Just one case, interesting though, in light of my other post about As.
"Then we spent a year in England. The first two months in public school were
tough, but the teachers tried their best to win her over.After five months, she was a changed person — creative, inquisitive, expressive. Most of all, she had fun learning.
It is different here. There is too much emphasis on homework,
little art and craft, teachers threaten to pukul if the hair is not tied, keluar
kelas if books are forgotten, and, worst of all, there is no attempt to make
children feel at ease in the classroom.What’s most important is scoring As."
(Source) From a letter to NST available from this link:
Is scoring straight As all that matters?
I must say I was not that creative or inquisitive at school, being conditioned by the rigid school rules. I was a bookworm at school, through and through. Two things led to me realising that the world was larger than exams and unapplied theory. Computer games - which led me into the field of programming; and my wanderlust - which compelled me to seek out foreign universities(those fancy brochures sure were cool).
In hindsight, of course, I could have saved myself a great deal of time and effort to learn all the other fun stuff in life if only school was more towards the goal of developing the mind by engaging in fun activities, or organising it myself. There were some of my friends who were more unrestricted in their thinking, unfortunately they were punished for their 'original' thinking. Fingernail offences were sure fun... "One millimeter makes all the difference? Or two? Heck, it's not even past the fingertip."
Even teachers get punished too. I had one Moral Studies teacher who was quite creative. He had us draw mind maps of the various moral values and their applications for each lesson. So our group hacked together some boxes and some text, very messy indeed, with us all non-artist. In the conventional school, we would have been chased out of the classroom. However, the teacher held up our diagram as exactly what he wanted, and scolded one other group for being too neat! He explained that what he wanted was brainstorming kind of material, not material for memorising. Which was kind of cool, something other than dead memorising for the 106(?) Nilai-Nilai Moral. But, the only thing that stuck among most of us was "too neat!". He sure wasn't popular after that. [Note to friend: If you were there, you shouldn't be reading! Send me an email!]
I hope (with some certainty) that my old alma matter is no longer like that :)