e pur si muove

I face an impervious wall of ignorance and social-status-obsessed thinking when trying to persuade JC kids to apply to good small liberal arts colleges instead of the usual big names. It seems that small classes and rigorous academics matter less than going somewhere that your typical wet market aunties has heard of.

The worst are those who go to the US but refuse to take risks when they’re there — the perennial seekers of classes where As are guaranteed. Go to any university with enough undergrad Singaporeans, and the gossip revolves around which professors are ‘easy’. To be fair, this happens with all students to a certain extent, but my impression is that it is particularly endemic in students of East Asian descent. Never mind that I have almost always learned more from a class that I did not ace than from a class that I aced — to these people, going to university isn’t about educating themselves, it’s about compiling an impressive-looking transcript that will then ‘guarantee’ them their cushy investment banking job.

I shared the same disappointment with the writer. The school teaches not passion but a perfect score. Objective for many schools, teachers and principals to be praised for bringing the school ranking up. Studying for grades is different than studying for passion. Present generation seeks not knowledge or wisdom but a perfect transcript yet are they to be blame? The onus is on the decades of poorly conceived education system which resulted in producing smart people that ends up being average joe in their achievements. Have we produce a Nobel prize winner?. Do we have Bill Gates? or even Jerry Yang?. All our so called smart scholars are in which sectors? Doing what with their life? They achieved monetary targets but wasted their life away coz they are practical and have no passion to purse deeper things that yet neither glory nor material gains. Quick bucks earned from gov sector doing average joe works than working hard doing works that can be of significant recognition. Yet now we start to adopt the teach less learn more thingy…. sounds really stupid…misguiding our generation even more. MOE scholars have brought us this far….are we the best yet or still comparing apples with orange(compared us to neighboring countries)? How about comparing with HongKong and European cities?
A blinded generation is a slow poison to the nation. We might not see it yet but if we walk faster maybe u can spot the limp.

>>I remember back in my day, admissions officers from the US came round to tell us emphatically not to send us reams and reams of unnecessary documentation, and that photocopying all our awards certificates will not increase our chances of admission>>

In my experience this is a practice not limited to SG but Asia in general, where we certify everything (participation, accomplishment, graduation) with a stamp and signature. I’ve noted that applications to programs in HK, TW and JP have substantial documentation requirements, far more than in the West.

Maybe this practice evolved from imperial chinese bureaucratic edicts.

twasher:

In my undergrad days, copying model homework from seniors’ homeworks was endemic among the Singapore scholars in engineering. Being a non-engineering major meant that most of that was irrelevant to me, and it has always annoyed me that our Future Leaders of Tomorrow were shortchanging themselves in this way.

SM:

When I last returned to SG and discovered that working 12-14 hours a day was the “norm” in Singapore, especially among my ex-peers, it was disquieting, to say the least.

I also respect people who work in something they don’t enjoy for the sake of springboarding their way to something they really want to do.

Some famous economist - I don’t remember who - claimed that the economic engines of the early 90s in East Asia can to a great extent be explained by people working insane hours relative to the comparatively less hardworking Western economies. Maybe quitacet could verify this?

quitacet:

Congratulations for being the first comment on one of my footnotes!

I should also mention this article:

http://takchek.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/stressed-out-varsity-applicant-check/

Good observation. I would also add the annoying tendency for some recipients of top overseas scholarships to turn around and accuse others who use the same strategy of being snobbish and shallow. Not to forget their inclination to jump at any opportunity to gang up with foreigners to bash Singapore.

Getting a top scholarship helps to open many doors, however I agree with you that other factors like sustained interest (”passion” is a meaningless buzzword), tenacity, persistence, social skills and sometimes creativity and flexibility play more important roles in sustained career success.

In addition, some people may not realize that getting high awards leads to even higher expectations of performance in a vicious cycle. Superb work is taken for granted. The crushing pressure of having to constantly live up to the exacting standards of others isn’t fun for everyone.

