Our Boasted Cream of the Crop - Truly Elite?

What does it mean to be elite? You might think of the following:

1. the most choice or select
2. People of the highest class
3. the best
4. People who exercise the majority share of authority or influence in society

Generally, the notion of being elite is associated with being the best – perhaps so far to be a role model to society. In October, I couldn’t help but be ashamed of what or whom we label as ‘elite’.

In Singapore’s meritocratic society, academics have fast been attached to social status and misperceptions. Attending a ‘good’ school in terms of ranking automatically associates you with being smart. Attending an independent school ranks you higher in intelligence (and social status) then if you were enrolled in a neighbourhood school. It doesn’t matter how well you do in school. Topping the cohort in a neighbourhood school generally places you behind a person who is the bottom of the cohort in a top autonomous school. (Think Harvard versus a Public School). These higher ranked individuals, possessing assumable higher intelligence, are also falsely associated with better morals and behavior.

“That’s so silly!” you declare. Yet, I’m sure you have formed these associations before as well, if not for a split second.

I partly blame our education system for creating these perceptions. It is our education system that has schools ranked according to academic performance. This may not be a bad thing you argue. True. However, ranking schools by academic performance may have unintended side effects.

School administrators naturally would strive to boost the status and image of their school. In selecting schools beyond the primary level, we are exposed to admission criteria – cut off points or grades – that determine if we are ‘good’ enough to enroll in our chosen school of choice. This admission criterion is fluid and subjective. The schools that have built up a reputation of being the ‘better choice’ are free to set cut off points low (in relation to the GCE O’levels and high in relation to Primary School Leaving Examination) to capture the so-called ‘smarter’ students – the cream of the crop, if you may. This cut off point tends to get harder to meet and is upward inelastic. Students work harder to ensure they get a place in schools. Working harder, sometimes leads to better grades (I say sometimes, because it’s always bad to assume for the plain and simple reason that not everyone is the same), which leads to lower points (referring to secondary school admission). This starts a vicious cycle of authorities lowering the cut off points again until it comes to a certain floor.

I found it utterly ridiculous that a secondary school had actually set a cut off point of 4 for admission in the year 2007. Just so we are all clear: the standard for taking the GCE O’level examinations is a minimum of 6 subjects. The minimum point (the best as well) you can obtain per subject is 1. In Singapore, if you excel in extra-curricular activities (also based on a standard set by the government mind you), you can earn the privilege of subtracting up to 2 additional points from your total. Applying from an affiliated school also grants you the privilege of subtracting 2 points from your total. Taking Higher Chinese (an advanced second language) can earn you a further additional 2 points to deduct. So, technically, it is possible to contest for seats in schools with 0 points. Utterly ridiculous yet surprisingly true and normalized.

Nobody questions the system. Nobody questions the standard. Nobody questions this because it’s been socialized and indoctrinated. Thus it seems almost rational to assume that people who graduate from or study in better ranked schools are smarter academically; they do need to meet the cut to get in in the first place.

Part of me does not blame Wee Shu Min for her unsavory comments. Insensitive as they may be, she may be socialized to think like this. Can you blame someone who is socialized to believe they are elite and thus better or more deserving? The education system does this through our multiple streaming policies. We are constantly filtering and ‘grading’ people. Teachers develop the very same stereotype that society does; most teachers treat their students accordingly, i.e. a normal academic student is thought of as less intelligent, whilst a special stream student is thought of as more capable and intelligent. Good grief even the labels we attach to the differing streams of education self proclaim the government’s perceptions. I do question the need of dividing the student population into “normal” (a.k.a. the slow learners or the less intelligent), “express” (the general populace fits in here – associated with being normal), and “special” or “gifted” streams (the faster learners or the more academically intelligent), especially when sometimes the only difference between the ‘express’ stream and the ‘special’ or ‘gifted’ stream is simply the study of a more advanced second language.

