; or through the mischances of growing apart, changing, finding new loves, losing old hope, and accumulating too many misunderstandings. Such is life, and even the brightest optimist has to accept the fact.

5 Accordingly, the Stoic thinkers advised their fellows to possess only what they would not mind losing. Montaigne learned from them to think as he did, he wrote, ‘I love not to know an account of what I have, that I may less exactly feel mu losses.’ The point was an instance of the more general one that since we have little control over external events, we must learn to govern ourselves instead; the less we desire, the less we base our serenity or satisfaction on what happens outside us, and therefore the less our loss will be when the inevitabilities occur.

6 But although this teaching was designed to help people bear vicissitudes bravely, and in its inspiration is one of the tenderest and most thoughtful of philosophies, it misses a very important point. This is that if one is frugal with one’s emotions- limiting love in order to avoid its pains, stifling appetites and desires in order to escape the price of their fulfilment- one lives a stunted, muffles, bland life only. It is practically tantamount to a partial death in order to minimise the electric character of existence- its pleasures, its ecstasies, its richness and colour matched by its agonies, its disasters and grief. To take life in armfuls, to embrace and accept it, to leap into it with energy and relish, is of course to invite trouble of all the familiar kinds. But the cost of avoiding trouble is a terrible one: it is the cost of having trodden the planet for humanity’s brief allotment of less than a thousand months, without having really lived.

7 Alas, the teachings of Stoic philosophers have been almost prophetic as the modern man embraces apathy as a means to cope with their emotion discontent or dull the outrage they feel as others trespass upon each man’s moral territory. In a near apocalyptic demise of expectations and standards modern man manages his loss by simply not being man. And like the leper who does not know he has lost yet another finger, the modern world remains oblivious to how it will lose yet another heart.

(p.s i could not find the online version as i only had the hardcopy, so i typed it out)

Friday, May 30, 2008

sigh, post number 2- Democracy Creates Stability in Society

Democracy is considered the ideal method of governance in modern countries of the twenty first century to create stability. However, in this commentary, I would like to disagree by focusing on one main aspect of stability: social stability. This is in which the people of a country are at rest and conflicts are not present in the country, be it underlying or prominent.

To employ democracy would mean that every individual can make a good informed judgement of political matters concerning their country for themselves. Thus, we can see this is rather much dependent on the literacy rate of the country. That is, if the literacy rate is high, the citizens in that country would tend to be more informed about their say in politics. Democracy in a country would mean fair treatment to all, regardless of race, language or religion. Furthermore, the people of the society can have voting through pure democracy, in which everybody votes on policies per se and the majority wins (referendum) ; or representative democracy, where the people nominate a representative to voice their opinion on state issues.

In this case, I tend to think that democracy merely leads to social stability and does not create stability. An ideal democracy is a society which inculcates the equal treatment of all, despite differences in many. This should solve all conflicts which could arise in our world today. However, it is highly unfeasible that such an ideal should be present in our modernized world today. For example, it is undeniable that despite all the physical differences we try our very best to stem out, the idea of elitism still holds. In any developed country of today, it is the crème dele crème who get the scholarships, get the jobs, and earn the big bucks. Thus, the concept of pure democracy is simply too idealistic a system to uphold.

Also, I do not think democracy actually creates stability, however, I believe it leads to stability, considering the fact that many other factors are also employed. For example, social stability can created due to cultures in their own family line, a common identity forged by a unified symbol. For example, in Japan, there consists of one people with a unified identity. Looking at the modern Japan, it is rather stable socially speaking. Also, looking at modern day Singapore, it is a highly unified system with rare conflicts. This is done so by a national pledge which fosters nation building and state advancing without the presence of conflict. Thus, we cannot say that it is democracy that actually creates social stability, but instead, it merely leads to social stability along with a few other factors.

Lastly, stability is a temporary subject with no absolute concept and no absolute definition. Instead, it is relative, subject to its constant: change. Such a constant can be due to factors such as a major war or environmental disasters. Thus, it is not possible to say democracy can create stability when stability is a constant and is relative while democracy has a fixed definition.

In conclusion, though democracy does result in social stability, it merely leads to social stability due to the presence of other factors such as a common identity. Also, stability is a relative concept and is subjected to the constant, change. Thus, I disagree that democracy creates stability in society.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Democracy creates stability in a society

What do you mean by stability? Do we want to concentrate on only certain aspects of this or do we want to cover all aspects? (As Mrs Ong said would be quite a lot to handle)

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Let the Paradigm Shift Take Place

PLEASE ENJOY WATCHING THIS VIDEO, IT GIVES YOU AN INSIGHT ON MY POST(:
(Though it's 20 minutes long, you'll definitely enjoy it. Trust me(:)



Should this video be unable to load fast enough for your enjoyment, please visit this site : http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

Transcript of Speech:
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.

There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.

One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.

The second is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.

I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.

And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.

That was it, by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...

I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."

When my son was 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."

Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21 now, my daughter's 16; he didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.

And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?

Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it. They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. but they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years. according to Unesco, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. [12:27] More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.

Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.

But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it's thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren't you, there's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break." (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")

And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.

Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.

But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

I said, "What happened?"

She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.

She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.

Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Now, I think -- [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won't serve us.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future -- by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

[Source: http://blog.ted.com/2006/06/sir_ken_robinso.php#more]

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This is a speech by Sir Ken Robinson regarding the issue of creativity alongside education. The context of his speech is addressing the issue of the loss of creativity as we progress in education. His contention is that as we grow up, we grow out of creativity, instead of into it. He feels that education lacks in developing creativity and instead impedes its advancement into our lives. The source, ted.com is a website which publishes speeches by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.

During the course of this project, I trudged from one website to another only to find pages and pages of failed Google results. When finally, an interesting “ted.com” came into sight and I clicked the link, bringing me to an all inspiring website with endless articles full of meaning and wit in today’s context. Hence, I decided to search some of the people I knew and Ken Robinson’s video popped up. When I stumbled upon this particular topic, I found it something I could relate to as I am a student in an educational system which recognizes the importance of the math and sciences. What propelled me to take this article was that it made me reconsider what I had constantly perceived as the “right way to go”. It also challenged the assumptions that my mind had about education and its purpose in my future career. Hence, I chose this article to talk about.

Why is it a good time for us Singaporeans to depart from the notion that the math and sciences are the route to success as engineers, architects, doctors and many more? With our past education system skewed towards being university professors. However, the diversifying education in Singapore targets the hierarchy of intelligence. Singapore has established itself as a country with sizeable affluence and gone are the days that the perception that the math and sciences were the most important subjects us students should handle still holds. Hence, we should reconsider the notion that kinesthetic subjects are second to the sciences. With the humanities, it develops a sense of creativity and many programmes in Singapore are already working towards the development of the child’s creativity. Examples include School of The Arts (SOTA), the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and Yong Siew Toh Music Conservatory. These schools aim to equip the child with essential learning materials to develop their interest and creativity. For one, SOTA takes in students with the passion for dancing, something which many parents scoff at when they hear it as their child’s ambition. Why?

It is time for the paradigm shift to take place and there is a need for rethinking our ideas about education as developing not only through pure academia but also in the arts to develop creativity to give students as holistic an environment as possible. The advancement of society now necessitates such a paradigm shift and exhorts us not to be so inflexible and reckon the sciences as en route to success.

Let the paradigm shift take place.

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