Earlier this month, I re-read 1984 while nursing a slight sunburn in idyllic Vieques. (It wasn’t even my copy, but whatever.) Call me a masochist or killjoy if you please, but it really isn’t that often that I get to read literature that isn’t chock-full of data and (in general) poorly written reported speech. 1984 is perhaps George Orwell’s most famous work, and definitely one of the most prominent literary dystopias around. (Fitting, perhaps, that its coinage as a word is attributed to Mill, after which my lab computer is named.)
One would think it pure, undistilled cynicism that when reading 1984, I feel like I’m reading not just about a purely fictional society, but also about my own country, in a greatly garbled form. But substitute the names, times and places, and it seems to read like a history of contemporary home. Replace Big Brother with the tendrils of a prominent ex-Prime Minister (with surreptitious excisions of other Old Guard members from the public consciousness), IngSoc for the oddball mélange of public exhortations that passes for “pragmatic public policy”, and fill in the missing technological innovations in electronics and biotechnology (perhaps not unlike in the vein of Brave New World), and one begins to paint a picture not unlike contemporary society.
One of the most haunting parallels is with England’s Oceania’s state of perpetual warfare, being locked in a three-way stalemate that justifies the continual drain on the state’s resources. It is no great leap of the imagination to line up the dial with the rationale and justification of national service/conscription in today’s society. One may think this is an overreaction to the fall of Singapore to the Japanese Occupation, or Konfrontasi, or the general state of social unrest. Or one may take to heart the justifications exhorted about Singapore’s need to defend itself from another war-crazed Japan or Indonesia. But one cannot argue with a fact that a large fraction of the GDP is allocated to defence expenditures, and that the two-man-year tax from every male youth of age (able-bodied or otherwise) engenders considerable opportunity costs that are difficult to measure. The recent case of Ike See, who almost had to turn down a rare opportunity to study music because of his National Scholarship responsibilities, perhaps illustrates the opportunity cost very appropriately.
And it is the Ike Sees of Singapore that have me greatly worried. For all its faults, the education system in Singapore has worked tremendously well when it comes to metrics such as the number of As at ‘O’ levels per capita or something equally meaningless. We can proudly claim math and science scores that rank among the best in the world, and success stories of students from underprivileged backgrounds rising to the top social strata by securing prestigious1 government scholarships and going to top-notch universities all over the world. (Success stories which, of late, seem to be increasingly rarer.) But at what cost, this relentless pursuit for metric results? The mass implementation of teaching the exam has achieved impressive paper goals, but has it taught students how to think? And how many students who can think critically for themselves have learnt to do so despite, rather than as a consequence of, our pressure-cooker educational system?
The problem, and its solution, form an inextricable Catch-22. That the success of mass education to do the most good for the most people lies in the identification of the lowest common denominator, and devoting the overwhelming bulk of available resources toward improving that very baseline2. The greatest good for the greatest number, the refrain of the industrial society, has been used to justify so many shortcomings of the system. One particularly insidious problem is that people on the fringes often get overlooked. It cuts both ways: not only do the retarded and learning-impaired suffer the ignominy of being consistently worse than average, the genuinely talented get shortchanged by not having sufficient teacher time for them to develop their potentials. And even more so if students’ talents don’t lie in Something Approved, i.e. an Examinable Subject worth boasting about.
Sounds easy to fix, doesn’t it? Just identify the smart ones, preferably early on, and give them disproportionate amounts of nurturing. (the same applies, of course to those with learning disabilities.) Fertilizer for the mind, as it were, to cultivate our Future Leaders. But think of how this would gel in a meritocratic society, and to boot one that is highly competitive and hence unforgiving in failure, and one that uses examination results as an operational definition for merit. How does one mass screen an entire student population for anything, be it competence at regurgitation or unusual mental acuity at manipulating IQ puzzles? No one has come up with a more cost-effective scheme than a wriiten examination, and so one happily administers such an exam to filter the wheat from the chaff.
So far, so good, but now stir in the hypercompetitive kiasu mentality that is evolutionarily advantaged in such an environment. Observe what happens: a rapid convergence toward the tried-and-tested method of teaching the test to ambitious students, whether or not the ambitions are intrinsic to the student or come from greedy, if well-intentioned, forebears. The problem with meritocracy is not its tenets, but in its implementability. It is an unstable ideology, in that once exam scores are accepted proxies for true (ineffable) merit, the confluence of an increasingly formalized educational scheme and a streamlined method for obtaining high scores is not only trivial, but inevitable. For if everyone starts getting As at ‘O’ levels, then one has to use a finer sieve to differentiate students, such as ‘A’ level results. By induction, the co-opting of advanced degrees such as the Doctor of Philosophy seems to be merely eventuality. We are already seeing it in the life sciences gold rush that defines our foremost thinking in contemporary labor management.
What is to happen next, once one has exhausted the awarding of all possible accolades, prestigious or otherwise? Given convergence in the streamlining of the process from examination certificate to desk job, there then arises evolutionary pressure to foster cultural traits that favor such an optimized pipeline. If one exhausts all possible avenues of differentiation via certifications and scores, a homogeneous élite stratum of society is bound to emerge, bringing along with it all the trappings of the upper class, including its snobbish distinctions delineating the boundary with the unwashed masses and well-honed instincts for the interests of self-preservation3. A calcification of society that paves the way for the transition from authoritarianism to totalitarianism via the police state4 would then not seem at all unlikely.
I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I do not yet see any form of logical redress.
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