It has been more than 10 years since I graduated from school. Back to those days, the way parents want their child to study as much as possible doesn't has much differences compare to the current trend, from what I seen and heard.
We were convinced, forced, threatened, or any words you would like to think of by parents and "adults" that we must study very very hard or our future will be ruined.
Thinking back those time, and looking at current time, I can see lots of irony when parents strongly believe that studying hard and getting best academic result (or precisely, as much A as you could) is the only way to guarantee a good future. But I'm going to poke a hole on this misconception today.
There are many reasons why getting great academic results doesn't guarantee good future. One of the factors that I would urge the now-adults to think back what they had learnt in secondary school and how do they apply those knowledge in real life.
Just to make things clear, I'm not saying that what we learnt in secondary school are totally useless, but I would prefer to think practically on how and what we learn can be applied to real world.
1. Bahasa Malaysia
I start off with the compulsory subject that we must pass otherwise our SPM cert is practically useless.But I really don't have much to talk about this. I only need basic BM to talk with Malays and most of the time, even Malays substitute lots of English words in BM.
Other than that, I only use BM to ask "How much?" and "Thank you" when I need to buy something.
All those simpulan bahasa and stuffs..... I had forgotten and don't need to use them at all in all these years.
2. Sejarah
If you work as a tourist in Malaysia, than you may need them. For me.... nope. I don't have any situation where I need to talk about parameswara, zaman dahulu and stuffs.3. Sains
Science oh science... one of my favorite subjects at those days. Still remember all those experiments to understand how atoms and the relation of those body cells and stuffs.But unless you work in the science institutes or some sort, ordinary people like me don't need to recall any sort of scientific knowledge in our daily life at all even though we are dealing with science every day.
4. Mathematics
The only time when I need to use math is to calculate total amount for my spending on lunch, dinner, etc during my monthly budget checking and to calculate how much lunch money I need to pay back to my colleague after lunch. And we only need addition, and then division, that's all.Sorry about those statistic, sin-cos-tan.... I totally forgotten what do they looks like.
5. Pendidikan Moral
Seriously, who really practice actual morale in current society?We may have taught all about morals which is actually very useful, highly valuable as a human being. But as we graduates and expose to the society, growing up made us realize that those moral subjects that we learnt in school doesn't always applicable in real life.
But I'm gonna leave those deep talk about morale in other time. The morals that we learnt in school are too basic, and the morality that we practice in the current society takes lots of hardship to learn the true morality, what should be right and whats not.... So in short, pendidikan moral doesn't teach us much.
6. Geography
So much info about the world, the land, countries.... but geography is one of the worst subjects in my list. Anyhow, I don't need to recall anything about geography in my daily life as well.7. Pendidikan Seni
I'm from Art stream, and quite unfortunate that I'm not in those business subjects classes. In short, I had disposed my brushes, watercolor and stuffs long time ago.I'm kinda into digital image editing (a.k.a Photoshop) nowadays, but what I learnt in pendidikan seni has nothing I can apply to my life right now.
8. Bahasa Inggeris
The reason why I put English as the last subject I want to talk about is because English is by far the most practical subjects I ever needed since I graduated from schools. As you can see, most of my posts and blogs are all in English. Can't deny the usefulness of this.However, I can't say that English is the most useful subjects in school. Despite getting an A in SPM for English, I only learn to speak and write proper English when I enter college. And it took me tons of courage and years to speak to people, practice, and polish my English in order to be understandable by majority.
So, sorry to say that the English classes that we had in school is actually insufficient. And given that we had major issues about people having tough time communicating in English as reported here, I can't provide suggestion that our school is providing sufficient English knowledge for our youths to face the society.
Final Words
It's acceptable if you may think that I'm probably the type of students that don't pay too much attention and interest in school, in which you are right and I'm strongly agree to this.I don't mean to boost but back those days, I don't really see the point of studying academic subjects to our best effort when we probably don't need it other than to make our SPM cert looks beautiful, in case our uncles/aunties want to take a look.
In terms of amount of usefulness in each subject, I really can't say that I learnt anything useful for my career, self development, and my life in overall.
I always have a thing about studying hard in school just to get a nice looking SPM cert, and I can be honest with you that my SPM cert is not nice looking at all but I can proudly tell you that I'm having a stable job with proper income, and I have no issue or worries in my future career path at all.
And my SPM cert? Probably in my closet cabinet, I think.
