A’s are for Attainment not Achievement

I don’t much mind the initial objectives of the local education curriculum. It does seem to have the right intentions -primarily that of dispensing fundamental knowledge through the necessary base skills required to acquire them. But you’d need to look only in certain places to be of like opinion -and that would be within the given textbooks that are prerequisites for every learning year. Of course you’d have to charitably overlook the occasional errors in spelling and paging, the simplistic anecdotes and analogies, the choice of graphics, and the nationalistic cover with the sensationalist fonts. Past that and you’d find contents geared to enable the understanding of the fundamentals and mechanisms of what you are learning about. For instance, they attempt to convey the concept behind division through examples of sharing in daily life rather than simply laying out division tables to be memorised. History is laid out as sombre true stories rather than simply putting dates to names, places and events to be remembered; which is more wont of the supplementary or interactive books that seems to be preferred by the teaching protagonists.

In the hands of the latter, the subjects are reduced to notes and data to be recited, remembered and regurgitated at exams. In the event of those 3 r’s failing when the time comes, there’s also the actuarial science of question spotting based on the empirical analysis of cycles and probabilities.

To further ensure those 3 r’s are properly instilled, there’s always tuition with more exclusive notes and tutors with better answering tips and techniques or higher q-spotting acumen. These are centres or personnel with reputations forged by the ratio of A’s to students over the years. Of course, tuitions are also indispensable for those requiring remembering by repetition. If you are not confident of your memory retention faculties, fret not, there are centres that chest-thumpingly boast to being able to boost it for you solely for exams.

What are exams then? Assessments of one’s comprehension, absorption and assimilation of the knowledge required to facilitate or enhance one’s role/survival for a life of fate unknown? Or more of a challenge to overcome where victory paves the way for a life of determinate goals; where casualties are doomed to forever fall to the wayside. With the kind of accolades and the amount of adulation and fawning, plus national media coverage, the latter seems more like it.

But isn’t it merely a simulacrum of what the true objective should actually be? No question it’s about the hardworking, but more for toiling to cover as much as possible in order to remember as hard as possible rather than to understand to the point of applicability. Intelligence? Isn’t it more to do with memory retention, which folks confuse with actual intelligence?

So maybe we should remove the false accolades and adulation which upholds such illusions so that future generations would not be fooled by it and may actually strive with due diligence for actual intelligence.

Could we?

Most likely not. They’d be up in arms and throw fits and tantrums over even the suggestion of removing such incentives and rewards. Don’t even think about it. No way would the parents/guardians ever allow such a travesty to even be considered. After all, that’s the route they came through.