Category Archives: Issues & Ideas

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

Getting too economics nowadays, and the philosophical mind slips into inquiry into behaviour that does little to question purpose of fundamental existence or the reason behind non-economic emotions. I scurried through some blogs and found how sentimental people around me are. Cool. At least for the hungry philosophical mind. Then economics mode set in and all sorts of question concerning the utility people obtain from being labeled ‘philosophical’ or more colloquially, ‘cheem’, or the kind of incentives that pushes people to thinking in ‘philosophical’ ways despite overwhelming social pressure that considers philosophical inquiry out of modern context or simply put in the most Westernized way, ‘uncool’. That, is supposed to be more of my concern – what exactly drives people to be philosophical? Innate curiosity about the world, pure divine inspiration, or just for the exclusive label forced upon by the society that has some form of mixed-blessing effect?

The last driving force seem the most powerful, though the second last may be as valid. The fundamental things that drives people is based on the incentives involved and thus the utility gained from the action. If the action of inquiry provides such high absolute utility, blogging these thoughts would have such low marginal utility that the action is unlikely to be carried out, so we can be rather sure that innate curiosity is insufficient to make people think philosophically, or at least, insufficient to allow us to perceive the philosophical-ness of a being. The fact that this property is detectable leads us to the next 2 plausible driving forces.

Divine inspiration is an attractive solution to the problem but it’s in no way a stable conclusion to this little problem we have over here. The fact is that people around me shares some similar properties about perception of social forces and they way of handling it leads us closer to the justification of social forces. However, in a bid to remove the ‘divine inspiration’ theory, we first have to present the empirical situation. The circumstances is such that many people are feeling sentimental, philosophical, emotional and they blog about it, and they convey if with such cliche statements that unless ‘divine inspiration’ is a mere software programme that behaves like a virus, that should not happen. The question naturally comes – if everyone’s having this divine inspiration, why not me; or perhaps now is the time? No. The answer is that there’s no divine inspiration to discuss, for everyone’s merely succumbing to this social pressure that innate desire to question seems to fuel. The word is ‘seems’, for it doesn’t. The forceful incorporation of humanities’ way of inquiry in Sciences have upset our youth’s way of thinking. We are ‘forced’ to think of something meaningful to ask about rather than having questions naturally arise from us when we have our encounters. That’s a clear example of pure information overload.

So, what the crap is this social force making people inquire about the natural world, the humanly interactions, and the things we perceive? It is a high level kind of social pressure, one that works it’s way not from interaction, or mirroring the rest, it works through imposing a barrier, that ‘exclusifies’ the author and encourage them to immortalize themselves, at least within their narrow scopes of perception. This sort of crap inquiry, pseudo-philosophy, may be capable of destroying our foundation of humanities, our roots in questioning about the world. Scientists, can never become the sort of philosophers who have asked the great questions we spent centuries seeking to answer, and the effort to make them so can have devastating results to the field of inquiry itself; for the wrong method of inquiry naturally leads one to the wrong solution and thus the wrong answer to the true inquiry. There’s a philosophy version of Alchemy and it’s brewing. Better whip out your Philonomics to clear the way.

Yea, I enjoy using laws of natural sciences to explain social sciences phenomena. I made an analogy about life from the kinetic energies of water molecules in a basin, I talked about equilibriums and closed-systems much like those in thermodynamics, and I discussed about really unrelated science theories and laws and apply them on human interactions. There’s one particular law in science that I am particularly interested in applying but never had a chance to. It’s the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution and I thought if there’s this day, when our income distribution follows that, capitalism would never have met its rival, communism at all.

I am not sure if it comes naturally to you all but the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution presents the idea that the smaller the pie to share, the stronger the tendency for some big guys to just snatch it away and stuff it into his mouth. Conversely, if the pie gets bigger, the tendency that it is shared becomes greater. Taking the ‘kinetic energy of particles’, which is the x-axis of the distribution curve as ‘wealth of individuals’ and the ‘probability density’ as the y-axis, and the temperature increments as total wealth aggregation, you will be able to visualize how we apply this distribution to the economics. I acknowledge that inequality will remain, and the beauty about this distribution that we have this hope, that while aggregate wealth increases, the inequality gap can be closed – or at least we are tending toward an asymptotic closing of the gap. Wishful Thinking.

