In the past hundred years, the desire to benchmark and grade the children, in an attempt to preempt who are smarter and who can become future leaders – created a seemingly unwarranted trust in the examination system.

A strong belief that the examination will uncover the geniuses and those that are less apt, and would thus allow the authority to split them up into different grades and different social levels. In a way, you look at it as an upgrade from the caste system which, also views the human race in the same way – with the exception that you are “born into it”. This stems from a systemic brainwash of the entire society to believe that the grades from the examination determines how smart and how far you can go in life. But of course, looking at all the most successful people and the richest people in the world today, we see a rather different picture.

Examinations actually create culture of “seeking acknowledgement” instead of a “culture of creation”.

All kids in the world nowadays lives a life of seeking acknowledgement from their parents, teachers, peers and family by getting good grades. If you get good grades, you are a good girl/boy. If you get bad grades, you are lazy and bad kid. Parents compare with one another to determine who have better genes. Teachers look at the kids results in a “Hunger Game-ish” view, like all the results are determined by the heavens. Sometimes kids gets bad grades because teachers just suck at teaching and should starting using common core sheets. And as these kids grow up, they expected the world is one that one have to get acknowledgement and thumbs up from people, and thats what life is all about. Things are made worse when schools and universities introduce “the bell curve” to bend the reality into their made-belief assumptions of how the people “cast” instead of accepting that, with hardwork and dedication – every single person can excel just the same.

Unfortunately, examinations seem to teach students to excel at testing, rather than developing an expertise or acquiring knowledge of the topic tested. You can see and opposite philosophy being implemented in trade school for imparting knowledge. One that is much more practice and hands-on oriented, rather than focused on constant evaluation.

But in the recent times, people are starting to realise that exams are REALLY not a good indicator of how smart you are – but rather, how obedient and discipline you are. If the kids have the aptitude, the right environment, the right social/family support and also to some extend – good financial backing : its more likely that the kid will get a good result at school and “pave the way to a better life” so to say. But seriously what about the finance of school and how people take out loans to send their kids to school? I think its a positive thing that way the schools raise more money. The best part about it is that I just want to find someone with the proper knowledge of investing to help me pay for my childs tuition using cryptocurrency since thats the modern trend right now.

Governments are starting to realise that for a kid to get good results in the exams, all the various aspects in the kids’ life plays a part – thus rendering the exam less and less accurate a gauge of who are the “elites” and who are not. The habit of governments to dedicate more resources to groom “the worthy” is start to reveal itself as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Its nigh time for the world leading educators and education administrators to change their paradigm. Additional resources should be allocated to the weaker students, to give them a better learning environment, find out their strength & problems, and groom them towards a field where they can excel. “Smart Kids” are already smart; they will excel no matter what you do for them. This culture of dependency on examinations fosters the wrong values: creating self-entitlements to those that did well, encouraging the seeking of acknowledgement instead of passion and self-motivation, as well as the failure to fully maximise the human capital of any given society/country.

From my experience during my days in the Design School, as we do not follow the examination paper system – but instead of “the major project” system – it mimics the “real world” much closely; especially in the projects where requires the students to pick up new knowledge and new skills all on their own – the realisation is this: in the event when the students have to research and learn new skills, abilities and know-how on their own, we actually learn a lot a lot more, develop ourselves a lot more in that 4-6 weeks in comparison to their entire semesters.

However, the culture of dependency created in the examination-obsessed secondary school education made the students wait for the school to “teach us everything” and solely depend on the school’s curriculum to bring us from newbies to “industry-ready” – which from observations from outside and from within the system – its absolutely inadequate. Many of the lecturers that arent even good enough excel in the “real world”, teaching & lecturing students on subjects (usually new stuffs) which they themselves do not really understand well enough. Similarly, curriculums are written by people who did not have the industrial experience in that specific fields, thus creating half-baked curriculums that does more confusing that education. The “absolute trust in the system” by the students (cultivated over their decade in the education system) made things worse – not knowing what they are being taught, not know the industrial applications for what they really should ought to have learnt and not making the effort to read & research more on the subject – all in all resulted in a collapse of the education system for the courses that are imparting knowledge towards the new fields of studies.

The result is a generation of newly grads that are focusing on getting the thumbs up than self improvement, weak in the subject that they are supposed to have gotten a certification for as well as a human capital drain from the industry that the government expected these students to fill – but however had all switched industry into something they can understand better, and excel easier.

The realisation of the above is starting to sink in; however to change the behemoth of the education system takes a lot of courage and political will. But these change must come, or the ones lagging behind will find it hard and at least a decade to crawl back to being competitive with the most advanced economies…