Last Updated on 2016-05-19 , 1:43 pm
We never really felt the impact of Singapore’s declining birthrate, until recent announcement by MOE served as a nasty reminder to the severity of this issue.
The Ministry of Education (MOE), announced at a briefing yesterday, that a series of mergers will see 22 secondary schools whittled down to 11 as mature estates churn out fewer school-going children. This was the largest merger exercise in the last five years.
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Next year, the seven secondary schools that MOE had earlier said did not have a Secondary 1 cohort this year – Balestier Hill, Henderson, MacPherson, North View, Pioneer, Siglap and Si Ling – will be paired and merged with seven other schools. They are, respectively, Beatty, Bukit Merah, Broadrick, Northland, Boon Lay, Coral and Marsiling Secondary Schools.
The list of mergers go on and on, and very soon many of the names we’ve got to know, or even the schools that we had studied in, will cease to exist.
Along with all the memories associated with them.
There were around 38,600 students who were posted to secondary schools this year, down from about 50,000 a decade ago. MOE said that a “sufficient critical mass” is needed for a school to offer a good range of educational programmes and co-curricular activities (CCAs) for its students. Several of the schools merging have three or fewer classes at each level, compared to a “healthy” range of six to eight classes per level in most secondary schools.
MOE said it will work with the schools to build strong identities and retain their heritage, by documenting the past in the merged school buildings.
Despite all the measure proposed by MOE to retain the cultures and minimize the losses, we can’t help but get a feeling of emptiness inside us.
This looks like the beginning of something bigger and much more worst. Like the beginning of the fall of Rome, or something like that. A result of years of negligence on the part of fellow Singaporeans.
Time to hit the bedroom and make more Singaporeans.
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