There were a few great articles I managed to savage from my old blog, which was unfortunately lost after the transfer of host. I probably be putting them up as ‘montage’ of my 2005 for my blog. Today, we will be looking at one of the longest posts I ever done on my blogs and I believe it still is the longest.

I haven’t been blogging in English for quite some time; and like any other post, this will be extremely long. I realised that I am starting to be very forgetful, or maybe it is just the power of time. I have nearly forgotten how to sing the school song if not for my old dusty planner, which I have dung out from some dirty cardboard box used to store my memories in secondary education.

Life no longer is the same as the past in this school. Everything has changed in this school since the time I came; all except the school song. The name has change, the uniform ‘amended’, the principal replaced, the schools merged, the teachers have moved from low postitions to high postitions (some do move in the opposite direction), others left the school, hopefully getting a better job; of course, there are the great stayers who have remain in the same position and school for more than 30 years, but they have changed their style, their ideas, they have been brainwashed.

Some students remain, some don’t, some left, some enter, others changed. I remained, Mib left, new PRC scholars enter and many friends changed. They become apathetic, restless, tired, lame, less jovial, indifferent to everything and abnormal. I could pin-point a exact reason or cause for such conditions faced by every single of our students; all I can say is that they are no longer the same due to a combination of factors, many in which, involves the school, our teachers, principal, and staff. I suddenly find myself singing the school song, at least I felt the urge to sing it. I felt like I want to sing it to the world and everyone whom I ever knew. But why? Why the school song?

The reason I can find is that I am sufferring from a condition that makes me feel like reverting back to the old days; we had fun, and were much livier. Yet when I sing the song, I start forgetting lines. Something rather odd because I manage to remember every line in the song whenever I sang in school, for all 4 years. I discovered that the song lost its meaning, it no longer applies, it doesn’t speak any word of truth that can ever be fitted into the current situation. I forgot the lines because I no longer believe in them and that they are no longer conveying any sensible message to me. Soon, the song in my memory will diminish. I can try learning it again, and this probably makes me feel even more true that the song no longer works.

I remembered the time when I first hear the councillors sang during my Secondary One Orientation. It was full of vigour, the type that makes us ‘[name censored due to sensitivity]’, the kind that brings out the sense of belonging in us, the class that draws the spirit out of us. I remember the time, my first day of school, which was a Wednesday, when I first sang it properly in school. Though I stumbled on a few words, the idea was generally inside me. But now…

I feel intense fear, and sorrow for such a demise of such a great organisation, with such great students, forefathers, and staffs. I don’t want, and do not know the causes of our being at such a state of existence, revealling them will only uncover more saddness. Yet I see an influx of fools into this great hole that lies right in front of us. I wonder if I should pity or hate them. It is like seeing a great army of humans rushing through the Gates of Hell into the state of extreme helplessness.

I saw the candidates of the general election. I thought they were absolutely nothing but fools, despite having been in this dreadful place for 4 years. They thought they could put out the fires of Hell; they are extremely wrong. Their efforts only fuel the fire, strengthening its power over all of us. They come from almost every single aspect, have a wide variety of talents, it was a display of great diversity of culture. Their speeches, all of different style, brings out their skills and also how naive they are. The most widely used techniques in their speeches were known as ‘crapping’, ‘false appeal’ and ‘manipulation’. Ironically, they are actually manipulated by the school, by a series of crapping of how democractic they are and falsely appealing to their greed for power. Good move, I say, Fat Brother, but it didn’t manage to escape my eyes.

Every single party deserve suppport but unfortunately, we must also see what they can actually do when they are voted. Hence, we can say that it is as good as not supporting them; for they do not have the authority of power to make any changes. Everyone comes out and insult the old system, saying they are ready to built a new one that will remove all the problems and create a utopia. How naive! The past years have also seen candidates doing this and using these tactics, but it appears that within the very short time when they are in power, they still have to struggle with their school work and the authority up there, Fat Brother; I can assure you that they have no time to do anything they sincerely intended to.

