Ng Jing Yng, Today, 10 Feb 11, p. 12. The headline may be "Schools go the extra mile to cultivate a love for reading" (what a mouthful of cliches), but the bottom line, you eventually realize, is grades, or more specifically, the shoving of students towards better grades. Near the end of the article, a student testifies to the profit of reading, how the routine, initially forced upon her, lost its tedium once it improved her English Language grades "from Cs to Bs". If that doesn't sell it, the effectiveness of our reading programmes is indubitably proven by Singapore's number five position (out of 65 countries, mind you!) as scored by the Programme for International Student Assessment. Wait, who exactly is jostling for better grades, here?
The revealing, sinister, and mind-boggling final paragraph is worth noting. For "weaker students", reading programmes have been "tweaked" to include the completion of "additional worksheets outside curriculum time". o_O
Pictured: Morning "mass reading". In the foreground, presumably, the bespectacled B-students, reading newspapers. In the background, anguished and disheartened C-students, slumped over storybooks.
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