Singapore’s Shame-Prone Education System
Professor Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly covers the topic of vulnerability and shame. In it, she talks about shame-prone cultures. According to Brown, in a shame-prone culture, “parents, leaders, and administrators consciously or unconsciously encourage people to connect their self-worth to what they produce”. People in such cultures also subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but connect this idea of a shame-prone culture to my experiences in Singapore’s education system. This post is an analysis of how our local education system might be viewed through the lens of a “shame-prone culture”.
A quick disclaimer that I am not an expert on education, nor a teacher in the Singapore education system. Many of these arguments are from my view as a student. I have gone through 16 years of (Primary, Secondary, Junior College, and Undergraduate) education in Singapore.
If you are not familiar with the education structure in Singapore, the Wikipedia page on it should get you up to speed. The graphic below might help too.
Multiple players are important in this analysis. Namely, they are (1) the student, (2) educators in the academic institutions the student attends, (3) their friends, and most importantly, (4) their family members (especially parental figures).
A Culture of Scarcity
At the core of shame-prone cultures is the concept of scarcity.
Scarcity is the “never enough” problem. (…) Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.
I bet this sounds familiar. In school, scarcity is prominent when we think ‘I’m not smart enough”, “I don’t have enough time”, or “I don’t have enough energy”.
Brown argues that there are three components of scarcity that influence culture — Shame, Comparison, and Disengagement. How prominent these aspects play into our cultures can be reflected upon by asking ourselves a few questions. I added in some of these questions under each component for you to think about too.
1. Shame
Ask yourself:
- Is fear of ridicule and belittling used to manage people and/or to keep people in line?
- Is self-worth tied to achievement, productivity, or compliance?
Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Looking back on my schooling years, I have experienced being shamed and watching others get shamed for not “doing well in school”. One particular instance comes to mind, where a teacher humiliated two friends who were caught chattering away in class by saying, “you guys flunked the exam already, still want to talk talk talk in class ah? If anyone should be listening, it should be you!” (Singlish kept for a realistic depiction)
My friends subsequently cried from the shame of being exposed for failing the exam and never really bounced back from the incident, doing badly in that subject at the national exams.
Our meritocratic system, while fair and good in theory, encourages people to tie their self-worth to their achievements — both academic and co-curricular. Those who do well in school get access to opportunities that can eventually lead to more “prestigious” occupations in life, or so our parents tell us. Ah, the balance between equal opportunities and the burgeoning issue of elitism (Rice Media has a great article on that here).
This debate has been going on for years in Singapore, where citizens have raised concerns that there is too much emphasis placed on grades. In 2018, the education minister announced a shift in focus away from grades to skills. This then led to a concern of an erosion of standards, a glaring testament of the consensus that we need grades to keep our students up to mark.
I have noticed in recent years, however, more of my friends saying that they are not going to let themselves be defined by a string of letters on a piece of paper (referring to a bunch of letter grades on their transcript). This proves to me that, perhaps as we mature and grow older, we start realizing that we tie our self-worth to our grades, and actively try to untangle ourselves. Parent volunteers are also trying to encourage fellow Singaporeans to see that there is a ‘Life Beyond Grades’, but there are doubts cast on this initiative.
2. Comparison
Ask yourself:
- Healthy competition can be beneficial, but is there constant overt or covert comparing and ranking?
- Are people held to one narrow standard rather than acknowledged for their unique gifts and contributions?
Say hello to the bell curve. How well you do has little to do with your absolute score, but with how you did relative to everyone else. The first question students have when the score is released is “what is the class average?”. One could get an absolute score of 80 but only get a B+.
In my research on this topic, I chanced upon altars constructed at local universities to pray to the “Bell Curve God”, which left me very amused.
After all, local employers still do look out for grades albeit the recent discussion of moving away from grades to experience (another measure of comparison?). Steep competition surrounds the jobs that pay well, and in a city where the cost of living is high and one’s income is often intertwined with their self-worth, it is no wonder students aim for the top. Getting there, however, incontrovertibly involves being better than others.
The Singapore education system is notorious for holding every student up to the same yardstick, though ministers argue otherwise. This is enforced through national standardized academic examinations, where results are “moderated” based on the cohort’s performance. The pre-requisites to enter into prestigious university courses can also be traced back to a foundation in either language or mathematics and science, defining the subjects one would choose at the secondary and pre-university levels. There is thus a narrow standard of comparison that students are held up to, that many struggle to come to terms with.
Our obsession with metrics also enhances such covert comparisons.
Today’s organizations are so metric-focused in their evaluation that giving, receiving, and soliciting valuable feedback ironically has become rare. It’s even a rarity in schools where learning depends on feedback, which is infinitely more effective than grades scribbled on the top of a page or computer-generated test scores.