Look at the famous Master Rasputin. He convinced all of us to vote for him; but what now, he admits that he did almost nothing within his regime to improve the situation of lack of power in students. Worse of all, he is now still pushing for some Rights Movement. I say, “You have a movement, you gotta move it. Don’t just say move, you gotta really move, even if it is just a step.” Readers, you must think I am crapping, but it is extremely true that Rasputin have been decorating his ideas and speeches so much that they are so impractical to be carried out. Some say transparency, some say have informal feedback collecting. How about you go get out there and give Fat Brother a punch, see if you observe some adipose tissues oozing out or lipids spilling on your hands. Come on, get real, I know Rasputin can run fast, but he just can’t move.

Hey Jack, the beanstalk outside your hut is growing fast, go climb it and destroy Fat Brother before the he attempts to climb down from his high up position and hurt us all by throwing his weight around. You must protect us, help us, use your vision, your beliefs, to make our day a better one. I tell you, I don’t believe you can do it. He has a goose that lays golden eggs and these eggs from crashing down, killing almost everyone that is in the way. Oh, and that golden harp that plays devious music that will brainwash everyone and attempt to blind us from his evil deeds. How about getting an axe to chop down that beanstalk? We are ourselves and he is him; we go separate ways. Oh yah, growing taller helps you run faster when the beanstalk falls, don’t forget to remind one of your member.

And the NCC! You guys are a bunch of disciplinarians who thinks that this school is full of chickens clucking around, waiting for someone to get them to do some push-ups or what. Fat hope! Militants are not welcome in this state of authoritarian. While you might become good friends with Fat Brother due to ‘Ideological Similarities’, he will eventually become suspicious of you, then this suspicion will evolve in to paranoia and and finally the end of you guys. You think this is the “Chun Qiu Zhan Guo” or what? Go home and make kites to fly so that you can invade the enemy’s territory.

So much for Pupils Action. No need to say much, go look at Singapore, the beautiful island that lies in the south of the Malaysia Peninsular. Come on, with a leader who looks like a republican dumbass and members who do not look as though they are satisfied with the current system. Everything in the school is ready for you. The Parliment Model; all seats occupied by one party (our school call it the council), with 3 seats for Nominated people. For your information, nominations are by the school authority. So what can I say? Wear white?

And you think you really are ‘The Party’? I think you guys are the party. The ones that goes partying around. This is not the 1970s, nor the Matrix age. That movie was long outdated. You will end in the same as ‘THE CHS’ – gone for good. Go back home and brush up your programming and fighting skills before you come back. You might like to put some virus in the school network so that some Agent Smiths appear to fight with you all, making you guys ‘The Ones’. Remember, get Agent Smith to convert Fat Brother first, or else there will be lots of fatty data left in the harddisk. They will form the Bad Clusters which will cause your harddisk to stop functioning.

I think this is long enough, I shall stop here. Everyone who has read, sit down and reflect upon what has happened and past. Overcome the brainwashing of the golden harp, escape the golden eggs that are falling, flush the Gates of Hell into the earth by dropping a nuke or two, fill up the hole with these earth, go ahead and punch Fat Brother. Stand up. Remove the lipids, destroy the calories and smash the carbos.

This article covered lots of supposedly censored stuff. It was written on the 18 February this year when I was extremely mad at all the changes I see taking place around me. I probably won’t be able to write such long posts any time soon. But I probably be writting a ‘follow-up’ to report on the current status of my surroundings – pertaining to the same topic.

I must first thank Leonard for his valuable compliment. I am not sure, but his compliment seem to reflect that he agrees with my point of view though I can never confirm. In any case, it is important that he agrees with me. Leonard, being one of the students enjoying (or should I say sufferings?) the merits of the Gifted Education, and also one who have experience the mainstream education almost in its entirety, would be the best judge as to how the two programmes differ. When I say differ, I don’t mean content, I am referring to the opportunities they offer, the assumptions they make (Stuff like ‘all geppers must be from rich families’).

