One of the criticisms about the Singapore education system is the streaming process as well as the cookie-cutter pigeonholing process.

I wonder if someone like Michael Phelps would have succeeded in Singapore, a place where we so quickly push people who don’t do well in academics into a lower stream, implicitly stigmatizing them as failures based on only one marker.

But that’s only one part of the story. I think one of Singapore’s current failings is our lack of a way to help more of our youth maximize their potential beyond the standard academic fare.

Anyway, the article ends nicely.

More to the point, I think, is the moral of her story, which offers hope for parents of any child with a challenge like A.D.H.D.: Too many adults looked at Ms. Phelps’s boy and saw what he couldn’t do. This week, the world will be tuned to the Beijing Olympics to see what he can do.