Walk into a typical tuition centre and you will see children hunched over worksheets, practising past year exam questions, chasing the correct answer.
This form of rote memorisation, drilling and cramming is preparing children for obsolescence in the AI era.
Singapore schools are deliberately moving away from this model. The Transforming Education through Technology Masterplan 2030 is built on the premise that thinking skills, not content mastery, are what will determine outcomes. To reduce rigid streaming and the emphasis on grades, the Ministry of Education has removed mid-year examinations and introduced Full Subject-Based Banding. It is rolling out AI tools that guide students with Socratic questions.
Ironically, when MOE removed mid-year exams, some tuition centres responded by creating their own mock papers to fill the void.
Singapore families spent $1.8 billion on private tuition in 2023. Seven in ten students receive some form of private tutoring. There are more tuition centres in Singapore than there are primary schools, secondary schools, junior colleges and universities combined.
Parents believe tuition gives their children an edge. But the model of tuition that Singapore has built — drilling, model answers, repetition until the format is memorised — does not just fail to prepare children for the AI era. It actively works against it.
MOE is naturally concerned about whether students are adequately prepared for an AI-driven future. To build AI fluency, the ministry is rolling out AI tools in primary schools from Primary 4 onwards. This has caused some concerns among parents about overreliance on AI, potential erosion of critical thinking, increased screen time, and impacts on young children’s neural development.
While we debate the pros and cons of introducing AI to young children, shouldn’t we also scrutinize how conventional tuition reinforces outdated learning methods—at a time when kids need critical thinking and communication skills the most?
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Rote Learning is Obsolete
Rote learning and drilling train a specific skill: pattern recognition within a familiar format. A child who has seen the same type of PSLE composition question forty times will perform well, until the question changes slightly.
As the founder of a skills-based learning centre, I’ve seen how debilitating this type of learning can be. I had a Primary 5 student who diligently practised composition-writing about “a meaningful experience”. But when the question asked about “a time she changed her mind”, she froze. She had memorised an answer. She had never learnt how to think.
Now place that student in a world where AI can retrieve any fact in seconds, write an essay in minutes, and solve structured problems faster than any human. What value can she bring when the skill tuition spent years sharpening, ie, reproduction of information, has been commoditised?
Drilling for Grades Kills the Experimental Mindset
Many tuition centres continue to measure their success by exam grades. While good grades signal concept mastery, treating A’s as the ultimate goal can be psychologically damaging. It breeds a fear of failure by framing every problem as a quest for the “right” answer.
In the AI era, success demands adaptability, bold experimentation, and resilience through repeated failure; you must embrace being wrong to innovate and grow.
Yet a relentless focus on 100% scores turns every minor mistake into a catastrophe, stifling the mindset of experimentation and adaptability children need to thrive in the AI era.
A child who has been trained to fear wrong answers will not experiment. They will not ask speculative questions. They will not sit with confusion long enough to think through it. Yet these skills – struggling through difficulty, arriving at the answer by asking questions and making tiny experiments, reflecting on one’s thinking — are exactly what AI cannot replicate.
May Lee, Founder of Edtivate Learning, a group of skill-based learning centres.
Tuition Must Teach Children How to Think
That is not to say tuition centres should be abolished. Having spent decades in the private education sector, I believe tuition fills a real gap. Classes in Singapore schools are large. Teachers are stretched. Busy parents cannot always provide the one-on-one attention their children need.
A well-run tuition centre offers personalised attention, the space to revisit concepts at a child’s own pace, an adult who notices when a student is confused rather than just moving on with the class.
But the tuition of the AI era must be different from the tuition of the exam-drilling era.
The Brookings Institution’s 2026 report “A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect”, which drew from over 500 consultations across 50 countries and 400+ studies, warned that generative AI undermines foundational cognitive, emotional, and social development through dependency and misinformation.
These are the gaps that tuition centres should plug.
The root word of tuition in Latin is tuitio (meaning “protection” or “guardianship”), from the verb tueri (to watch, guard, or protect). Tuition centres must now inhabit our role as guardians to protect our children from the negative impacts of AI on education and enable our children’s cognitive, emotional and social development.
What will it look like, in practice?
Tutors should shift from “I explain, you copy” to building thinking skills. The goal is to empower students to think critically and take ownership of their learning. Clarity alone does not create understanding; engagement does. This means designing lessons that build problem‑solving, curiosity, allowing for the student to struggle productivity.
Instead of giving better answers, tutors we must design better questions that require evaluation and synthesis. For instance, instead of “What were the causes of the fall of Singapore in 1942?”, a better question is: “How do these three conflicting primary sources challenge the traditional narrative of the fall of Singapore?”
The goal is no longer about teaching students how to get an A but to navigate ambiguity and complexity. Instead of providing the solution, they should think of their work as “designing a quest” to trigger inquiry-based learning. This requires patience and allowing students to struggle productively.
We believe that the ultimate mark of a tutor’s success is when the student no longer needs us. Central to this philosophy is metacognition: the practice of teaching students not just what to think, but how to think about their own thinking. Rather than rushing students toward answers, tutors can help students develop the self-awareness to catch and plug their own knowledge gaps.
When our students can judge how well they have understood something, adjust their studying based on their self-assessment, and know when to ask for help, we know they have learnt how to learn.
Singapore’s schools are moving in the right direction. Tuition centres must to catch up. Teach children to think. Teach them to struggle productively. Teach them that a wrong answer is the start of understanding. Help them become the kind of learners who can walk into an uncertain world unafraid.
Today, regurgitating knowledge to ace an exam will not help our children. The thinking, reasoning and communications skills that transcend the classroom will.
Written by: May Lee, Founder of Edtivate Learning, a group of skill-based learning centres.