Very smart, witty, lovely and absolutely gem of a show. This is the modern, up-to-date growing-up rite of passage movie. If not for the NC16 rating, I would have recommended all of you go watch it.

P.S. Thanks to Becs for recommending the show!

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Three cheers for some better sensibility out of this suffocatingly terrible business world of education. An educational review in UK has a report that denounced the utterly inhumane business language that we now use in education assessment. BBC News reports,

Professor Pring is the lead author of a report, published this week by the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, which looks at how the aims and values of education have come to be “dominated by the language of management”.

So when judging schools and universities we now talk about “performance indicators” as a substitute for assessing the quality of their teaching.

Learning has to be measured by an “audit” of the qualifications achieved rather than a more qualitative judgement of what students have learned.

Repeated phrases refer to “efficiency gains”, “choice for customers”, “the market”, and “funding systems that respond to customer demand”.

The phraseology of “inputs” and “outputs” is more like the language of industrial production than of education.

It implies there is an exact specification for the finished product.

The Nuffield paper wonders whether we have lost sight of earlier descriptions of education such as “the conversation between the generations of mankind” (Michael Oakeshott) or an introduction to “the best that has been thought and said” (Matthew Arnold)?

Yet this matters because the language we use shapes the answers to the question: “what is education for?”

Not only are students assessed in this manner, teachers and schools also faces the same monstrosity in their own assessments. It has become the case where those values and attitudes which are more difficult to measure or intangible are often neglected in favor of doing the things that are easier to count. Therefore it is no wonder every student and staff in our school system is swamped with a mountain of things to do, so that we can all have a portfolio full of “stuff”.

We don’t seem to be anywhere educating people to be wiser and more humane. We are a generation of selfish people. Just yesterday, the taxi driver was complaining to me that Singaporean drivers have no courtesy on the road. And the phrase he used to describe these rude drivers is very telling. He calls them “educated barbarians”.

We need to start acknowledging that our education system is trying too hard to deliver so many targets and key performance indicators, that we are losing track of the what school and education should be about - to teach and learn to be a better person. What makes a better person? Some of that answer is not so easily quantified. We need to recognise this and realise that performance ranking is not the solution to a better education for ourselves.

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Yup. I will be wearing green for a while. No, I am not wearing Lee House t-shirt but I am going for reservist, which I may add, is usually a waste of my time.

Take care in school, and be nice to my relief. Everyone is a beginner at one time or another. More importantly, get your work done and hand in on time. She will probably be handling CA results for Sec 2. So Sec 2s please make sure you hand in your sketchbooks to her promptly when she is collecting. For Sec 3s, I have not decided yet so just get all your exercises completed first. Sec 4s should know what they should be doing anyway.

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People always sound surprised when they hear I don’t watch TV.

I think watching TV is a lazy activity and a waste of time. If you want entertainment, just go and watch a movie. Variety shows on TV are always fillers or badly-disguised idol-making machines. Rarely are there any talkshows that manages to be interesting and thought-provoking. Movies are generally much better produced than TV dramas. Why would you want to waste your time with 2nd rate efforts? If you want news and information, we have the internet now and you can find all the news and information you would possibly want from all the different perspectives and sources, so that you can make your own opinions and conclusions. Getting news and information from the tube is plain laziness.

And even this classic movie from 1976 shows you why you shouldn’t be watching too much TV.

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恭喜发财！新年快乐！
万事如意！年年有余！
身体健康！学业进步！
考试顺利！美术第一！

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