Dear Sir,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to the syllabus of the history subject that you are reviewing. I believe, as you do well know, that there is a distinctive similarity between the primary school and secondary school syllabus. The similarity, without doubt, is that we are still studying the topic of Singapore history, just that for secondary schools, it is more integrated and complex.
With this said, I don’t mean that studying Singapore history is bad and unadvisable. In my opinion, I feel the Ministry of education should actually just try to put the whole of Singapore history in our primary school years. For example, we could start with something easy, such as the founding of Singapore for primary one and two. After that, we will start with the more important parts of Singapore history and allow students to have a short debate once a week during Primary 3 and 4. Lastly, during primary 5 and 6, the MOE should allow us to start on more complex things and explain to us the rest of Singapore history by Primary 5 and 6.
To ensure the system work out, we could perhaps extend school hours by an hour or above, at the same time increasing the amount of history lessons. Also, we could have a 10 minutes interval between history lessons to allow the students to relax and let loose.
After that, in our later years, the MOE can probably allow us to study the history of ancient countries such as Greece or Egypt. I would like to stress that this system is, in my opinion, extremely efficient as in secondary schools, we have a lot more topics as compared to primary school. By using this system, we can reduce the stress we experience as well as know more about the history of other countries and as such, increase our general knowledge.
Your truly,
Lim Jing Yu