Singapore Parents, Stop Optimising Your Kids for Exams
It's 9pm on a Tuesday. Your child is at the desk. Not because they want to be — because there's an assessment book to get through before Friday. You bought it because every other parent in the class seemed to have one. Your child hasn't complained. They're doing the work. And somewhere underneath the tiredness, you feel something that's hard to name: a low-level anxiety that if they don't do this, they'll fall behind. Behind what, exactly, is harder to say.
We've built a very efficient system for teaching kids to pass tests. The tests have changed.
The World They're Being Prepared For No Longer Exists
In 2026, AI can sit the PSLE. It can pass the SAT, the A-levels, the bar exam, the medical licensing exam. Not metaphorically — literally. The same ChatGPT your neighbour used to plan a family trip to Kyoto can score in the top percentile of standardised tests designed for 16-year-olds.
This doesn't mean exams don't matter. They do. School results still open doors. A good PSLE score still matters for secondary school placement. None of that has changed overnight.
But here's what has changed: the advantage that comes from being good at exams used to compound over a lifetime. You got into a good school, which led to a good university, which led to a good job, which led to a stable career. That chain still works — but it's compressing. The jobs at the end of it look different. The skills that sustain a career across 40 years look very different from the skills that get you through an exam at 12.
Exams are the floor. They are not the ceiling.
What Actually Matters Now
Three things. Not a long list — three specific things.
How to learn. Not how to memorise existing knowledge, but how to acquire new skills from scratch, repeatedly, across a lifetime. The world your child will work in at 35 will require capabilities that don't exist yet. The ability to pick those up quickly — to be curious, to experiment, to not be paralysed by not knowing something — is worth more than any single subject grade.
How to stay curious past the point where curiosity is rewarded. School rewards the right answer. Real life rewards the interesting question. Most kids who are naturally curious learn, slowly, to manage that curiosity so it doesn't get in the way of their grades. Some of them never get it back. That's a loss worth taking seriously.
How to use tools well. Including AI tools. A child who knows how to direct an AI agent to help them learn something new, build something, solve a problem — that child is not at risk of being replaced by AI. They're the person directing the AI. A child who only knows how to do things AI can already do better than them is in a more precarious position. That's not a criticism of those children. It's a criticism of what we've been optimising them for.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I'm not suggesting a curriculum overhaul. I'm suggesting three small shifts that any parent can make, starting this week.
Let your child use AI to explore something they're genuinely curious about, with no test at the end. Not to get answers — to go deeper. If they're obsessed with dinosaurs, let them use an AI agent to build a theory about why the T-Rex had small arms. If they love Minecraft, let them use AI to design a building they couldn't build before. The subject doesn't matter. The practice of following curiosity somewhere unfamiliar does.
Build something together. A simple budgeting app. A quiz game for the family. A tool that tracks their pocket money. Use AI to help. The point isn't the output — it's the experience of breaking a problem into steps and working through it. That's a skill, and it transfers.
Ask your child to teach you something they learned using AI. Teaching forces understanding in a way that passive learning doesn't. If they can explain it to you, they own it. If they can't, they have a prompt to go back and figure out what they actually missed.
Exams Still Matter. Just Not as Much as You Think.
I want to be clear about something, because I know how this sounds in Singapore.
I'm not telling you to stop caring about school results. PSLE matters. Secondary school placement matters. University still opens doors. None of this is pretending otherwise.
What I'm saying is: do not let that be the ceiling. Parents who treat exam performance as the goal are going to produce kids who are very well-prepared for a world that is already changing under our feet. Exam performance is the floor — the minimum requirement, the thing you need to have handled so everything else can happen.
The ceiling is curiosity. The ceiling is knowing how to learn. The ceiling is not being afraid to pick up a new tool, try something you don't know how to do, fail at it, and try again. That's what compounds over a lifetime. That's what AI cannot replicate.
I work in AI. I see every day what these tools can and can't do. The one thing I have never seen an AI do — not once — is want something. Be genuinely curious about something. Care about the outcome beyond the task.
That's what we're raising. And right now, we're spending a lot of 9pm Tuesdays optimising for the wrong thing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I let my child use AI for homework?
The question worth asking isn't "should they use it" but "how are they using it." AI as a shortcut to avoid thinking is worth worrying about. AI as a tool to go deeper, to check understanding, to explore questions the homework doesn't ask — that's a different thing entirely. The distinction is active versus passive use, and it's worth having that conversation explicitly with your child.
How do I teach my child to learn, not just study?
Start with what they're already curious about, outside of school. Give them a project with no right answer. Let them fail at something small and work through it. Ask them questions you don't know the answer to and find out together. Learning how to learn is a practice, not a lesson — it develops through doing, not through being told how.