5 August 08

Listening to:
The Pretender by Foo Fighters
Butter-Fly by Wada Kouji


So there's a big thing happening in our educational institution right now. A bunch of people, at least 8, probably more, duplicated family day coupons and handed them out to fellow students. The teachers got tipped off somehow, and on Monday the Secondary 4 level was warned that if the culprits did not own up by the end of the day, the police would be called in.

These events provide a firsthand view into this aspect of Singapore. Let's analyze.

Firstly, it is clear that the people involved (plus bystanders) were surprised by the crime's severity. A dude I talked to wasn't even aware that with real money involved, duplicating coupons was as good as counterfeiting money, a serious offense. We don't think; we react. We react to impulse. We're raised in a society where morals are a stack of notes and the fearsome Singaporean strictures are rotated with bedtime horror stories. We're black and white. We don't understand, we memorize. Too bad that makes for shitty adaptive mechanism, n00bs.

Secondly, the school is not organized/united/serious enough about educating students about what goes and what doesn't in Singapore, or they have some other fundamental error in their approach somewhere. Maybe they believe that CME classes are enough. Maybe they let the parents do it. But most likely, it's because of the emphasis on grades. Not that I'm not glad about CME classes being booted once and for all (I'm amoral), but on principle, kicking out CME and keeping PE doesn't make enough sense. The CME stuff they give is epic fail in themselves. They never bothered to nurture constructive discussion when we were younger, so asking for a discussion to happen is probably a big bunch of useless. Or too much work. Either way, when we look at CME notes, and find out that we won't be punished if we don't take them seriously, we go back to our handphones under the table. We're not taught to question these things(or much else, for that matter; SBQs are notoriously hard for many). Fundamental fuck-up.


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I had Narain for English today. He gave us a handout that talked about whether Singapore's system is totalitarian. Then he went off on a completely different tangent about how our principal turned our "backwater Congo" into a value-added institution.

The dates of Narain's and our principal's first arrival at our school is only three months apart. We were pathetic back then. What he described sounded like the lower echelons of my former primary school - gangs, bastards, complete disregard for anything that is pure and good, the teachers were afraid of the students, and loads of people were getting 2 passes for O Levels. Half of the graduating cohorts had nowhere to go after tertiary.

Our new principal came in and replaced the weary teachers with fresh new ones. She effectively told the Upper Sec to go to hell and concentrated efforts on the new batches of kids. She just dumped all the useless faggots in the Upper Sec, and in four years, our school's academic ranking had jumped by about a hundred.

NOW you know why you hear about Mr Loy at odds with the principal over whether to give up on the Normal Tech people. NOW you know why she's so Nazi about keeping our academic and disciplinary standing. She brought the school out of a cesspit, and she's not going to let it fall back in on her watch.

To probably everyone else, I suppose, this had completely no link with the topic about totalitarian Singapore. But I think the underlying issue he was musing about, consciously or subconsciously, was that whether Singapore is totalitarian/Nazi/communist doesn't matter nearly as much as the question of how effective it is. Dictatorships need strong, decisive, and pragmatic dictators that don't flinch at breaking a few eggs to achieve a greater goal.

Our principal broke some eggs (already rotten anyway) to revitalize the school. I'd say it was worth it.