If you are labeled ‘special’ or ‘gifted’ in life, and treated as tough you were capable and academically intelligent, self-fulfilling prophecy states that you will eventually exhibit behavior that accords to others’ expectations of yourself. In other words, the exalted become better and the ostracized get worse. Growing up in an environment where you are indoctrinated to think you ARE the cream of the crop, irregardless of other factors, may see you developing a haughty pompous attitude.

I’ve just mentioned one of the factors that may have influenced Wee Shu Min’s attitudes – the social structure of education. Naturally, being in a high class and relatively influential family may have put her in a position of power (economically if not anything else). This might have cased her attitudes in concrete.

So I wonder: are we creating elites or little insensitive horrors with our education system?

“Some people cannot take the brutal truth in life and that sort of language” – Mr. Wee Siew Kim, Ang Mo Kio GRC MP and Wee Shu Min’s father. I think Mr. Wee is obviously confused on what the brutal truth is. I simply cannot understand how saying that “a well-educated university graduate who works for a multinational company should not be bemoaning about the government and get on with the challenges in life” a valid and reasonable case in point. Derek’s comments do not reflect a problem isolated to the individual but rather an issue that the nation has to deal with as the population ages at a fast rate.

Mr. Wee’s comment only brings me to conclude two things. 1. Mr. Wee seems to be a bit myopic in the approach of Derek’s comments, where implications are concerned. 2. Mr. Wee is simply trying to place his daughter in better light (her point is valid though delivery is wrong). Either way, I have gained a better understanding on why Wee Shu Min would behave as she would. If it is the former, then I really do start to worry about the quality of leaders we have picked to represent the populace.

Apparently, earlier, he was quoted implying that his daughter’s comments were extracted representing an invasion of privacy. Isn’t the internet a world wide web of public material though? It is understood that everyone and anyone with an internet connection and the proper hardware can access material placed on the net. Furthermore, why blog if you expect to keep it private? There are passwords and security mechanisms for such privacy if needed though it is clear that non were employed in this case.

What you are about to read is a real incident that happened in Singapore. In brief: a man objectively comments on the occupational hazards of aging on a blog only to receive an online response from what most Singaporeans would identify with as our elite’.

Monday, October 02, 2006

When I read the Straits Times article (dated 24 Sep) on PM Lee calling the young to be committed and make a difference to Singapore, I have so much thought about the issue.

I am 35 years old, graduated from University and gainfully employed in a multinational company. But I cannot help but feel insecure over the future of Singapore. Let’s face it, it’s not uncommon to hear, “when you are above 40, you are over the hill”. The government has been stressing on re-training, skills upgrading and re-adapt. The fact is, no matter how well qualified or adaptable one is, once you hit the magical 40, employers will say, “you are simply too old”.

We have been focusing our resources and problem solving on low unskilled labour. But in reality, our managerial positions and skilled labour force are actually fast losing its competitiveness. I travel around the region frequently for the past 10 years. It didn’t take me long to realise how far our neighbours have come over the past decade. They have quality skilled workers, and are less expensive. When I work with them, their analytical skills are equally good, if not better than us.

It’s not new anymore. Taxi drivers are fast becoming “too early to retire, too old to work” segment of the society. I like to talk to taxi drivers whenever I am heading for the airport. There was this driver. Eloquent and well read. He was an export manager for 12 years with an MNC. Retrenched at 40 years old. He had been searching for a job since his retrenchment. Although he was willing to lower his pay expectations, employers were not willing to lower their prejudice. He was deem too old. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another No. 1; having the most highly educated taxi drivers in the world.

On PM Lee calling the young to be committed and make a difference. Look around us. How dedicated can we be to Singapore when we can visualise what’s in store for us after we turned 40? Then again, how committed are employers to us? But we can’t blame them. They have bottom lines & shareholders’ gain to answer to. Onus is really on the government to revamp the society. A society that is not a pressure cooker. A society that does not mirror so perfectly, what survival of the fittest is. But a society, where it’s people can be committed, do their best and not having to fear whether they will still wake up employed tomorrow. Sadly, Singapore does not offer such luxuries and security anymore.

