UNDESIRED OUTCOMES of Education!!!
I was invited to conduct a motivational talk in a secondary school today for about 70 students from Secondary One Normal and Technical streams. These are students whose Primary School Leaving Examinations results did not qualify them for the express course.
First of all, the one-hour session of my talk took almost 20 minutes to get started because of some miscommunications and student "unrest". So, I was left with only 40 minutes. Worse, throughout the entire session, I have to pause on many occassions to send "black sheep" to the back of the lecture theatre where the talk was held. This is the first time in my eight years of conducting motivational talks that I have to resort to putting on my hat as a "disciplinarian". Quite a number of students were utter nuisance to the whole group. They affected and implicated the whole group which consists of many other good and polite students.
Those "black sheep" were totally disrespectful to their teachers. They made fun of their teachers. Frankly, the teachers were helpless. I am not sure what the school was doing about this? If I were running the school, I would probably expel one of the students first. Such undesirable and deliberate act of disrespect begins with the very low self-esteem of these students. They do everything possible to seek attention. Tracking all the way back, the root cause might be the streaming exercise in Primary 4 and Secondary one and the lack of capital punishment in schools.
I began the talk with a very unpleasant tone. I told the students what their trouble was. These students have already condemned themselves. They already believe that they are not good, useless, and good-for-nothing. So, they have given up on themselves. Some of them even behaved like gangsters! Come on... I told them that I grew up with gangsters and drug addicts all around me day in day out in my younger days. I have seen street fights and have seen knife being pierced into someone's body. I have seen drug addicts taking drugs right before my eyes. So what? I have never engaged myself in any of those fights. I have never smoked a single stick of cigarettes in my life. It is what you choose to be. One of them in the audience even wished that his parents died. This is a generation with deteriorated values. This student should be identified and sent for counselling. One day, he might just kill his parents!!! This is again the trouble with an education system that had over-emphasised on academic excellence neglecting the importance of social and family values. Though there are some new initiatives lately, but it takes 15 years to see the result of the new implementation.
When the talk was over, a few good students came forward to thank me and expressed their disapproval of the behaviour of those black sheep. I congratulated them for being matured in their thinking and encouraged them to continue doing the right things.
First of all, the one-hour session of my talk took almost 20 minutes to get started because of some miscommunications and student "unrest". So, I was left with only 40 minutes. Worse, throughout the entire session, I have to pause on many occassions to send "black sheep" to the back of the lecture theatre where the talk was held. This is the first time in my eight years of conducting motivational talks that I have to resort to putting on my hat as a "disciplinarian". Quite a number of students were utter nuisance to the whole group. They affected and implicated the whole group which consists of many other good and polite students.
Those "black sheep" were totally disrespectful to their teachers. They made fun of their teachers. Frankly, the teachers were helpless. I am not sure what the school was doing about this? If I were running the school, I would probably expel one of the students first. Such undesirable and deliberate act of disrespect begins with the very low self-esteem of these students. They do everything possible to seek attention. Tracking all the way back, the root cause might be the streaming exercise in Primary 4 and Secondary one and the lack of capital punishment in schools.
I began the talk with a very unpleasant tone. I told the students what their trouble was. These students have already condemned themselves. They already believe that they are not good, useless, and good-for-nothing. So, they have given up on themselves. Some of them even behaved like gangsters! Come on... I told them that I grew up with gangsters and drug addicts all around me day in day out in my younger days. I have seen street fights and have seen knife being pierced into someone's body. I have seen drug addicts taking drugs right before my eyes. So what? I have never engaged myself in any of those fights. I have never smoked a single stick of cigarettes in my life. It is what you choose to be. One of them in the audience even wished that his parents died. This is a generation with deteriorated values. This student should be identified and sent for counselling. One day, he might just kill his parents!!! This is again the trouble with an education system that had over-emphasised on academic excellence neglecting the importance of social and family values. Though there are some new initiatives lately, but it takes 15 years to see the result of the new implementation.
When the talk was over, a few good students came forward to thank me and expressed their disapproval of the behaviour of those black sheep. I congratulated them for being matured in their thinking and encouraged them to continue doing the right things.
posted by Jonathan Ooi @ 9.3.06
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