Tongues Engaged

i wrote about how i think some blogs put forth good recommendations on policies and inspire discussion on policy matters some time ago. in that post, i mentioned that it might be a good idea for policy makers to occassionally look through some people's blogs as a source of feedback on policies.

i now have a good concrete example here. if only the Minster or someone influential enough or even one of the Ministry's minions officers could read that entry. perhaps it would generate some discussion within the Ministry and lead to an improvement to the system.

personally, i feel that eligibility to do Higher Mother Tongue should not be determined solely by the aggregated results of the streaming examinations at Primary 4 nor the PSLE. a student may a genius at one particular subject (in this case Mother Tongue) but totally suck at the other subjects.

or we can look at it from the other perspective. just because some one does wonderfully well in PSLE does not mean that that person can do HMT. such a person might only have a mediocre ability in MT but has exceptional aptitude for Maths and Science, thus scoring excellent aggregated PSLE results. such a person might then find HMT impossibly difficult. therefore, the point is that whether a person can take HMT as an O-level subject should not be dependent on his aggregated PSLE results but rather should be dependent on his ability in the language.

unless of course the government still feels that it is more important for students to have good Maths, English and Science results and only when these are satisfied, can the student do other stuff. because that is what the message the current policy is sending out, "hey, if you can't do Maths, Science and English, then you had better spend more time on those subjects rather than doing MT, no matter how good you are in MT." of course, this runs counter to the spirit of allowing students multiple paths to success and the ostensible vision that all talents are equally valued.