What's wrong with Singapore.

Our great leaders
The news for the last week has been mostly on the parliament debate, or the lack of it. Mr Brown made a list of the top 10 things our ministers and members of parliament said about the new budget. It was “soooo good”. The excellences of the budget aside.I have begun, sometime back, to take everything the government said with a pinch of salt. The reason is simple. I realise that everything that is been said, has an agenda. I mean, seriously, these are politicians. It’s doubtful even how much of their own opinions they can express, after all most of them are from the same party. What we have here is a system where a single party find its own member and through various means get the people they chose elected. It’s kind of a weird system in the sense that I don’t know how much of the people’s wishes are represented and how much the people actually wants the “chosen ones” to be their voices in parliament. Although I must also admit, it kindof work (I prefer it to the mess in US for a start). But there are drawbacks to everything.

Sense of Belonging
One of the drawbacks is that the people’s sense of belonging is eroded. If you can never have a say in a place, the place never really belongs to you. And this is a serious issue. And this issue will get increasingly serious with the influx of immigrants (6.4 million I heard?). The new immigrants, having just arrived have little if no sense of belonging or emotional attachment to Singapore. So the increase amount of new immigrants will reduce the total sense of belonging as a whole. While the current citizens on the island have a certain amount of emotion attachment, it too is reduced by an increase in the amount of “outsiders” in their country. It may not sound nice, but it’s true (and I don’t mean it in a bad way). The newcomers have their own language, habits, bla….and well I would said, Singapore as a general whole are not too happy with this invasion of their space. Anyway, the point is, the more different Singapore becomes, the less sense of belonging we can come to expect from the common man in the street.

The 10 years series.
What’s wrong with the 10 years series? Well recently MOE phased out the pre-1997 ten years series because the syllabuses have changed. Well, that’s pretty reasonable, but the students(and I suspect the parents) panicked. It was reported (thesundaytimes march 4 2007) that students are hunting 2nd hand book store for the old 10 years series. Prices have increased for those old books and I suspect(again) there will be a pirated maket going on soon enough. Kiasu? Yes, but more than that. Singapore students pass exams by doing 10 years series. To a point where if you want higher marks, do more 10 years series. I dare say if we ban 10 years series, Singapore students won’t know what to do. Why do I say that? The only subject without 10 years series is literature, which also happens to be the subject Singapore students score worse in. I suspect (yet again) that the concept of walking into an examination hall and expressing yourself without a prior answers to refer to scare the hell out of our students. “But what if I don’t put down the correct answers!!!” Personally, I hated 10 years series, never actually did any. I feel the over-reliance on 10 years series breed a generation of people who are good at memorising a given answer and sticking to it. Destroys ones confident of expressions. And forms a habit of doing the ‘correct’ thing, which may not be the right thing.

Censorship
So many things to say and examples to give. I’ll just give a recent one: Incredible wife makes disappearing act
What the fuck were they thinking?
Seriously, creative industries are going to have to play a great part in Singapore economy, after all our only resource is our people right? Well I just want to say that for creative individual, either everything goes or nothing goes.