Education-centric website Domain of Singapore Tutoring Experts kindly invited me to write a guest post for them. Here’s a short excerpt of the post:<\/p>\n
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Singaporean students have heard it all before. Go to school, study hard, get a good education, get a good job, settle down and start a family. It\u2019s a tired refrain, repeated by well-meaning tutors, teachers, and school principals.<\/span><\/p>\n They mean well. Making a living wage, having a roof over one\u2019s head and enjoying strong relationships are always desirable. But then what? This road offers no purpose in life, no formula to self-discovery, no way of contributing to humanity and no means of making meaning out of a complex existence. This meme treats students as bees churning out wealth and babies and little else.<\/span><\/p>\n Students are humans. They are not rats pursuing fragments of cheese in an endless labyrinth, nor are they the digits of capitalism\u2019s invisible hand. While education should prepare students for gainful employment, the times are changing. Knowledge and skillsets in demand now may not be so tomorrow, and to live one\u2019s life in the perpetual chase for grades and money is to exist solely for material comforts and to deny the full range of one\u2019s inherent talents and strengths.<\/span><\/p>\n The purpose of teaching is not to create the next generation of workers. It must be to create the next generation of humans.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n —<\/p>\n