Chinese school

I would like to comment based on my personal experience regarding the article in The Star http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp?file=/2007/12/4/columnists/vkchin/19629191&sec=VKChin. I went to a chinese primary school in Kuala Lumpur. As the author has rightly said, by the time a girl finishes her education in a chinese primary school, there is no doubt that she would have been caned at least once. I remember I was so glad to be out of the chinese school system after standard six. I used to really hate chinese school because it was dictatic. We were not allowed to keep long hair and we spent a lot of time lining up being lectured. Academic wise, teachers often expected less than perfection, certainly from my class (which is the top class of the year). I was caned because of careless mistakes in maths (eg 7 x 3= 22), selecting the wrong answer in MCQ when we were specifically asked to revise for the topic, getting a C for essay practise and on many other silly occasions. I hated chinese calligraphy and hence have always got either a C or a D for that. Plus chinese school teachers are very harsh in grading, only one or two in the class would get an A in a typical essay writing practise (It was really not us who was stupid - almost the whole class got an A in the end-of-year national standardised exams UPSR). You have no idea how meticulous my teacher was - I spent so much time drawing box-like margins on every pages in my exercise books just because she wanted it that way.

Students would get caning for trivial things like forgetting to bring book or PE shirt. There were several times in which my sisters and I, on separate occasions, forgot to bring a file or book or even a piece of paper that we panicked and phoned mum to bring it for us. And mummy did actually travelled for 30minutes to deliver us our stuff. It seemed so ridiculous when I think back.

Another thing notoriously famous among chinese schools are the heavy bags. In standard six, we had to bring, on top of many textbooks, workbooks and exercise books, two big heavy dictionaries in Malay and Chinese language. My school bag normally weighed 30kg, that's excluding the pile of exercise books on my left hand and an extra small bag of files on my right hand. I actually developed a bit of kyphosis in primary school because of these heavy bags. Hence my bag felt like feather when I went to secondary school.

It was very difficult to shine and develop your full potential while in a chinese school. Only the very best 3-5 people gets the opportunities represent the school for bigger competitions. We hardly get to volunteer to participate in competitions, especially in my class, my teachers would usually just call the same 3-4 people to compete in story telling, public speaking and singing competitions without even asking if anyone else is interested. I was quite pissed off with that on several occasion - although I did not have much hidden talent to reveal, I'd like to be presented the opportunity to prove myself.


It is only fair that I think about the benefits of having a primary education in a chinese school. It gave me a very strong foundation in chinese language - I can tell you for a fact that my proficiency in chinese language was excellent (that was 10 years ago unfortunately). The drilling in mathematics built solid base of arithmancy for secondary and tertiary education - any ex-chinese school students always have an edge over other students when they are compared in later education. And I had fun playing snare drum for the school band in standard 4-6. It was quite enjoyable being one of the school pianists playing the school song in weekly assembly and in singing competitions and performances.

So should caning be allowed in chinese school? No. I think it is time for chinese school to revert to the national recommendation about caning student, which is something like caning is only to be done for serious offense, action to be taken by the disciplinary teacher or the principle with witness present etc. But I know chinese school is changing for the better, in terms of allowing students more freedom to participate in activities, certainly from what my youngest sister said about my former school. We know that operant conditioning works on mice, but there must be better, more civilised ways of making a point to children.