My son is 12 this year. This means that in 20 days, he will be sitting the PSLE alongside 40,000 other children across Singapore.
Every Singaporean knows what the PSLE is. It's a rite of passage, the exam that marks the end of a child's primary school years. Everything they've learned culminates into a week of exams that supposedly determines their future. Children spend hours in tuition. Parents pay thousands of dollars. There's an entire mini rat race around getting that AL4 or getting into the "right" schools. Kids are stressed. Parents are exhausted. Lots of tears are shed. Frustration mounts. Kids, parents, teachers, everyone.
I understand why the PSLE feels like everything. It's been embedded into our Singaporean culture that this is the only ladder to success. If you want a good life, you need to study hard, score well in the PSLE, get into the right secondary school, get into the right university, get a good job.
But you know what? That deal was written for a different world. When I was doing my PSLE, there was no YouTube, no social media, no AI, and certainly no 19-year-old founders raising venture capital. The path was narrow, the options were few, and the system was designed to sort us efficiently. But the world has changed so fundamentally since then. The PSLE is no longer the single ladder. There are doors everywhere now.
Today, a child with an idea, a laptop, some curiosity, and a little help from AI can build things that used to require a full engineering team and years of experience.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying grades don't matter. They do! And as a mum, I am still hawking over my son as he studies and am very much hoping he does well. If it helps, I've managed to get hold of this year's prelim papers from a number of schools (here) which you can use for your child's revision. I believe there is still real value in what the PSLE builds: discipline, the ability to sit down and grind through hard things, to manage stress and show up anyway. Those are really important foundational skills that every child should learn.
But there is a difference between teaching children to work hard and teaching children that a number defines them. I believe children need to know, early, clearly and repeatedly, that they are more than their results. Building something matters. Curiosity matters. The ability to create something from nothing, to solve a problem that hasn't been solved, to dream up something the world doesn't have yet, that is a kind of intelligence too. And with AI, the ceiling on what's possible is genuinely moving. The children who aren't afraid to experiment and fail and try again, they are going to have options we can't fully imagine yet.
I wish every child sitting for the PSLE this year, all the best. But when the results come back, whatever they may be, I hope we all remember the things which actually matter. Grades are not a measure of who our children are. They worked hard. They did their best. We are proud of them and the future we want to build, for them, with them, is so much bigger than any AL score could ever hold.
❤️