The debate on educational reforms struck a chord with me in view of my personal educational experience.

I am currently pursuing my undergraduate education at a liberal-arts college in the United States. While universities are institutions with large departments, a large student body and a greater focus on postgraduate-level study, liberal-arts colleges are much smaller institutions with smaller student bodies specialising in undergraduate education.

Liberal-arts colleges are known for their small class sizes and intimate learning environment characterised by close interaction between students and faculty members.

By the time a student graduates, he is expected to have taken courses in nine subject areas from each of three categories: the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the Arts and Humanities, and the Social and Behavioural Sciences. There is also a great emphasis on the interpretation of non-verbal texts (that is, music, art, and dance).

Because liberal-arts colleges are much smaller, they tend to be less well-known, compared to the Ivy League. You might, or might not, have heard of liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams.

I came here to give myself more time to explore, and then to decide what I really want to specialise in. I came here also to get away from the stigma which many Singaporean employers attach to a degree in the Arts and Social Sciences, which is perceived to be 'useless'. I remember trying to explain to people why I chose to go to an unheard-of-in-Singapore college (Wesleyan University), rather than the prestigious London School of Economics to do a fixed course in the area of Government and Economics, which I wasn't sure was my cup of tea.

People told me: 'What's the use of going to this liberal-arts school? How are you going to get a job with a degree from this place which is not part of the Ivy League?'

I don't know the answer to that question, the thought of which makes me cringe. It reminded me of the time at the end of secondary school when I decided to go to the arts stream in junior college (JC), as opposed to the science stream, because I knew that Physics and Chemistry were not my cup of tea.

People around me were genuinely concerned that I would deprive myself of the chance of getting a 'useful' engineering or medical degree.

Up till the end of JC, has the purpose of my education been to get into university so that I could get a good job?

Was I just a human resource who could be moulded into 'the creative workforce of the 21st century', or was I supposed to be that individual who was nurtured to articulate his thoughts and question the world?

I came here to find myself constantly engaged in the spirit of exploration, whether or not I was in the classroom. Students who came through the portals of a liberal-arts college were not regarded as a human resource which was to be trained for the workforce.

They were regarded as individuals, each with their own opinions, who came together for the sole purpose of learning and having an education that could be considered as 'liberating'.

I found that one main difference between the system that Singapore tried to adopt from America and the American system itself was that, in Singapore, the end towards which policy-makers tried to work was to produce an individual equipped with thinking skills so that they could have a 'creative workforce' for the new economy.

In America, however, education and the spirit of exploration were the end in themselves. An educated individual who questions the world he lives in is the desired outcome, and it is in this spirit of exploration and learning that one learns to think and view everything from different perspectives.

It is only when one is true to the spirit of learning for learning's sake that the desired result of a 'thinking' individual is reaped.

One more thing I learnt is that creativity and individualism are intertwined and that you can't have one without the other.

This led me to ponder whether one can engineer a 'creative workforce', which is an oxymoron because 'creative' denotes individualism and 'workforce' denotes assimilation.

As I got to know the Americans, I found that they came here with a different mindset. Not everyone intended to graduate and lead a high-flying Wall Street career.

A close friend of mine is majoring in Art History and intends to go into museum work. Another person I know spent a semester in Tibet and intends to specialise in Tibetan Buddhism at the postgraduate level. Someone else I know is an East Asian Studies major and intends to teach English in Japan before specialising in Japanese Studies in graduate school. Others spend a great time engaging in political and social activism.

I realised that society does not penalise each of them for the decision they make, unlike in Singapore where the oppor-tunity costs of doing so at the expense of job security are too high.

Coincidentally, I realised that many employers here, like in Singapore, are still biased towards people who graduate with degrees in Economics than in other subject areas.

While the American job market is not as accommodating of people who choose to major in 'impractical' areas of study, there is a place in American society for each and every one of these persons who choose to study what they like.

Among my American friends and acquaintances, a handful of them graduated from Stuyvesant and Bronx High, New York specialised-science high schools which are by now famous in Singapore.

Recent reports in The Straits Times have created the impression that these high schools produce many students who go on to the Ivy League simply because of their status as specialised-science schools which supposedly provide quality teaching. The fact that these schools stand apart from the rest is because of the student body. Academically able students flock to Stuyvesant, Bronx and Brooklyn more because of their academic reputation than because of the fact that they are specialised-science schools.

Contrary to public perception that teaching at these schools is of a high quality, it is, in reality, the same as any other public high school in New York City. Also, for any number of scientist wannabes that Stuyvesant produces, there are as many people who go on to specialise in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

I found that the Singapore education system I went through, despite all the criticisms, prepared me well in dealing with American college life. Many Americans were amazed, when I showed them my JC yearbook, at the number of extra-curricular activities that were available in my JC.

Even as NUS and the Nan-yang Technological University adopt the American SAT I reasoning test as an entry requirement, the Americans here are adopting a new version of SAT that includes a writing section, not unlike the essay that every JC student has to write for the General Paper in the A-level examinations.

I believe that had my education not been so result- and grade-oriented, and had students been taught to have a passion for the subjects they were learning (as opposed to scoring well), the experience would have been even better.