Today, I will be penning down my thoughts recently posted open letter to the education minister by a secondary 4 student from nan chiau high school.

First off, the gist of the letter is that schools are stifling creativity of the students and that schools place academics above everything else in the student’s education. I agree with the writer as I believe that this is the general trend of most schools. Schools emphasize on giving “politically correct” answers as opposed to truly giving your opinion. Schools also have a very tight syllabus to follow thus causing the teachers lack of time to answer the students various queries.

However, I think that the writer is being unfair at times, making unjust generalizations and assumptions about various aspects of schooling. I would like to draw your attention to what the writer said that teachers do not accept key terms or phrases in biology and chemistry that he rephrased. I would like to point out that these key terms are usually very difficult to replace, and one’s word can hardly fault the teacher for not accepting paraphrases as more often than not, the paraphrases deviate from the original meaning. Besides, the writer’s association of lack of expression to social networks being more used is a false one. Students use social networks for a variety of reasons, usually more of interacting with their friends than as an outlet to express their opinions. Furthermore, I disagree with the writer that “tons and tons of model answers and model essays” have to be memorized. Full length essays are hardly memorized in schools and model answers are only memorized as the students usually cannot use their own words to explain them. For instance, how to you rephrase key biology terms such as “sperm duct” and “prostate glands”? It simply cannot be done. Moreover, it is also necessary for students to be familiar with the theory side of a subject before being able to formulate their own opinion.

I believe that the tone of this letter is quite apt. The writer is humble, merely sharing his opinion in the letter while realizing that the opinion of a 16 year old might not mean anything at all. He does not force people to accept his arguments and opinions, merely stating his observations and his opinions from those, leaving us to come to a conclusion ourselves. However, I believe this is what will finally convince us of his opinions. It is a well crafted letter as at different parts of the letter, it directly addresses the minister, or the students, whenever appropriate.

If I was writing to the education minister, I would also emphasize on the points in this letter. Besides that, I would also raise the issue of students not developing a global perspective, preferring to huddle together in their own group while not mixing with other people of different nationalities or races. Besides, the issue whereby special programmes promote elitism is also widely discussed, and I will also raise it with the education minister. The sole criteria for entering special programmes in schools is usually academic excellence, however is academic excellence enough as a criteria? People is special programmes usually are given special preference, with the majority of the school’s funds spent on them. However, are the students in special programmes really better than students outside of them? Would it be better if there was no criterion for these special programmes, trusting in the student’s ability to decide what is best for them?

With this I end off, leaving you with this thought, is there really a perfect education system?