N Levels, Streaming and a father's love.

My son will be taking his N level results this afternoon. I am proud of him. He is confident that he will do well. That’s enough for me. 

In the papers yesterday, the burning question is this: “Has streaming run its course?” 

And yes, it is about how the society views those who struggle at the academic bottom. Because if you think about it, “education policies don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist in a social context,” so says NIE don (Assoc Prof) Jason Tan. 

He added: “It makes some educational sense to sort students based on their ability, but the different options have differing social prestige.” And how the society addresses this “differing social prestige” is what makes or breaks the society. 

It is sad that students like my son don’t often get the encouragement that they need to do well in school. The stigma is real. It goes deep. It discourages most of the time. 

In fact, those at the bottom struggle not because they can’t keep up. They struggle because a part of society has given them up. 

In the papers, one student Ng Yi Xun (Sec 5 N(A)) said, “Express students look down on us, they think there is an intelligence gap, we’re not smart and we don’t study. We know they may talk among themselves but we just ignore them. Let them say what they want to say.” 

FYI, Yi Xun has secured a place in polytechnic to study digital media. 

Another student Goh Jia Hui said: “In a cohort, you know you’re at the bottom. There’s definitely some discrimination, even in co-cirricular activities (CCAs). You feel the teachers prefer Express over Normal stream students.”

Now, the good thing about streaming is that it allow students to stay in school. They are able to cope. They are learning at their pace. Therefore, they feel they are making progress.

According to the data, “the current drop-out rate is virtually zero, down from 5.3 per cent in 1997 and 3.6 per cent in 2002.” 

A secondary school teacher said: “Streaming is not an unsound concept. The reality is that not all teachers can handle a mixed-ability class, and streaming is one way to structurally optimise teaching and learning.” 

Lesson? I actually have one, and it is captured in the words of Denise Phua when she said: -

“Schools ought to be a microcosm of society, where there is a healthy mix of students from different socio-economic backgrounds, abilities, race and religion. We can tell a lot of a society from the types of school it has. We will also lose the golden opportunity to have students mix socially daily and be educated in the desired attributes of honouring the differences and helping each other out, regardless of backgrounds, on a daily basis, not in artificially created opportunities.”

Denise understands that “streaming is efficient”, but she said, “it downplays the fact that people have different intelligence and highlights only academic strength as the most important differentiator. It is not rocket science to allow students to be unlabelled and have them take subjects at basic, intermediate and advance levels.” 

In the end, in my view, it is not the streaming that is to be faulted (though it has a lot of room for improvement). It is how the society sees those who get streamed that is the issue. The mindset has to change, from top down, that is, parents have to take the lead here because it is a classic case of monkey see, monkey do. 

If the school ought to be a microcosm of society, where there is a healthy mix of students, regardless of race, language and different learning pace, then what keeps the society from division (or disunity) is not only the students’ attitude but their parents’ attitude too. 

I know it is an uphill or upstream climb for many because the implicit labelling and stigma is almost second nature or unavoidable. 

Clinical psychologist Carol Balhetchet said: “When you stream according to students’ grades, you are already labelling who’s better and who’s not as good. If you put students in track B, it’s telling them you’re less than A. Maybe a few will fight to cross to A, but the majority of B-grade students will settle.”

But we as a nation, as a society, must take this leap and make this sure footed progress to measure ourselves not by what we own, what accolades we receive, and what scores we get in our report cards. 

No doubt, those things are important to the extent that they serve a self-monitoring function. They keep us motivated and inspired. They encourage us to better ourselves. 

But when we allow them to define us, when we make it indispensable for our self-esteem, we also enthrone them as a competitive status symbol and hail them as inseparable from our self-worth. 

This is where we lose a defining part of our humanity, that is, the compassion, kindness and understanding for others who may develop differently from us and have equally treasured strengths and gifts that take a longer time to nurture and grow.

I feel that nothing is more divisive in a society than one that is suffering from a certain form of myopia, that is, a society that is conditioned by the system to arm itself quite neurotically with a magnifying glass to focus on just one aspect of human ability like heaping up the grades, and relegate the rest as secondary traits or worse, insignificant (to be looked down upon). 

And if the school is a microcosm of society, then regardless of grades or streams, my hope is for everyone, students, teachers, and yes parents included, to always take a firm standing on a vantage point to look further into what every student can achieve in one lifetime, and not at one particular academic point in time. 

Our measure shouldn’t start and end at one or two crossroads in school, but stretch over a person’s lifetime post-school. 

That way, we give everybody growing space and opportunities to excel in their own pace, and to bloom at their own time. And at most times, with an attitude like that, we are seldom disappointed. 

That way, we also break down the dividing walls of stigma and discrimination, and learn from each other what amounts to a humane society, that is, it is one that is kind and understanding and embraces differences, and not allow it to set us apart. 

So, tonight, I am having a simple celebration with my son. For at the end of a hard day, whether in school or at work, the results do not define our relationship, but the relationship defines our relationship. 

Sometimes, we parents need a little reminding about that.