I probably be talking about the GEP issue some other time because I don’t have the information on this programme and personally, I have set out to write something about breaking bonds. It is inevitable to raise the issue of bond breaking when it comes to discussing scholarships. Previously, I also mentioned briefly about how rich people, may decide to break bonds anyway, after their studies. I would say, to have bond breaking becoming ‘common’ in a sense, is a breakthrough for Singaporeans. It is, I believe not a question or loyalty, but promise. Those bond breakers breach their contracts, fine with that, since their are willing to give the compensation. In the eyes of law, there is balance, because both parties agreed on the terms initially. Of course, it is never desired for any form of contract to be broken for most parties, since both sides are stakeholders in a way or two.

Why do I say that this is a breakthrough? It simply shows that our ‘local talents’ are now being valued. At times, if not usually, adhering to the bond would bring down their value. For bond breakers who alliance with MNCs to free themselves, they have gained some form of recognition that makes them worth the price stated for compensation. Their value increase with the breaking of the bond. Many employers prefer freshmen not because of their cost of hire, but the very fact that they do not have any pre-perceptions of the industry that will misled their decision or affect their view of certain actions of the company. Most importantly, they have the passion than a graduate who have undergone ‘training’ at a statutory board for, say, 3 – 5 years. It is important that these organisations tied to the scholarship holders through the bonds do not extinguish this passion, which they usually do.

But how? How do I know that their passion is gone? And is passion that important, you see, work is still work? Well, some may think so, they probably value the money, for ‘work is only a means to end and not the end’, to use a distorted clause from the existentialist. Jim Collins mentioned in Good to Great that if your company is only going to think about growth, money making, profitting from whatever you are working on, you can only become good, if not bad – you never become great. And ultimately, you don’t spin as much money as those great companies do. Passion, according to him, is essential and it is not a individual concept, it must involve almost all in the executive and management. This is why he devoted almost a chapter to explain why every organisation should look into where they can have fun before plunging into the market.

Passion is gone? Or is it not? I am not sure, having made the claim above. But how many scholarship holder manage to climb into MNCs and succeed in the global economy? Oh well, that’s unfair to debate on because most scholarship fund studies in law, medical, or perhaps sociology, less with economics. Even with economics, that guy out of ten probably decides not to enter the financial sector. So the arguement stops there, you got to probe further yourself.

I am not propagating the idea that we should break whatever bond, regardless or the nature, the compensation required. Let’s be pragmatic, these bond conditions and stuff are used to restrict the ‘poor’ scholars, with an additional quality – he would not be able to win over the big corporations to sponser any compensation for him. Then you think again, you such a person be getting the scholarship in the first place? Probably not. I think this sudden influx of scholarship ‘new criteria’: Charisma, Outstanding in presentation or style, and most importantly, I have raise this very disappointing point – they do look for looks, is the source of all these problems. We can never be objective about looks unless we conduct the interview with a cloth or something between the interviewers and interviewees. We have to clear up all these mess created by the lame criteria, because it appears that all these qualities they are looking for simply makes up celebrities. Then we’ll have celebrity doctors, celebrity economists, celebrity sociologists. Think about it, that’s not too bad – the telephone companies can hold a ‘Professional Idol’ to dig more money from naive teens, who are now enjoy the greatest perk of technology – the handphone.

And that’s the whole point of group interviews! They select relatively, never considering certain unique characteristic of anyone in the room that they might be able to tap on. Don’t be mistaken, this are all opinions, for I have never once stepped into a scholarship interview of any form, or even watched a video on group interviewing. I don’t know the techniques, the information involved, and the insiders stuff. What I know, is a combination of the obvious fact, and psychology. Think, how many times have you judged a person without considering his looks? That’s virtually a human impossibility. Face it, we are never objective. And being subjective is good, for that is what made me write all these.

Once again, I am unable to finish what I want to say, I probably continue some time later. In any case, readers might find this post bothersome to read because the thoughts are hardly crystalised and I seem to be spewing random points, jumping from here to there, without a read central theme.

