By Carmelita Miki Kwek
Online Journalist
mikikwek@sph.com.sg

 

A lot of adults talk about the ‘rat race’ of corporate life, but I don’t know anything about that. I’m not eighteen yet - I just finished my A-level equivalents, and I’ve only had an office job for about four weeks (and don’t my bosses and supervisors know it).

But I do know about the educational system.

I used to attend a mission school in Singapore. My parents began homeschooling my sister and me when we relocated to Shanghai in 2003.

When I was in a traditional school, I used to think education was about attending classes and doing well. When I did well, I would get into good schools, which would lead to a good university. After university, I would make mounds of money so that I could live my life out comfortably.

However, homeschooling turned my perception of education upside down. For the first time in my life, education wasn’t about getting the best results or going to the best schools. It was about doing school for the sake of, well, just learning.

In Singapore, I equated learning with school. You learned in the classroom - and only in the classroom. They might take you to a museum to see exhibitions, but the information was not going to help you pass your mid-year exams.

Independent reading didn’t do much good, either. How were the Secret Seven and Charlie Bucket going to help me when teachers wanted to know how much pizza was left after Gopal, Ahmed and Susan ate two-thirds of it (please show your working)? Even those fun science books weren’t any good as there were never going to be questions on velociraptors or great white sharks.

And to me, that was all education really was – preparing for exams and beating the system.

In contrast, homeschooling did away with the walls of the classroom and the requirements of the system. You want to work get good results so that you can attain your high school diploma and go to university, but it’s not the primary focus of education.

DVDs produced by a homeschool company in the States were used in my homeschooling journey. The teachers on the DVDs reiterated that education was truly about shaping who you are as a person.

Through my homeschooling stint, I found that literature helped me to examine moral lessons as well as open my mind up to new ideas. Science and maths trained me to be logical and analytical.

That is really the most important thing I learned in my time outside of the formal educational system: You learn for learning’s sake, to better yourself, to shape yourself as a person and to get yourself to a place where you will have a maximum positive impact on the world.

And isn’t that what matters the most at the end of the day? You can have cars and houses and a nice salary, but regardless of how you were educated, what matters the most is who you are as a person -- what is in your head and heart -- and how people remember you.