With the country working towards the Brunei Vision 2035, all eyes are on the next generation, thus the focus on developing our youth. Over the years, there have been a few standouts that offer us optimism of the future.
However, I am concerned about the common practice of shining a spotlight on high-achieving students, as I am not quite sure if academic performance in high school truly determines future success.
When I was a high-schooler – albeit over a decade ago – there was a constant focus on top-scoring students. The school would award the top three students of each year in a grand ceremony, and the rest either wished they were one of them or did not care at all.
That’s what worries me.
While a one-size-fits-all approach to motivating students to excel in school seems reasonable, scratch the surface and you’ll see that everyone is different; what serves as a motivator to one student may further discourage another from trying.
If the goal of these award ceremonies is to raise the competitive spirit among students, to nudge them to do better, perhaps a rethinking of how we approach education is in order. The way our curriculum is mapped out, a lot of school subjects appear to reward those with strong memorising abilities. Yearly assessments may start out as tools to measure the students’ understanding of a particular topic; but they are now a way of promoting rote learning.
As we inch towards a more digitalised world, there is an increasing urgency to ensure that the future generation is filled with creative individuals who are capable of thinking on their feet. It is not enough to teach them how to use Zoom; we need to promote learning for learning’s sake. Ultimately, we need to start accepting that education is not a race to see who can memorise the faster or the most; it is to prepare youngsters for challenges ahead, whatever those may be.
Change Seeker
