Meaning of Success

Recently, I came across a quote which got me thinking – “Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.” 

In Singapore’s education system, our children are expected to excel in all subjects, to become masters of all subjects.  Reading this sentence alone gives me great stress because our children have to be great linguists, mathematicians, scientists, historians, geographers, chemists, physicists, biologists, and the list goes on.  Can we adults achieve these ourselves?  Nevertheless, young Singaporeans have lived up to that expectation, some even surpassing these expectations, if you go by the number of distinctions our students achieve every year.   This extraordinary achievement has resulted in the bar being raised year after year.  How did our children do that, and at what expense?

More than half of our children are myopic before they turn 12 years old and the age for needing to use spectacles to correct their vision keeps getting younger and younger.  The number of obese children is also on the rise.  More and more teenagers are reported to be suffering from depression and many have chosen to prematurely end their life.  While there is no concrete study to show that our high-stake examination system is the sole cause for all three scenarios outlined above, to ignore the possible co-relation is also misguided. 

Long hours spent on studying meant that our children do not have the time to go outdoors to play – an activity that has been proven to reduce stress, lower the probability of developing myopia and obesity among children.  High expectations to excel and the constant upward shift of the “goal-post” inevitability create sense of fear and inadequacy.  Image a hamster running on a spin-wheel.  When will it be consider good enough for it to stop?  Also, achieving an A1 in chemistry does not necessary imply that the child will become a good chemist.  It merely implies that he has managed to get most of the answers correct.  Whether he understood the concepts remained to be seen. 

I am not encouraging parents and educators to be “soft” on our children in the name of indulging in their search for the easiest way out (when faced with challenges).  In fact, I am all for instilling disciplinary and developing tenacity in our children.  No great thing is achieved without these two attributes.  However, do it for the right reasons and know your child’s limit.  Will you consider it a success if your child finally achieve the perfect score, but find it both mentally and physically impossible to go on?  What then is the use of the perfect score?