On the issue of babies. The government encourage us to pro-create. The next generation is essential in sustaining our competitive edge. Then again, the current market condition is such that our future has become uncertain. There is no more joy in having babies anymore; they have become more of a liability. It’s really a chicken and egg issue.

Many of my peers, bright and well educated have packed up and left. It’s what MM Goh called “quitters”. It’s sad but true, Singapore no longer is a place where one can hope to work hard their lives and retire graciously. It’s really the push factor. A future is something we sweat it out, build and call our own. Unfortunately, people like me, mid 30’s going on 40’s, staying put by choice or otherwise, we can’t help but feel what lies ahead is really a gamble.

To PM Lee and the Ministers, we are on a different platform. Until you truly understand our insecurity, the future of Singapore to me remains a question mark.

posted by Derek

http://derekwee.blogspot.com/2006/10/when-i-read-straits-times-article.html

This is Wee Shu Min’s response:

mom’s friend sent her some blog post by some bleeding stupid 40-year old singaporean called derek wee (WHY do all the idiots have my surname why?!) whining about how singapore is such an insecure place, how old ppl (ie, 40 and above) fear for their jobs, how the pool of foreign “talent” (dismissively chucked between inverted commas) is really a tsunami that will consume us all (no actually he didn’t say that, he probably said Fouren Talern Bery Bad.), how the reason why no one wants kids is that they’re a liability in this world of fragile ricebowls, how the government really needs to save us from inevitable doom but they aren’t because they are stick-shoved-up-ass elites who have no idea how the world works, yadayadayadayada.

i am inclined - too much, perhaps - to dismiss such people as crackpots. stupid crackpots. the sadder class. too often singaporeans - both the neighborhood poor and the red-taloned socialites - kid themselves into believing that our society, like most others, is compartmentalized by breeding. ridiculous. we are a tyranny of the capable and the clever, and the only other class is the complement.

sad derek attracted more than 50 comments praising him for his poignant views, joining him in a chorus of complaints that climax at the accusation of lack of press freedom because his all-too-true views had been rejected by the straits times forum. while i tend to gripe about how we only have one functioning newspaper too, i think the main reason for its lack of publication was that his incensed diatribe was written in pathetic little scraps that passed off as sentences, with poor spelling and no grammar.

derek, derek, derek darling, how can you expect to have an iron ricebowl or a solid future if you cannot spell?

if you’re not good enough, life will kick you in the balls. that’s just how things go. there’s no point in lambasting the government for making our society one that is, i quote, “far too survival of fittest”. it’s the same everywhere. yes discrimination exists, and it is sad, but most of the time if people would prefer hiring other people over you, it’s because they’re better. it’s so sad when people like old derek lament the kind of world that singapore will be if we make it so uncertain. go be friggin communist, if uncertainty of success offends you so much - you will certainly be poor and miserable. unless you are an arm-twisting commie bully, which, given your whiny middle-class undereducated penchant, i doubt.

then again, it’s easy for me to say. my future isn’t certain but i guess right now it’s a lot brighter than most people’s. derek will read this and brand me as an 18-year old elite, one of the sinners who will inherit the country and run his stock to the gutter. go ahead. the world is about winners and losers. it’s only sad when people who could be winners are marginalised and oppressed. is dear derek starving? has dear derek been denied an education? has dear derek been forced into child prostitution? has dear derek had his clan massacred by the government?

i should think not. dear derek is one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country, and in this world. one of those who would prefer to be unemployed and wax lyrical about how his myriad talents are being abandoned for the foreigner’s, instead of earning a decent, stable living as a sales assistant. it’s not even about being a road sweeper. these shitbags don’t want anything without “manager” and a name card.

please, get out of my elite uncaring face.

By Wee Shu Min

If this is our cream of the crop, then may God help us?

A Lesson in Driving

Do you drive? If you don’t, then have you ever journeyed in a moving vehicle before? Yes? Good. Then either way you can identify with what I’m about to describe to you.