Personally, I am well aware of my limit to cope with such pressures. Luckily, as only the “third best” in your hierarchy, any little achievement I produce is always a pleasant surprise.

With the internet and google, isn’t that enough for the students to make up their own mind where they want to end up?

There is no need to spend so much effort worrying for them… As much as parents want to shield their kids from hard knocks, it is an inevitable event in the passage to adulthood.

I don’t think it’s fair, at all, for you to comment on the intellectual state of the newest generation based on what you read in the papers. Note: the papers.

Kash:

“I don’t think it’s fair, at all, for you to comment on the intellectual state of the newest generation based on what you read in the papers. Note: the papers.”

Elia:

“What makes you think that I’m judging solely from what’s in the Singapore media?”

Kash, you have raised an interesting point. For an article that aims to show the failings of the “top scholarship” approach, the writer has made the same falacious assumptions that he claims to despise.

Assumption #1: That scholarship holders are “scholars”.

A common shorthand in Singapore to be sure, but a person critical of the scholarship system would not confuse scholarship holders with reputed academics.

Assumption #2: That most Singaporeans care about some sort of hierarchy between different classes of scholarship holders and what schools they go to.

“Back in my day, there was a nascent hierarchy of scholars vs the non-scholars. Now it seems like the top students only tak e scholarships to HYP; the second best go to Oxbridge or some other elite US universities or NUS medicine; the third best go to NUS/NTU, and then there’s everyone else, the Failed Dregs of Society.”

Notice the irony of the above statement with the next sentence:

“It’s disgusting and bizarre how Singaporeans quickly rank, file and pigeonhole prospective universities in their heads, and how quickly they share their delusions with anyone who happens to be within hearing range. ”

Is this class-distinction really endemic in Singapore, or did the writer “seem” to have made it all up?

Again, this class-distinction may be only obvious to individuals from the “top scholarship” system, though I have yet to meet any other person, scholarship holder or not, who would claim that Oxbridge is for the second-best.

Assumption #3: That the failure of top scholarship holders entail failure for Singapore.

Implicit in this article is the assumption that the few elite scholarship recipients are so critical to the future of Singaporean society that their individual failures will be catastrophic.

However, even if every last one of these RJC-HYP students are shallow, mercenary, selfish and hypocritical snobs, does that mean that Singapore has no other source of high-calibre people? Our education system may be flawed, but in recent years many more people have been able to make the transition between ITE and the polytechnics as well as to the universities, demonstrating an improving flexibility in catering to the later bloomers who are more street-wise. Some of the future leaders in Singapore will come via these routes.

Only people deeply entrenched in the top scholarship system would simply disregard the vast majority of Singaporeans and base their “judging” primarily on the selfish actions of a select few elite members.

Assumption#4: That an argument against the insincerity of others need not check itself for lack of sincerity.

“But you know what - at the end of the day, it’s not the credentials, awards, honors or academic pedigree that matters. It’s how you behave as a human being that’s paramount.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to also know people.”

I know only one person who left a well-paying career to do full-time volunteer work in a poor country; perhaps that person can say the above statement with genuine meaning.

For any one else still entangled in this world of fierce career competition and complex social interactions, such a claim looks more like an appeal to popularity. The assumption here is that ordinary people (”Failed Dregs of Society”) will simply accept it wholesale since they are unable to analyze the incorrect assumptions and internal inconsistencies that plague this article.

elia’s right about some people tho. there’s this guy from this other school who’s COMPLETELY COMPLETELY fitting of elia’s description, and worthy of the shame.

As a recent A level graduate, I have yet to enter university and hence can’t judge any Singaporeans in university yet. However, I would like to raise some points, just to put some things in perspective a little.

I think it is unfair to say that every student in Singapore is obsessed about social status. At this age, a lot of us still have our own ideals and dreams, and not everyone would be so practical and cynical to only study what would guarantee them a secure job in their future and abandon their interests. I personally know people who want to go to France to study history, Japan to study liberal arts and people who choose the small, good liberal arts colleges in the US. Not all of us think the world of HYP or the Ivy League schools. Most may call us the exception, and that may be true, but no matter what there is still this exception and hence it wouldn’t be exactly fair to call all of us status-obsessed or uninterested in learning.

