Laser51088, I must applaude you. 
You have hit head on, on a major nail that is currently still
obstructing and hindering on the progress of the nation's full
potential towards manpower optimization.
The focus on the abilty to take in hard, logical and 'scientific'
facts, memorize them and then to subsequently regurgitate the
memorised facts has long been an established and undeniable
phenomena in the local Educational focus.
While I take pride in noting that our progress in this area is
ranked and recognized throughout the world through the achievement
of excellence preformance in International Competitions, I also
lament on the tragedy of our inadequate focus on areas that contain
a less 'scientific' and logic driven nature.
To cut the words short so as to avoid digressing from the topic,
important areas such as foreign languages, arts, philosophy, and
cultural studies are but familiar names of specializations that has
had a long history of being left cold.
As a small nation who is highly dependent on international trade
and relations, I really feel very strongly that the
underappreciation of these seemingly 'commercial less valued' areas
is a potentially dangerous pithole.
Just as our primary cores in the maritime, semiconducters,
electronics, and manufacturing industries would serve in a similar
order as the line 'depts' in an organization, the contributions
from underappreciated areas such as foreign languages and cultural
studies would serve the country well in the likeness to the
supporting 'depts'.
The cloning and unidirectional thinking that you have mentioned as
in your above post has to undergo reconsideration for the world
itself does not run on on our familiar SG system. If we dun start
to shape up now and embrace Education with a global perspective,
we'll only end up strangling ourselves eventually.