I cannot agree with this quote more. For many of my courses at the National University of Singapore, I have only received a letter grade back on a test on our school’s online portal, without even my marked script. Sometimes if we’re lucky, the professor goes through parts of the examination where many people made mistakes (ironically, we have no idea which question we stumbled at, and have to reach into the depths of our memory when these sessions are conducted). This is classic of a system where feedback is not valued and propagates the notion that a student is just their ID number and their grade.
3. Disengagement
Ask yourself:
- Are people afraid to take risks or try new things?
- Is it easier to stay quiet than to share stories, experiences, and ideas?
Shame can only rise so far in any system before people disengage to protect themselves. When we’re disengaged, we don’t show up, we don’t contribute, and we stop caring.
I wrote in a previous post, On the Importance of Being Inquisitive, that I observed my classmates being meek and not wanting to engage in class discussions. My friend Yu Qian Lim mentioned that she faces the same situation in her Humanities classes, and a possible reason was a fear of not asking “good” and “right” questions. This circles right back to Brown’s questions above. Many Singaporean students, in most situations, are afraid to voice out their opinions in a large-class setting. Why? Fear of shame, comparison, and judgement.
However, I have observed that in more intimate, discussion-based lessons, people are more willing to engage and share. This might also be because the professor or supervisor is not always present in the conversation, and hence one is not constantly being judged (and sometimes graded) on their candid responses.
Because judgement is often being passed by the first influential figures in our lives (our bosses, teachers, parents), fellow students also start picking up this same lens to view others. One bad experience of a teacher shaming a child in class not only encourages that child to disengage, but is also a signal to all others present that the culture in this group is shame-prone, and to protect oneself, they should disengage too.
Why Our Shame-Prone Education System is Dangerous
Using shame as a way to get our students to “do better” and “excel” is simply wrong and dangerous. Why? Because of the outcomes shame is associated with.
Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all — there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.
What’s more, developing a shame-prone culture amongst our children and youth can have lasting effects on how they view themselves.
Childhood experiences of shame change who we are, how we think about ourselves, and our sense of self worth.
Shaming children in school for not doing well can result in them erroneously labeling themselves as incompetent. This discouragement can then lead them to disengage from learning altogether, a harmful consequence not just towards themselves, but to society as a whole.
On a more serious note, shame-prone cultures in education systems in China and Korea, where competition is arguably more intense than in Singapore, face high rates of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, which can lead to suicidal tendencies. This happens in Singapore too: “In May 2016, an 11-year-old boy jumped to his death from the 17th floor of a flat block, fearful of sharing his exam results with his parents. It was the first time the child had failed a subject.” It’s no laughing matter.
The problem with instilling a shame-prone culture in our children extends further into their lives, where they bring such mentalities about themselves and others into their work and their future families. They also start to employ the same tactics of shaming on their peers — did you know that Singapore has the 3rd highest bullying rate in the world? And shame is at the heart of bullying.
Worse, for a nation that is trying to encourage innovation, a shame-prone culture stifles exactly what we’re trying to breed.
Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.
As if this isn’t enough evidence as to how damaging shame-prone cultures are to ourselves and the people around us.
The Alternative: Learning to be Vulnerable
Ultimately, as Brown said, “the greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.”
We must teach our children and students that it’s okay to be vulnerable and make mistakes. Encouraging vulnerability is not being “soft”. It doesn’t mean teachers and parents should not be strict and stern to their students and children. It doesn’t mean that discipline should be thrown out of the window.
Encouraging vulnerability means to be careful in the way we think and speak, to ensure we don’t conflate one’s mistakes with their inherent inabilities. When something goes wrong, we should ask, “what is the problem?” instead of “what is your problem?”
We need to teach ourselves and our children:
Vulnerability ≠ Weakness,
Feeling ≠ Failing, and
Emotions ≠ Liabilities.
This builds a robust sense of worthiness in them, which, in Brown’s words, “inspires us to be vulnerable, share openly, and persevere. Shame keeps us small, resentful, and afraid.” In this manner, we can catch ourselves when we fall into the scarcity mentality and quit using shame as a threatening tool to get people to get in line.
On a larger scale, a shame-prone culture and the hyperawareness of scarcity is probably not only pervasive in our education system, but other aspects of our lives as well. These feed into, and reinforce, one another.
But know that change begins with us and us alone. We cannot only blame the system for inculcating such a culture, we must also do something about it in our everyday lives — in the language we use towards others, and more importantly to ourselves.
I’m currently trying to get back into the habit of reading and writing more. I have been relatively successful so far. If you’re curious, you can view my reading progress on Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/tankityung. Follow me on Medium or on my publication: medium.com/tan-kit-yung to see more of my work.