We aren’t unconcerned about grades. Yes, we do worry when our grades slip, because after all they will determine if we can get into our target universities. However, that doesn’t mean we do not take an interest in learning at all. It will be impossible to generalize that everybody is uninterested, or that everybody is interested. The bottom line is, please do not generalize so quickly and ruthlessly. Have you spoken to every single student and questioned him or her about their interests? Have you seen somebody’s face light up when talking about a subject they love or have come to love? I have close friends and we all share a love for History, a subject which we can’t always score well in but love anyway, simply because it is fascinating and it teaches us something new everytime we attend a lecture or tutorial.

There are many who are more experienced than us teenagers, but I feel that there are many too who are hence more cynical because of their experience. We do have our interests, and I’m glad to say that there still are people willing to pursue those interests.

Leng Hiong:

I see that in your case, the pot is calling the kettle black. You are quick to find irrelevancies to pass of as criticism or fallacies, but are oblivious to the glaring deficiencies in your own.

1. You are arguing an irrelevant contextualization. It is obvious from my context that I am referring solely to ’scholars’ as scholarship holders. I agree that scholars in the academic sense form a very distinct, not necessary coincident set of people, but it just so happens that in this context, this is a non-issue. One only needs to search my blog archives to know that I share the same disdain for the same conflation that, had it been made here, would have been inexcusable, but it has not.

2. Maybe most Singaporeans don’t care, and that a scholar is a scholar is a scholar. However, I can definitively say that many scholars do indeed care. I have met people who do indeed claim that Oxbridge is inferior to HYP because HYP is harder to get into and “all you need to get into Oxbridge is 3 As what”. Granted, they are scholars who studied in the US, and that I don’t have signed written statements proving that that’s what they’ve said, but they do exist.

This of course does not mean that I’m endorsing what they claim, and indeed the “irony” that you’ve pointed out can be interpreted as my true assessment of such claims.

3. I do not seem to recall making this claim. Can you point to me exactly where I said this?

At any rate, you’ve completely missed the irony.

- Yes, Singapore has good people that don’t become “shallow, mercenary, selfish and hypocritical RJC-HYP snobs”. I don’t dispute that. I am, however, disputing the attitude; a subtlety that you don’t seem to realize.

- “Only people deeply entrenched in the top scholarship system would simply disregard the vast majority of Singaporeans and base their “judging” primarily on the selfish actions of a select few elite members.”

REALLY?? Shall I trot out the clichéd examples from movies like Singapore Dreaming or 小孩不笨? How else would you explain the existence of the private tuition industry; the plethora of tuition centers and private tutors; the abundance of assessment books in many local bookstores; and the ubiquity of past year examination papers in just about every photocopying shop in the country?

I really must introduce you to the consumers of such products - there are many, many Singaporean mothers who would be surprised that priming their precious children to take up prestigious scholarships is not the be-all and end-all to raising Good Citizens of Tomorrow.

As irony seems to be lost on you, I will reiterate that I do not endorse the attitudes or statements; I’m just presenting views that I’ve heard over and over and over again.

4. I had hoped that you would be one of the people who would not resort to argumentatum ad hominem, but alas that has turned out not to be the case.

For the record, I made a conscious and sincere decision to walk away from the “world of fierce career competition and complex social interactions” that is the Singapore scholarship system. When I entered that rat race, I naïvely and sincerely thought that this was a way to change the system for the better from the inside. Believe me, I did not walk away willingly, except for overwhelming evidence that the system is structured in a way that would have made such change impossible. So I said, “screw this” and sincerely went to pursue my own dreams.

Had I not been sincere, I would be in the scholars’ rat race, grumbling about the meager dregs of tax dollars that I were entitled to take home every month.

Had I not been sincere, this blog wouldn’t here for you to slander me on.

I wrote that last bit as sincerely as I know how. It doesn’t surprise me that someone who doesn’t know irony in an essay drenched in it can mistake sincerity for cynical rabble-rousing.

