Article.
Something new that I wrote for Zaobao:精英与大众：如何磨合
Haha as you can see I do not believe that an education system that is too exclusively elitist (e.g. GEP, IP, ... whatever they have these days :P) is going to do any good for our country as a whole. It is still meritocracy but skewed - meritocracy that sets the path for a child way too early.
(I have been through the system... The GEP selection system is already skewed - i.e. designed to select for a particular group of people - at least in my perspective. For the English part, I don't think even my teachers know those words in the vocab section (I just remember being really stunned when I saw those words - where on Earth did they pop out from?!). For the math part, I knew how to do the sums because I was doing more advanced math for fun. Of course, if they had a Chinese section I would have owned everyone else, but too bad they didn't have it :P)
(Digression - so people who are better in Chinese are not GEP worthy la! It is truly the mindset back then, I can guarantee - because they want us to fix our English first. Even my dad thought that way. Well, 塞翁失馬,焉知非福... If they had a Chinese section and picked me, I won't be here shooting at people; I would be shot at instead. This perspective that I have now is going to help me a lot a lot in the future... I really have to thank my parents for that :) )
It is just that seriously our elites (i.e. future leaders of our country) need to understand heartlander Singaporeans instead of just superficially interacting with them and acknowledging that they exist. When our elites eventually become our leaders (or healers or whatever profession they choose), these are the people that they are going to serve. Our leaders need to know exactly how our people think and exactly what they need on top of all external challenges and other broader issues, and they need to convey all these not-immediately-apparent or even counter-intuitive problems effectively to the population (the aging population problem is to a huge extent counter-intuitive to a lot of people!).
I wrote this to Zaobao (I am replying someone) because I think that something has to be done, and it must start now. Let's not talk about how easy it is for our people to climb up the social ladder; I'm not trying to solve that problem. Though, since it is already in our social structure that the majority of our elites come from the upper-middle class or above (or they run in families - we can hardly change that), the least we can do is to get these people to interact with people from other social classes at a close enough basis so that they can develop the skills to communicate effectively with a heartlander Singaporean.
It may simply be overly idealistic to expect every single Singaporean in the elite class to be able to communicate with a Singaporean from the hawker centre auntie class with complete ease and zero reservation (when I say 'communicate' I mean 'to have a conversation lasting at least 10 minutes' - ordering chicken rice doesn't count!). That will make a utopia already. Though at least we should make an effort to approximate towards that :)
(Oh anyway, this reminded me of a quote from someone in tomorrow.sg:
'I might disagree with what you said, but I will defend to my death your right to say it.'
Haha I am criticising policies. No doubt about that. Hope that we can all defend to our death for one another our right to say these things :D)
Labels: Policy and Politics
