Singapore households spent $1.8 billion SGD on tuition in 2023, according to our government. There are about 1.4m households in Singapore. Do the math! Now, I’m not against the idea of tuition; I had Chinese tuition in primary school because I was really weak in the subject. I’m against excessive tuition classes that wipe out the time needed for play, socialisation, reading and self-exploration from our kids.
Though my conversations with other parents + people in general and by examining my own self-learning journey, I have come to see that there are some critical skills that young people need, and these skills are probably not taught in a rote memorisation session.
One of the skills is simply “Understanding of how things work.”
Most people don’t know the workings of a car engine, a microwave oven, a laptop, a gaming console or their smartphone. They’re complicated machines but their usage has been vastly simplified with good UI and a few buttons. This is why I see many people struggle to grasp how to use or evaluate Gen AI, because they don’t understand the principles behind the technology.
When DeepSeek caused a market dip a few days ago, many people didn’t care (unless they had Nvidia shares) but the news media went wild, and I saw many people posting ill-informed opinions about the situation. The latter reflected a lack of understanding both the technology, the industry players, and the nature of speculative markets. Now, I’m not an industry expert in these areas, but I had enough knowledge to surmise that the markets would bounce back quickly, which it did.
Anyway, back to my point about tuition. Since parents are already spending so much money on it, perhaps they can carve out $30 from their monthly tuition budget and gift their children with a LLM subscription (ChatGPT Plus or Claude), an online coding course (Udemy courses are often on sale for $18), or an activity that gets them to put something together (cooking, robotics, botany, etc). None of these activities will guarantee better exam results, but they will help shape young minds to better understand the world and the disruptions that will only accelerate, and not slow down.
(Of course, getting kids to read for pleasure and self-learning is another important habit but social media has defeated the bookworms.)
You can chase a generic life that everyone has memorized as the “right path” with the “right answers”, or you can navigate your own way through this messy world with a compass powered by your knowledge and skills.