You are driving along the not-so-clear road and need to make a u-turn to get to your destination. Making a u-turn at the junction you happen to be at happens to be illegal. But wait! What’s that? A lane that you can turn right into! What’s so good about that lane you ask yourself – It still doesn’t allow me to make a u-turn. You take only a split second to realize that not 5 meters from the lane entrance is a turning into a car park that is parallel to the road, with traffic in the direction you want to go. You smirk to yourself thinking: I can just make an unofficial u-turn by turning into the car park and exiting the other end. I am so smart! Hah!

You do exactly that.

However, you fail to realize that the car park is simply a narrow lane about 2 car lengths wide, with official diagonal parking spaces on one side of it, and people parallel parking on the other side of it illegally. You realize this only when you are stuck behind a car that is in front of you who is reluctant to move till the driver gets a parking space. You realize this because you cannot squeeze your car though the narrow space between the car in front of you (who puts in a reasonable effort to get as close as possible to the cars parked in official parking spaces beside it) and the vehicles parked illegally parallel along the side of the lane which forms a sorry excuse for a car park. Meanwhile, you hear the car behind you sounding its horn – over and over, lasting longer each time until all you hear is a persistent high pitched BEEP!

Looking into the rear view mirror, you realize that you aren’t the only one who thought it would be a rather fine and dandy idea to enter the lane (a.k.a car park) for a substitute u-turn. There is a whole line of cars behind you.

How would you feel? What would you think?

My friends and I were caught in exactly this situation yesterday evening. The people in the car directly behind us had a blast of a time testing how long the car horn could last. It would have been more fun if everyone just started horning in tandem in different time intervals. Who knows? The differing horn sounds might have created some kind of symphony – albeit not the kind you would normally listen to pleasantly – but a rhythm of some sorts? Instead, it was just one car with one type of high-pitched sounding horn, whose incessant horning slowly transformed from a classic short two-part horn to a long continuous horn, as if running a marathon. It was annoying to say the least.

I know what some of you might be thinking. If the car in front is not moving then you have to do something to get the person to move his/her car right? Horning is the better alternative to getting down from your car and actually confronting the person.

I got pretty annoyed at the car horning behind. If horning so many times before wasn’t helping, horning incessantly isn’t going to help much either sweetheart so put a cap on it. I got annoyed at the car in front that refused to move off for what was like a good 5 minutes thereabouts – never mind that there was a whole row of cars behind or that a certain horn was creating a fair bit of noise pollution.

Later, we realized that the car was not waiting for someone as we previously thought, but waiting for a parking lot – which it finally got. Why that didn’t occur to me before is a mystery. I mean, think about it – you ARE in a car park, with a car in front of you that’s obviously not moving. However, even discovering that fact (which should have been obvious before) did not deter me from thinking instantly – why didn’t the driver just move? Didn’t he/she realize that he/she was holding up a whole lot of cars?

Then it struck me: I realized that if I were the driver in that car, I would have the worst time. My friends and I, along with the cars behind the alleged inconsiderate driver, could simply walk away from the incident with an unpleasant experience to create conversation with. We could simply attribute the time we were ‘stuck’ to the driver in front of us, as I imagine everyone else would. The car behind us was essentially not blasting its horn at us – but to the driver of the car in front of us. We were innocent parties caught in the middle – or rather, behind the source of the problem.

If I were the driver of the car causing the entire problem though, I might have a dilemma. On one hand, leaving the car park would mean having to exit to the main road (since there isn’t any other exit) and following the flow of traffic till there was a u-turn, and then double back again after that. On the other hand, staying would mean I would be holding up a whole lot of people.

After some reflection, a tiny part of me can understand why the person did not move off. Firstly, there wouldn’t have been a problem if there weren’t cars parked illegally at the side of the one lane car park. So technically, you are in no wrong but simply doing what we would consider as normal in a larger car park – waiting for a space to park. Secondly, we were all entering the car park with no intention of parking our car, so in that sense, we kind of did put ourselves into a fix.

That being said though, the u-turn wasn’t that far and ultimately I thought exiting the car park was the best course of action – albeit the most inconvenient to the trouble maker – especially given the situation at that time. To be fair, the driver was inching forward, albeit at snail speed.

