Here's how tuition culture is thoroughly choking Singapore’s economic growth

It's a culprit behind productivity woes.

Singapore’s unhealthy obsession with straight As and perfect test scores may be the unheralded culprit behind the country’s productivity woes.

According to a report by Morgan Stanley, the prevalence of standardized tests in Singapore’s education system hinders students from ‘real’ learning and instead drives pupils to rote memorization in order to ace tests.

“Singapore’s education system may have inadvertently taught students to learn to tests. The high frequency of standardized tests, the emphasis on test results and the outcome it drives (in terms of school entry acceptance and employment) may have imbued an aversion to failure and stifled creative thinking and risk-taking,” the report noted.

This reluctance to take risks is reflected in Singapore’s weak entrepreneurial attitude. The city-state was ranked 25th in terms of entrepreneurial attitude in the latest Global Entrepreneurship Index 2015, trailing behind other developed countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia.

“Indeed, to that point, the appetite for risk-taking among the society perhaps still needs to be further cultivated to weaken the social perception that the most ideal jobs sit with multinational companies, to encourage more would-be entrepreneurs and to foster a better support system for the entrepreneur community,” Morgan Stanley said.

“The antidote to dealing with the growth consequence of a structural immigration slowdown and high leverage is to focus on productivity, in our view. In this context, we think features of the education system and labour market practices in Nordic economies such as limited standardized testing, a highly competitive teaching profession, less focus on competition but more focus on collaboration, active labour market policies and lifelong learning programs are important learning points for Singapore in its productivity thrust,” the report said.