Singapore, Monday, April 6, 2009 – The Ministry of Education today announced eight new Junior Sports Academies to be set up in 2009. These academies are centralised efforts to identify and train sporting talent, and will be housed at various schools.
The eight academies and start dates are as follows
Anglican High School – Badminton (April 2009)
Anglo-Chinese (Primary) – Swimming (April 2009)
Catholic High School – Wushu (April 2009)
Yio Chu Kang Primary School – Soccer (April 2009)
Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School – Shooting (July 2009)
Nan Hua Primary School – Table Tennis (July 2009)
Pasir Ris Crest Secondary School – Fencing (July 2009)
Paya Lebar Methodist Girls' (Secondary) School – Table Tennis (July 2009)
These schools were selected based on their track records in the respective sport, sports culture and management support.
They join four other organisations which piloted Junior Sports Academies in 2008. These are the Singapore Sports School for netball, swimming, table tennis and track and field, the Singapore Table Tennis Association for table tennis, Chung Cheng High Main for wushu, and Henry Park Primary School for badminton.
The existing academies have so far trained 260 young athletes, and MOE estimates the new academies to develop some 200 more. MOE intends to set up more Junior Sports Academies over the next few years.
If you think this is bad, check out what was announced last week – http://redsports.sg/2009/05/14/direct-school-admission-exercise-psle – it doubles up on this to confirm your suspicions.
Singapore sounds like she is very lost and very desperate in their search for “young local sporting talents” – whatever that means – and yet they are heading in all the wrong directions.
At the end of the day, its the children who suffer from these experiments. Singapore really needs to observe countries that have succeeded in building a solid sporting culture in the country.
For a country as tiny as Singapore, what we need is a healthy base. Why make it so complicated? Such exclusivity and “elitism” is going to stifle the (already absent) sporting culture.
As if our education system has not reflected enough of how we’ve gone wrong. To make performance and results the focal point has come at the expense of building a learning culture in Singapore.
If even sports is going to go “the MOE way”, then we can just be prepared to see a generation of result-oriented kids, who can’t care less about the learning process and other sporting values.
Seriously, just let our children play.
First of all, there are a lot of politics in Singapore’s sports. There are also a lot of problems with the Singapore Sports School project which most people in the general public won’t know about.
Until the mindsets of sporting organisations, athletes and coaches change, we will continue to lag behind other countries, considering as well that most of our athletes are amateurs and not full-time professionals unlike other countries.
Nonsensical.
Is this a subtle admission that the Singapore Sports School project was a failure? If it ain’t then why do we need such new projects?
Come on Singapore, get the act together.