First, the subject setting is reasonable.
The biggest advantage of primary education in Singapore is that the subject setting is very reasonable. In China, the main courses in primary schools are math and Chinese, and English usually starts after the third grade, but learning is very simple. There are four main courses in Singapore, English, mother tongue, mathematics and science, and the four courses have the same weight and proportion in the daily examination and graduation examination. There are few subjects in China, and the only way to widen the gap is to make Chinese and mathematics more refined and deeper, and the Olympic Mathematics came into being.
Singapore is bilingual, so there are two language courses, both of which are relatively deep. For English, the papers here are more difficult than those of the same grade in Britain, America, Canada and Australia. Compared with the domestic level, if you pass CET-4, you can get 50-60 points (full mark 100) and 15 points for vocabulary. Writing is even more difficult, because when describing the details, Chinglish's expression ability is very poor, let alone the listening and speaking test. The fourth year of college needs about 3000 words, and the fifth-grade children here need at least 6000 words.
With regard to mother tongue courses, taking Chinese as an example, the graduation level of grade four in China can be mixed with grade one and grade two in junior high school. That is to say, by the time of graduation from junior high school, Singaporean children whose mother tongue is Chinese can read newspapers, magazines and novels fluently, write fluent and rich compositions and communicate with each other in spoken English. As a second foreign language, this level is quite good.
Science taught in English is a course especially suitable for primary school students. Science classes in primary schools include some basic knowledge of biology, physics and chemistry that was learned in junior high schools and senior high schools in China. Learning parallel circuits, the principle and application of magnetism, some basic theories of physics, plants, animals, genetics, evolution, circulation and many other knowledge are very detailed, and some links are even more in-depth and detailed than domestic high school biology books, and the content is very useful and interesting.
Because there are more subjects than in China, students' energy is mainly used to master book knowledge and outline content (the outline is developed on the basis of textbooks, and it is not enough to study textbooks only), rather than expanding to a higher and deeper level. Therefore, in primary school, Singapore-style education focuses on improving language ability and mastering basic natural science knowledge.
Second, compared with China, there is no "burden reduction" at all, so it can be called the country with the heaviest burden of primary school work in the world together with China.
Interestingly, although we are always worried about the burden and pressure brought by domestic basic education to children, more and more people in the world appreciate and support China's solid basic education. There are "junior high schools" in China, and "shunt" and "PSLE" in Singapore (entrance examination for primary school graduation, entering middle schools of different levels according to their grades).
Singapore began to "shunt" from the third grade of primary school, that is, according to the results, good students entered good classes and poor students entered poor classes. There will be an adjustment at the end of each year. The backward children in the good class are reduced to the poor class, and the good children in the poor class are promoted to the good class. The content of good classes is deeper and wider, the progress of poor classes is slower, and the content and depth are much worse.
Children's physical and psychological development can't be synchronized, especially boys are very disadvantaged under this system. But this is the reality. You are behind in your studies. According to this placement mechanism, you may not catch up with each other step by step. My friend's child has just finished taking PSLE exam after graduating from primary school. He scored 250 points in the second-class prestigious school (the school ranked between 20 and 50 in Singapore), and the boys ranked first in the senior high school entrance examination, but there were still 15 girls who scored higher than him.
It seems that this is not a scientific "elite education", but it is really cruel to children.
Under such pressure, primary school students in Singapore are really hard. But objectively speaking, it is still easier than the children under the pressure of "junior high school" in Beijing. Students in Beijing are so busy that they have no time to exercise. They still play ball, swim and watch TV every day. Later, I thought that the reason why the pressure on children and parents is not too great may be because it is easier to find a job and life in Singapore, so the competition for survival is not very fierce.
Third, a veritable bilingual education.
In recent years, due to the rapid economic development in China, Chinese has been paid more and more attention. Many job advertisements require candidates to speak Chinese in addition to fluent English. A few years ago, in order to create a good language environment, China's parents could only speak English instead of Chinese. Now, on the contrary, parents deliberately only speak Chinese at home, not English. Most primary schools offer advanced Chinese courses.