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The education system has changed but parents remain in a time warpSome days, I wish I was much, much younger.迷你倉 This isn't about me mourning the loss of youth, however. It is the yearning of someone who wishes she can turn back the clock to take another shot at her years in school.I was from a neighbourhood primary school and later went to what was reputedly the best girls' school in the east, mainly because it was in the most convenient location. When it came to junior college, again distance trumped drive and ambition.Transport was a big deal. In lower primary, I had to walk to school, climbing over what then seemed like a steep hill - but such was an asthmatic child's perception of a minuscule slope.That was the little school that could. In Primary 1 and 2, I had Miss Maggie Tan. She wore short dresses and had her hair flipped out girlishly at the ends, but she was perfectly capable of inflicting physical pain if you mangled your sentence structure. Sometimes, when I catch myself slipping linguistically, I can picture Miss Tan's judgmental glare, a prelude to a knock on the head.At the back of my classroom, Miss Tan set up a small dollhouse that doubled as a shopfront on one side. This was how we learnt how to buy and sell things, how to add and subtract. We also took turns to feed the pet guinea pigs we kept in class.One school holiday, I was tasked to babysit a pair of them. They died within days under my lackadaisical care. But when I reported back to school empty-handed and told Miss Tan that the "guinea pigs die", I did not get the scolding I had spent weeks dreading. She asked for details and then growled: "Died, died! The guinea pigs died, not die." Miss Tan was more upset that I had massacred the language than she was about the poor rodents.Miss Tan and my Primary 6 teacher, Mrs Helen Koh, were not ordinary teachers. They spent hours beyond classroom time to do other things in the school. One Saturday afternoon, I spotted Mrs Koh, a maths teacher, painting oil murals on the school walls. The science teacher helped build a pond with fish, frogs and tadpoles. The school even had an aviary full of birds.Secondary school was a lot different and somehow academics took a back seat. I meandered through the education system as an indifferent student before it finally spat me out at the other end, with a degree, miraculously enough. I made it, despite myself, thanks to my older siblings' expectations - and perhaps my late father, whose habit of always reading a book in his free time must have left an impression deeper than I realised.It was only in my last two years in university that I rediscovered the love and curiosity for learning that had eluded me for the better part of my teenage years, again thanks in large part to the teachers I had.This is the prism through which I sometimes tend to view the school system. My own experience seemed rather caprici文件倉us in hindsight. If not for some lucky breaks and timely interventions, I might not have survived the system.And there is no doubt that I would have enjoyed no second chance had I gone through the more ruthlessly competitive system of a decade or two later. If I, with my late 1970s-early 80s attitude - more focused on Grease than grades - had time-travelled into the 1990s, an honours degree from Asia's No.1 university would have been inconceivable.I suspect many of today's parents are similarly untrusting of the system based on their own experiences.Recently, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat spoke of how he was struck by the wide gap between what schools are doing and what parents believe to be going on in schools.In some countries, this perception problem has been called the "40-year gap" because parents with children in primary school attended primary school 40 years ago. The education system has undergone tremendous changes but many of us remain in a time warp. Depending on how we ended up, we're either wishing for idyllic homework-free days for our children, or rueing our lost years or re-living the stresses we faced as students.As parent Wong Siow Yuen wrote in The New Paper on Friday about her anxieties over her son's PSLE examination and his own seemingly relaxed attitude: "I had been influenced by the enormity many parents and educators accord to the PSLE. It's as if I've been loading him with memories of my failures and inadequacies."Will such attitudes moderate? The ministry has a gargantuan task persuading parents to take a deep breath and move away from the obsession with grades. But it too must demonstrate that it is putting its marks where its mouth is: that is, training and equipping teachers to do more than teach students how to score in examinations; and rewarding principals and teachers who bring out a broader diversity of talent.Right now, there appears to be a tense stand-off between parents and educators. Parents will not budge until they see clear and unambiguous signals that the system is changing. Educators will not relent and stop teaching for examinations until they are convinced their employers really mean what they say.The passage of time will probably convince everyone that a broader view of education makes sense. Jobs of the future will require such a range of abilities that it should be easier for Singaporeans of diverse talents to find their calling.The problem is that it is hard to see that far into the future. So, there is another gap to bridge, as educators and parents try to prepare the child for life decades from today.Who knows what that future will bring? For a start, many of us can afford to let go of our hang-ups. We could stop fighting the long shadows of systems past, and work with the positive reforms that educationists are trying to roll out. We owe that much to the young.zuraidah@sph.com.sgtwitter.com/zuibrahim存倉