A 13-year-old National Junior College student has joined the ranks of fellow Singaporeans (including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) who’ve scored winning titles in the world’s oldest international schools’ writing competition.
For her thought-provoking poem Two Voices, Janine Shum was crowned the junior winner in The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2018, chosen from approximately 12,000 entries from across five regions of the Commonwealth. The win landed her the opportunity to drop by Buckingham Palace last week, where she received her award from Camilla Parker Bowles, The Duchess of Cornwall herself. The young lady even scored herself feature on BBC during her royal visit.
Two Voices
One can easily see why she won. Two Voices is a poem that contrasts the lives and perspectives of two girls — one in Singapore and one in Afghanistan. Shum deftly utilizes the twin cinema format, a homegrown poetic form featuring two separate columns of poetry that can be read horizontally across both columns as well as vertically down each column.
It makes for a bigger impact. One sees the stark differences in the lives of the two students, with one feeling that education is a deprived basic need to be empowered, while the other feeling that going through the pressures of education and rote learning is disempowering.
“My poem suggests that education should be about changing society for the better – reaching hearts and minds. Education should encourage open-mindedness, curiosity, the thoughtful questioning of social norms, and the challenging of discriminatory and prejudiced views,” Shum explained.
“Education should also nurture and care for the whole child. Only then will we have the right ingredients for our common future in education.”
Read Two Voices below.