Surprisingly, I have been reading news. Yes, and I came across Soon Sze Meng’s article on our local school’s contribution towards social mobility. As a typical student myself, I shall leave readers to find out for themselves what exactly is social mobility. In any case, the article revolves around the discussion of meritocracy in Singapore and who exactly does our education system benefit.

For ages, we, belonging to the lower band of the society, lived with the idea that education is our key to penetrating the social ‘classes’, allowing us to attain ‘greater heights’. We believe, that wealth do not last more than 3 generations, with the second (in some cases) and third squandering away all the first generation have worked to build. We once thoughts, that as long as we slog and work, we will outshine the ‘rich’ students, who are characterised by their lazy, and apathetic traits. Unfortunately (or should I say fortunately), our society is not so ideal, and so is many others.

A nation founded upon the principles of meritocracy is successful because everyone starts off at the same point, the identical starting line. Whoever runs fast enough, have the perseverence to last till the end, emerges as the victor, and not forgetting those who have accompanied the victor all the way, whom themselves earn the rest of the honour. Others are left scattered around the track – some gave up halfway, some sink into some kind of crisis purely by chance, while others who may have tried the shortcuts got lost. For this point, I am also suggesting that people do win with shortcuts.

That was then. The second generation don’t differ much from the first except that they had a more stable life, and were able to enjoy what the previous generation know as luxury. They are able to enjoy in their late 50s or so. But as we step into the third generation, the disparity is getting wider. We see that everyone has a different starting point; you have a guy from a tycoon’s family, another is the son of an official (this kind of people are known as white horse in Singapore context), and who knows, you get a peer who has just migrated to Singapore from Australia and he’s an excellent speaker. You get different competitors, and so on the other hand, there are the sons and daughters of hawkers – the mini rich class; finally, there is the lower income group, supposedly characterised by the fact that they qualify for financial aid. I have to stress this point that there is no discrimination intended.

What I am trying to say here is that you now need to introduce ‘Selective Meritocracy’. This has been in practice and this is not something new at all. It involves the addition of filters to prevent ‘well-fed’ people who has the ability to fund their own studies from obtaining scholarships or monetary rewards for academic achievements, thereby robbing the deserving, and in a way, less fortunate of the opportunity to ‘move up’ (to quote from Sze Meng’s words). Paradoxically, this system of selective meritocracy is only used in scholarships or cash grants involving money that usually does not exceed SGD$1000. The scholarships that goes up to hundreds of thousands do not work with this system.

The vicious cycle is turning, in fact spining. The rich get the appropriate help, the right contacts, and the resources required to do whatever known as ‘projects’. The poor, with less exposure to the academics, and having a need for extra income, would rather address to the immediate problem by working part-time, than to work on his ‘project’. The system, acknowledges the efforts of the rich boy, praising his efforts to contact a renown professor to aid in his ‘project’ while dismissing the poor student as a rebellious, undisciplined and ‘good-for-nothing’. This is getting fearful. Well, the situation is not as extreme as the analogy I have drawn, but the actual is very close. Extremely close indeed.

There are, in fact, presence of students who have excel academically and present himself as being an outstanding and ‘high-class’ student despite his humble background and manages to obtain the scholarship that they are pursuing at the end of their ‘learning journey’. But they are rare. Let’s put this fact aside and imagine, for Einstein has mentioned how imagination is more important than knowledge: If the ‘rich’ guys who have obtained scholarships are erased from the big picture completely, how many ‘poor’ others would have been able to ‘move up’? And in turn, they would be able to aid how many others ‘move up’? This would eventually close up the income gap that we seem to have now.

Think about how the small gap between obtaining the scholarship and not for both the rich and the poor would alter from cases to cases. A ‘rich’ who grasped it feels happy, go on the study, come back to adhere to his bond (alternatively, he might decide to break the bond and even compensate with his own money if he is really rich enough), and then live on. The ‘poor’ who missed it would have spent his slogging on his studies seemingly useless. Well, he can continue with his academic career and alter his future a little, but will never be able to make the difference that he would have if he manages to obtain the chance to pursue what he initially wanted.

