My brain's back!
Ok, first vaguely intellectual post for the past few weeks. It's amazing what you can do when you're fired up. ; -) I know I oughtn't boast, but I managed a (halfway) cogent 400-plus-word essay in an hour, before the office work really piled up. Gee, I still have it!
For the clueless, my pseudo-essay was written in response to a Straits Times Forum letter, where the writer bemoaned her lack of scholarship just because her results weren’t straight As. She also argued for giving them out to “underdogs”—a dubious category of persons that seemed to include her and, erm, her alone.
A scholarship in every pot? Get real
Ok, I’ll not talk about all this caste/meritocracy/whiny issues since they’ve all been thoroughly covered by the previous emails. Instead I’ll pick up on the entire worrying mindset behind the whining (and the System that caused it).
First, I ought to set this straight: the Scholarship as an institution (which is what it’s grown to become in Singapore, rightly or wrongly) is NOT meant to be a personal validator or morale booster. Far from that, the Scholarship process involves a hard-nosed decision as brutal as Singapore’s economic reality. Seen American Idol? Our selection process is like that—with so many good candidates, the slightest error, however minor or accidental, is going to edge you out.
But when we're edged out, we grumble, because our one-track mind, partially moulded to be so by the (hopefully no longer) one-track education system, demands a result for every effort. Can’t effort be its own reward? Can’t we accept that personal achievements like overcoming adversity and personal problems do not need public commendation, be it in the form of scholarships or otherwise? For all that our untalented civil engineer Mr Hung had done wrong, just about the only right thing he did was say “I’ve done my best. I’ve no regrets.” Now, wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear that from a Singaporean instead of “I’ve done my best. Now where’s my bloody scholarship?!”
The (rather obvious) solution to this, as glibly noted by Raymond Lim time and time again, is a more hands-off approach to validating success. People should be allowed to spread their wings and fly or fall on their own, instead of the government stipulating who can and cannot flap their wings in the first place.
But like all glib solutions, there’s a rub: independence cuts both ways. As individuals assume greater personal responsibility over their own fate, they run to Papa less and less. Papa can exert less influence over the child as he grows up and becomes his own man. So we have a dilemma here: the government needs strong-minded, independent people for economic stability. But such people don’t need the government as much as weak-willed, compliant (and complaining) citizens.
Of course, an ideal government is perfectly fine with losing its influence, recognizing that the job of a leader is to work himself out of his job. But realistically speaking, who’d willingly let go of power? So the issue is one of governmental willingness to relinquish control (thus risking chaos) as much as one of citizens getting a spine and assuming responsibility for their own successes—and failures. As always in economics (and hence politics) a balance must be struck, but the REAL question, as always, is: where?
Ok, first vaguely intellectual post for the past few weeks. It's amazing what you can do when you're fired up. ; -) I know I oughtn't boast, but I managed a (halfway) cogent 400-plus-word essay in an hour, before the office work really piled up. Gee, I still have it!
For the clueless, my pseudo-essay was written in response to a Straits Times Forum letter, where the writer bemoaned her lack of scholarship just because her results weren’t straight As. She also argued for giving them out to “underdogs”—a dubious category of persons that seemed to include her and, erm, her alone.
A scholarship in every pot? Get real
Ok, I’ll not talk about all this caste/meritocracy/whiny issues since they’ve all been thoroughly covered by the previous emails. Instead I’ll pick up on the entire worrying mindset behind the whining (and the System that caused it).
First, I ought to set this straight: the Scholarship as an institution (which is what it’s grown to become in Singapore, rightly or wrongly) is NOT meant to be a personal validator or morale booster. Far from that, the Scholarship process involves a hard-nosed decision as brutal as Singapore’s economic reality. Seen American Idol? Our selection process is like that—with so many good candidates, the slightest error, however minor or accidental, is going to edge you out.
But when we're edged out, we grumble, because our one-track mind, partially moulded to be so by the (hopefully no longer) one-track education system, demands a result for every effort. Can’t effort be its own reward? Can’t we accept that personal achievements like overcoming adversity and personal problems do not need public commendation, be it in the form of scholarships or otherwise? For all that our untalented civil engineer Mr Hung had done wrong, just about the only right thing he did was say “I’ve done my best. I’ve no regrets.” Now, wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear that from a Singaporean instead of “I’ve done my best. Now where’s my bloody scholarship?!”
The (rather obvious) solution to this, as glibly noted by Raymond Lim time and time again, is a more hands-off approach to validating success. People should be allowed to spread their wings and fly or fall on their own, instead of the government stipulating who can and cannot flap their wings in the first place.
But like all glib solutions, there’s a rub: independence cuts both ways. As individuals assume greater personal responsibility over their own fate, they run to Papa less and less. Papa can exert less influence over the child as he grows up and becomes his own man. So we have a dilemma here: the government needs strong-minded, independent people for economic stability. But such people don’t need the government as much as weak-willed, compliant (and complaining) citizens.
Of course, an ideal government is perfectly fine with losing its influence, recognizing that the job of a leader is to work himself out of his job. But realistically speaking, who’d willingly let go of power? So the issue is one of governmental willingness to relinquish control (thus risking chaos) as much as one of citizens getting a spine and assuming responsibility for their own successes—and failures. As always in economics (and hence politics) a balance must be struck, but the REAL question, as always, is: where?
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