One who believes all of a book would be better off without books

bad bad school...

So we've all gone through this, or are going through it. What are we going to do in the future? The jump from secondary to tertiary education is enormous. And even after that, most of us are still wondering about what to work as in the future. We leave school feeling clueless about what to do next. So what exactly have we spent the last 13-15 years of our lives learning?

Schools came up when civilizations evolved enough to support entire groups of people not working. A complex society would need people with at least basic education to function efficiently. The word school, came from Greek, originally meaning 'leisure spent in pursue of knowledge'. A lot of times, schools were built as part of a religious center, and if you were not of an upper class or a aristocrat, being a scribe at a temple was probably the only way to learn how to read and write properly. 

Strangely enough, Britain was one of the last European countries to have compulsory education (Aztecs being the first... woohoo! those were smart heads they were chopping off!) 

But if you check up Deschooling the Society, or just google miseducation, you will find alot of opposing views about the actual benefits of going through compulsory public education. Schooling that confuses grades, theories and ability to memorize with success in life, knowledge and competence. Schooling that inhibits your ability to think instead. I especially find fault with the fact that for so many years I've been taught to pronounce flour as 'flar'. And then after you graduate from school, it becomes an artifact in a museum, completely removed from you. Something you gaze at and go "ahh.... school" as if you have stopped learning and stopped having a real life.

After all, if you spent all your life so far in a daily routine of reading books and doing homework, how on earth are you suppose to accept that the Monday after your graduation you're suppose to... well, just do something else. And isn't there something wrong if school is suppose to prepare you for life, but then all the adults tells you the best part of life was being in school? Wait a minute, so all that preparation didn't work anyway? 

So, yes, if you do come out of school feeling lost and confuse, blame it on the education. 

 

 

History of Singapore

Heraclitus said that “everything is constantly changing and opposites things are identical, so that everything is and is not at the same time”


My guess is that he's saying that when you change forward, you need to change backwards as well. But what is changing backwards? By changing the present to fit a fuzzy memory of a happy utopian past. Simply put, nostalgia, tradition, customs. However else you'd like to call it.


So to be a revolutionary civilization, forward thinking and always keeping with the times, it needs also to be grounded in identity and habits. You've probably heard this many times in different contexts.... that Singapore is changing too fast. Maybe we forgot to change backwards while we were sprinting forward at massive speeds. We sacrificed a slice of our heritage in exchange for economic and political stability. And to fill that gapping hole we feel, we created artifacts of history to adore.... the Merlion, Shangnila Utama, do we even truly know what they are?


But yea, seriously, now I'm distracted... who exactly came up with the story of the Merlion? I know Shangnila Utama thought he saw a lion, I don't think Sir Stamford Raffles saw anything other than the Sultan... And I remember going to Sentosa's Merlion where they had a little video of the legend of the Merlion where it rose out of the ocean one rainy day and stared shooting laser beams from its eyes. 
That's the version I told my friends when they ask about the history of Singapore.


I guess we can't really dig for archeological sites and we probably already destroyed whatever was left in the soil with the Circle line, so we're left with what the first bunch of immigrants who arrived in Singapore came up with while squatting by Singapore river eating Hokkien Mee.


Personally, I'd like to think that the Merlion was a very rare high level Pokemon.