Why am I going on and on about this incident you may ask?

The car behind us started horning started not a minute after we stopped. At that point of time, I thought the driver was really impatient. Think about it. For a number of us, unpleasant incidences stick in our head longer and more vividly than pleasant ones. This is how stereotyping begins. That driver behind us is one of the reasons why Singaporean drivers are known to be impatient, rude and reckless. That fact, together with the annoying horn that was sounding at the time annoyed me.

I thought the car in front of us (the culprit) was annoying too, at that point of time. Despite the reasons I mentioned (all that I could possibly think of for not moving); it would be more considerate to move your vehicle would it not?

How do we decide how long to wait before we deem it ‘reasonable’ to take action I wonder (in this instance)? Are we really impatient or are we simply taking action to prevent clear inaction?

Think about this the next time you decide to tap your horn, or vigorously jam it. Think about this the next time someone horns at you in your vehicle. The world may be a more pleasant place to live in if we could understand each other better wouldn’t it?

Complaint through Song

Life is full of surprises. Life is full of laughter and joy. Life is full of happiness. However, nobody is always happy all the time. It is almost impossible that one should not experience a tinge of annoyance or unhappiness once. Where do our negative feelings ultimately come from? I think it comes from our satisfaction level.

Homo-sapiens (simply a fancy-dandy word for human beings a.k.a. you or me or anyone who isn’t from outer space – other living creatures not included in definition) I feel, are beings of insatiable wants and desires. We may be satisfied with life as it is today, but not tomorrow. The habit of taking the local public transportation may prove to be an annoyance after having driven a car for a few months. One simply is not satisfied with having to wait for the bus or journey at a slower pace or walk to the bus stop and from it and so on. In the past, it may have been a necessity, and thus we learn to deal – we may not be satisfied but we aren’t unsatisfied either.

This insatiable desire to want more – to covet something different – is probably what drives our economy. It drives us to get the latest PS3 although we may already have a PS2. It drives us to change our mobile phones an insane number of times through “upgrading” – which basically means getting a new mobile phone and spending more money. It drives us to buy new clothes because we feel we don’t have enough piled up in our closet, or that it’s not what we desire to wear anymore.

Even where altruism is concerned, it drives us to help the people we term are ‘less fortunate”. We are obviously not satisfied with the way things are in life – or with ourselves.

It’s not very uncommon that this dissatisfaction leads us to complain – and Singaporeans are purported to be very good at it. Complaining is always associated with something negative. It is not new to have someone who’s known to complain a lot to be known either as a b*tch or unreasonable, just plain difficult or looking for trouble. There’s a fine line between feedback and complaining mind you.

Have you ever thought how you complain to others (if you ever have – which I’m sure most of us have)? Do you moan and groan? Do you rattle on about the event in complete detail? Do you talk at the top of your voice or at an increased volume? Do you tell as many people as possible? Complaint can be a positive process too, if done in a relatively amiable fashion. How you ask? Well, the “Helsinki Complaint Choir” has made complaining a musical event.

You can visit them @ http://www.complaintschoir.org/ if you want to know more about them. A Quick Blurb in case you’re too lazy and want to be spoon fed the short version: The pet peeves and pleas of the people in Helsinki are collected by Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and composed into this work of lyrical art which is sung by a choir to the masses. The music is composed by Esko Grundström.

Watching that, another thought bubble popped into my mind. For what purpose do we complain? Do we do so to seek attention? To voice a grievance hoping it would be changed for the better? Do we complain for the sake of complaining – simply because we can? Why do we complain and for whom will it benefit? If it doesn’t help matters in present or future, nor does it help anyone (presumably there is no impact except negativity) for what do we complain?

In any case, I think if all of us take a more light hearted approach to complaining, we could all have some fun at the same time accomplishing the same thing. I’m not talking about singing. I’m talking about cracking a joke about it. I’m talking about not raising voices. I’m talking about the possibility of hurting or offending someone less. I’m talking about a way life could be great – even when there’s dissatisfaction.