Does school prepare you for life and work?

I never thought that school alone was enough to teach about life, meaning and purpose. I’m sure nobody thought so too. 

The way schools are set up, you know that it is largely about testing you on your acquired textbook knowledge and streaming you from one class to another to get the best out of the system. The best are generally those who excel academically. 

Here is why I thought this way. And it is in the papers this morning. It is entitled “Youth feel school doesn’t equip them for work.”

The bottomline on this online poll carried out in 2018 by National Youth Council is that ”seven out of 10 young people are unsure or do not think the tertiary education they receive in Singapore prepares them sufficiently to join the workforce.”

The online poll included two dialogue sessions on lifelong learning and nearly 3,000 young people (between ages 15 and 35) attended in 30 discussion groups with over 15,000 young people polled online.

The conclusion is that lifelong learning (and if I may add, lifelong humility and service) is the cornerstone of a meaningful life. 

Alas, I have gone through the system too and that was in the 1980s. Not a bright student, I struggled with the text. Most of the time, I was drifting quite aimlessly. 

That said, I had many fond memories of my secondary and tertiary education days with good friends for whom I still keep in contact.

But, when I came out to work in my mid-twenties, I realised that school can only do so much. 

Bless the system and the dedicated teachers, but being academically equipped does not mean that I am ready for life, family, parenthood and all that jazz (or mess) in the middle of it. 

Now, at 49, I am transitioning into a phrase that reminds me of this quote: “Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” 

Well, less morbid than that, the point is that in the process of raising a family, you realise that you are not young anymore. Your body is telling you a different tale from the tireless adventures of the days of your youth. 

It is largely a slower-paced tale of intermittent memory loss, falling or shaky teeth and aching bones from places you thought you had it covered. 

You see, life’s picnic can be planned to the very square inch of your picnic mat with neatly placed dishes in sterilised tupperware and bottle of Evian high mountain water at easily accessible corners of the mat. 

But, how do you control or plan the weather (cloud seeding)? How do you tell life’s thunder and storms to back off? How do you control your life, immune it from trials, protect your kids from broken hearts, and prepare yourself for mortality, or worse, before that, the long road of morbidity? 

While you can ace your exams by doing 10-year series questions to cover what had been previously tested and will turn up in predictable form, how do you prepare for an emotional betrayal, a dead end career, a debilitating congenital condition in your child, a lie you cannot forgive or an addiction that stubbornly resist all efforts of reform? 

That’s a life’s shoe too big for the academic years spent in school to fit, however good the intentions were. And I would be naive and silly to expect it to come to a snug fit. 

One Assoc Professor offered this advice: “It is important for students to develop critical soft skills such as resilience, the ability to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and failure as such human skills cannot be replicated by technology.” (Mary Anne Heng of NIE).

Needless to say, those skills will not and cannot be taught in school, that is, in a controlled environment with carefully thought out scenarios for you to pick your brain on. 

You excel in that tested form by ticking the right boxes, or by offering the best, most defensible and intellectually persuasive, answer(s). 

But in the life that you are living now and have to go through, personally encountering a business ruin that may destroy your identity, worth and reputation, or a grief of a loss of a loved one that will overwhelms you for years, there is just no template scenario to be tested on or the perfect answer to be put on pulp paper for submission. 

The marking of life takes time, most times, a lifetime (while the marking in school is time-restricted). The grades of life is developing resilience, maturity and an indomitable hope of all good things in the many storms of life (while the grades in school is alphabetical yet alarmingly predestined of one’s pathway in life). 

And you don’t graduate from life until you are lying on your deathbed scanning the faces that stand by your bedside, tearing for you, for the selfless acts and service you have offered in your lifetime, for the lives you have inspired.

But in school, you graduate within prescribed timeframe so as to make way for other students to occupy your seat or place.

So, let me end with a picnic. Never forget to have one with your family and friends. Plan well for it. Be in the moment when you are with them in a picnic. Never forget the memories of it, the fun, the joy and the sharing. 

At the same time, the rain and storm will come. The distant thunder rolls are real. And you prepare for them, by having a good time with loved ones in a picnic. You prepare for them by building resilient relationships. You prepare for them by always giving of yourself to the lives that matter. 

For when the storms come, you will be more than equip to brave through them because a life like that is never alone, is always empowering, and is always overcoming. 

Have a blessed weekend. Enjoy it with family and loved ones. Cheerz.