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Singaporean here. My biggest gripe with Singapore's state as it is (and why can't we criticize it?) is that while Singapore does have a stronger emphasis on ed

Singaporean here. My biggest gripe with Singapore's state as it is (and why can't we criticize it?) is that while Singapore does have a stronger emphasis on education (GREAT!), it still falls behind in knowledge. Singapore has no natural resource, and thus no natural export. Its main exports (other than "tourism" which doesn't count) is through secondary products like petroleum, and through its workforce, considered high-value by companies around the world. Its workforce, being a resource, is therefore treated like a resource. And resources must always be more readily available, more efficiently farmed, more accurately quantified. The only way to survive in this country is to go through the gauntlet, and get stamped with a quality grade like beef. My personal hope for the future of Singapore is to slowly make the transition away from treating its humans as a workforce resource, and to start treasuring their humans as a knowledge bank. Indeed, I believe Singapore has realised this, with its growing bio-technology sector, A* etc. However it is a race against time; unlike other resources, its workforce can turn against it. No I'm not really speaking about revolution etc. But years of being a resource has put a toll on the population... just as a engine that is run in overdrive for too long wears out. Many of the Singaporeans who can afford to find a better life elsewhere, where their knowledge is valued higher, are doing so. Those that do not have that knowledge are simply resigned to being the nation's workhorse, and take no effort to seek it themselves (or perhaps they cannot afford to). This puts Singapore in a weird position. It is suffering from "brain drain". And the current remedy for it is importing knowledge from elsewhere. Unlike regions like the US, EU, AU, where populations are made up of many varieties of cultures, Singapore is a young country with only 3 major ethnic groups, and outsiders are viewed as such. This further axacerbates the feeling that local workers are just their workers. Anyway, after that long blob, my 2nd personal hope is I may be able to return to my country and contribute back, not through workhours, but through knowledge. Disclaimer: this is all my views and intuition, I don't have any links or numbers to back things up.

tokenadult 14y ago
A Singaporean friend of mine just saw my posting of the same United States editorial on my Facebook wall, and she suggested the 29 October 2012 article "A less exam-centric approach to build character, creativity," http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-less-exam-centric-approach-to-build-character,-creativity http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-les... featuring quotations from a speech by Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam of Singapore as a possible response. It does appear that people respond to incentives, and the Singapore education system has set up pretty good incentives for one set of behaviors, with an ongoing debate in that slowly democratizing society about what behaviors to encourage for the next stage of Singapore's development. AFTER EDIT: I just reread all the other comments in this thread, in light of what they are saying in response to one another. I should respond to a couple that come from someone evidently much younger than I am, who has spent time in Singapore as a foreign resident (with what language background?). At the top comment level: Foreign languages are almost never taught Grandchild to that comment (from same HN participant): The three ethnic groups in Singapore As a member of the older generation, I can remember when Singapore had a lot more than the current "three ethnic groups" (that would be Chinese, Malay, and Indian, by the reckoning of Singapore) as an actual linguistic matter. To both points, by the Singapore government's own statistics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Langu... as recently as 1990 there was no one language of the four languages that are official in Singapore--Malay, (Modern Standard) Chinese, English, and Tamil--that was even spoken at home in the majority of homes in Singapore. School instruction has been in English since independence in 1965, but only a tiny minority of the population spoke English at home in my generation. I would have to consider a country that has four official languages from four different language families, NONE of which the plurality of the population spoke at home just a generation ago, a very successful country in teaching second languages. And if today people in Singapore think that "Chinese" is one ethnic group, they have forgotten a lot of ethnic division between Hokkien speakers and Hakka speakers and Cantonese speakers (who speak mutually incomprehensible Sinitic languages, all of which I have studied in addition to Mandarin) that is also very recent history in that country and other parts of the Chinese-speaking world.

tokenadult 14y ago

A Singaporean friend of mine just saw my posting of the same United States editorial on my Facebook wall, and she suggested the 29 October 2012 article "A less exam-centric approach to build character, creativity," http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-less-exam-centric-approach-to-build-character,-creativity http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-les... featuring quotations from a speech by Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam of Singapore as a possible response. It does appear that people respond to incentives, and the Singapore education system has set up pretty good incentives for one set of behaviors, with an ongoing debate in that slowly democratizing society about what behaviors to encourage for the next stage of Singapore's development. AFTER EDIT: I just reread all the other comments in this thread, in light of what they are saying in response to one another. I should respond to a couple that come from someone evidently much younger than I am, who has spent time in Singapore as a foreign resident (with what language background?). At the top comment level: Foreign languages are almost never taught Grandchild to that comment (from same HN participant): The three ethnic groups in Singapore As a member of the older generation, I can remember when Singapore had a lot more than the current "three ethnic groups" (that would be Chinese, Malay, and Indian, by the reckoning of Singapore) as an actual linguistic matter. To both points, by the Singapore government's own statistics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Langu... as recently as 1990 there was no one language of the four languages that are official in Singapore--Malay, (Modern Standard) Chinese, English, and Tamil--that was even spoken at home in the majority of homes in Singapore. School instruction has been in English since independence in 1965, but only a tiny minority of the population spoke English at home in my generation. I would have to consider a country that has four official languages from four different language families, NONE of which the plurality of the population spoke at home just a generation ago, a very successful country in teaching second languages. And if today people in Singapore think that "Chinese" is one ethnic group, they have forgotten a lot of ethnic division between Hokkien speakers and Hakka speakers and Cantonese speakers (who speak mutually incomprehensible Sinitic languages, all of which I have studied in addition to Mandarin) that is also very recent history in that country and other parts of the Chinese-speaking world.