Squall:

Thanks for reassuring me that the idealistic, non-HYP-obsessed segment of young Singaporeans still exists.

Again, it might not be clear from context, but what I’d written above is essentially targeted specifically to the ST articles cited. I’d assumed that most discerning readers would automatically figure out that from the context, and give the article its due authoritative weight, i.e. not very much at all. All of the criticism that you’ve attempted to levy at me can be equally applied to the ST articles themselves.

Obviously I couldn’t've interviewed EVERY student to probe whether or not they had a passion for something. However, I CAN say that in my personal experience, the proportion of passionate students among the scholars that I know have declined drastically on a yearly basis.

I remember staying up late playing FFVIII back in JC. It inspired me to write a keyboard script to automatically level up by fighting chocobos and those cactus creatures.

Leng Hiong:

you claim to have found “salient flaws”, but the issues you have raised are not flaws at all, but are best described as misguided misinterpretations of the original text.

1. Since you have a hangup about the “Failed Dregs of Society” term, it’s high time everyone realized that i’m being ironic about this label. It may be hard for you to believe, but I genuinely do not believe that such a label is accurate. However, it is my informed and educated opinion that Singaporeans do appear to have clear impressions of a pecking order in society that is premised on academic credentials, even if they do not articulate their attitudes as such.

If you choose to disagree with this view, that is your prerogative. I have my sources, albeit anecdotal, to support my view, but I will be happy to examine any evidence that you may choose to present that substantiates your disagreement. But you should consider that despite the anecdotal nature of my evidence, I am merely reporting what I observe; I have nothing to gain by inventing evidence out of nowhere.

2. To the extent that Singaporeans take ill-informed opinion seriously, it can and will pose substantial problems in skewing many Singaporeans’ attitudes toward good schools. Asking people to choose between HYP and Oxbridge is clearly choosing between Excellent and Excellent; as far as reputation and quality of education are concerned, there is really very little to differentiate either choice. It therefore surprises me to hear people diss the Oxbridge choice based on all sorts of flimsy arguments. It is not too hard to construct a fallacious argument to substantiate such an attitude: one that I hear from time to time is that “more Singaporeans get into Oxbridge than HYP, therefore HYP is better”. (At least it was true back in 2001 or so.) Clearly in this context, there is a spurious conflation of exclusivity and prestige and superiority when these attributes are arguably uncorrelated.

3. It is painfully clear that you have failed to recognize the irony in your question, and therefore appear to not understand irony at all. My original intention was to be sardonically amusing, but somehow the effect becomes tragic when you manage to mix together two disparate points that I’ve tried to make.

As for the “high praise” that you have ironically labeled as such, I have already explained that that is my informed opinion, based on many, many observations. I have yet to find contrary evidence to my claims, therefore they appear to be true, however unpleasantly they may be worded.

if all you have are off-hand remarks from a few people in the top scholarship system who studied in the US and consider Oxbridge to be inferior to HYP, how is that a problem?

It’s not only people who have studied in the US. I can confirm that the attitude in my JC, and the scholars I know, was also that Oxbridge are inferior to HYP — whether they were going to the UK or the US. (By the way, there is little overlap between my circle of acquaintances and Elia’s, in case you’re wondering if we’re drawing from the same sample.) And typically they would have little justification for this inferiority other than the fact that far fewer people get into HYP than into Oxbridge, or a vague reference to the US’s superiority in research compared to the UK, a point that is largely irrelevant to undergrad education.

Finally, insofar as only a small minority of Singaporean students are in a position to compete for admission into good overseas universities, then it’s true that only the ‘elite’ agonize about whether HYP is better than Oxbridge, and other similar issues. But I believe the contention of Elia was that amongst this elite, the attitudes he mentions are prevalent. It’s clear from the context of the post that when he refers to ‘Singaporeans’ and ‘people’ in the later parts of the post, he’s referring to the class of people featured in the ST article, i.e. “elite JC students”.