This is getting long and I probably would continue with this talk in the next few posts.

I was thinking of getting into education politics again by creating a category, ‘School’ and posting anti-school articles. A pity I didn’t really have the time to maintain such a log about the progress of democractisation in our school. Nevertheless, I shall let the head of the cat out of the bag for a little basking in the sun.

It is yet another SBC today and it is interesting to note how the absence of teachers can trigger extremely stimulating responses from the audience. The students are finally willing to talk. Like what some other SU member said in Mandarin, “Secondary 4 students are hard to handle.” I think so too. Of course, this time, there are much changes to the SU organisation and they way the spend money.

The most glaring part of the whole SBC is definitely the presentation by the finance controller. Firstly, I would like to point out that we did not vote for a cute, young boy to be the finance controller; we thought he’d better off being a Welfare Secretary. Secondly, the proposed budget is a crazy $10 050. I am not sure about the $50 that seems so extra that I thought our dear Fat Brother should have donated it out of his pocket. Overall, it is just, too big a figure to swallow. But perspective does help, each student contributes only $5 – enjoying nothing at all. The rich guys out there can treat it as money for feeding some dogs or donated to some organisation for the disabled, but not for people like us. We cannot afford to pay such a huge sum of money, only for it to be wasted. Yes, Master Rasputin, the money that is removed quietly, and without our consent from the CDS is like a form of investment. It is like a one of the bets we are laying down in the great HCI Casino that is going through some ‘Integrated Programme’, to integrate all forms of entertainment with education – without forgetting to forget about Confucian’s teachings (or any other Chinese moral teachings) and go gamble. Investment for the better good of the whole school. Yeah, right. Oh, and according to a ex-member of the SU functioning body, the projected amount is usually only 75% of the actually amount they are going to spent. This time, the pocketting of our money ‘for the sake of greater good’ is a result of the school being stingy with their money because they want to pound the soil beside the canteen, and insert some piles there. That reminds us of the announcement last year that the building of the SALT centre and the science building would commence in October/November 2004. It appears otherwise. The whole place is rounded up but I don’t see work going on. Good job guys!

Of course, there is a welfare initiative to stuff the mouths of dissidents about this sum of money that we all have to fork out. And it is the conversion of a shabby, tiny corner of the canteen into a Meeting Room, which the students are allowed to use for their meetings, or study sessions. The irony is that the room is said to be wired with wireless LAN for surfing the net. Anyone with a sense would know the room is going to be our LAN gaming centre soon. Nevertheless, we must trust our students. The dissidents are probably the only ones who are going to use the room properly – to discuss about revolution plans. Of course, they probably would decide that it is impossible to overthrow the damn regime halfway through the meeting and start taking out their laptops from their bags…

That dumb thing aside, the SBC included a touching speech about the school culture and how our school environment contrast with other schools’. Admit it, this school is not ready. A culture is something built over the years and if the traditional and most important culture about teamwork and all the nonsense are already questioned, I wonder why we are talking about having a new vibrant culture that embraces any possible trace of diversity we have among our students. Sometimes, we just don’t have the right person at the right position to do the right thing that will benefit the right group of people. Such alignment is almost an impossibility in the history of man. It is as though the planets of our solar system, they hardly align, but once they do, they would create something supposedly power. Even so, it takes millions of centuries to occur.

The boy guarding the beanstalk now have to hold this pillar to the giant’s castle carefully and prevent it from collapsing. The beanstalk is now more and more fragile with the internal conflicts within the giant’s castle. Now that the giant is dead, Rasputin and his gang is plotting about how they can collect as much of the giant’s wealth as possible and keep it for themselves. Everywhere, there are dissidents waiting to chop down this beanstalk, especially when this boy is not alert. Personally, I regret not climbing up the beanstalk and searching for some gold coins for myself after the giant’s death. Now I am waiting, for this beanstalk to collapse with all the castle’s wealth falling down for all to share. That will be the most glorious day of our revolution.