Your IQ is like your DNA, it is unique, as a result we are going to have differences. The differences in us make it interesting or we shall all be doing the samething and boring. Just remember everyone of us dependent one another. A garbage collector is as important as a doctor.

Change requires popular support and continual articulation of interest from civil society. Assuming that “making sacrifices and working” is in order for personal success, then the weakness of the unequal opportunities of “elitism/meritocracy” as practised is really about your fellow man suffering an unjustly uphill battle for his personal success.

As you say, it doesn’t have to be like this. And if it’s elitism that makes it so, why not change it? If you truly want changes, you have to start it yourself. If you’re not willing to make sacrifices and work towards what you want, why should anyone else do it for you?

And yes, you can decide if you want to pursue it too. You just have to be prepared to disappoint a lot of people, and be prepared to put up with a lot of comments like “but how can you throw your life away???!!”

On a side note, I do recommend getting a degree regardless. Sucks to be in Singapore without one, and it’s also your way out if you don’t see a possible future here anymore. Or of course, you can stay to fight for one. As with the rest of life, it’s all about the choices you make.

Decide whether it’s worth it, but not whether to pursue it. The expectations from family, peers, and society overwhelms any objections, any free will, the individual has.

Besides the most wilful or rebellious (or the lucky ones with the right family culture), the elites, like the rest, are streamed into their respective role in life. They don’t enjoy options and the benefits of choosing the better options. They are merely “streamed” to a particular role in life, the role of an elite. Whether that is truly good for any person’s life has never been a concern.

It doesn’t have to be like this, but elitism in Singapore makes it so.

Like you said, I think that there’s nothing wrong with elites as more than often, they are the catalyst to societal advancement. I think the issue here is not the presence of elites, but the current system that perpetuates and entrenches elitism.

Why do I say so? An elitist system is one that denies equal opportunities at many levels. Such a scenario is becoming increasingly evident in the past few years, what with the introduction of the IP programme on top of the GEP Programme. Students from different school affiliations are made on compete on an unequal playing field for entry into elite schools.

I think what the government has in mind is the nurturing of future leadership. However, hothousing and protecting them within these elite alliances (Raffles, Hwa Chong) is hardly a good way to nurture leadership that is down-to-earth,approachable and mature.

Pardon me, but I do not quite understand the argument here. Of course, in an ideal meritocratic society, every single individual has the maximum opportunity to learn. They are granted the resources they require and given all the guidance they need to develop their interests and talents.

However, the world is not ideal, and such resource allocation is impossible, so in reality it is a compromise: we have classes of different levels and let those who have the greatest capability to join the top class, and then so on for the different quanta of capability. And since resources are limited and varied (e.g. we have teachers of different standards), it would make sense from an economic perspective and a educational point of view to distribute the better teachers to the top class. This is still a simplification of reality, but I think it describes the situation well enough.

Therefore, in a sense I do not know what you mean by contradiction of equal opportunities. If you mean “equal opportunities” to be everyone getting the equivalent amount of resources and education, then it’s quite impossible realistically. This stratification of education levels will be a better way of distributing the opportunities, since it is somewhat tailored to the capability of the students.

Granted, this raises many issues such as discrimination and elitism which you mentioned.

I do not think this is true. 1% or less of the cohort goes into the GEP programme, they are not visible to many during the whole course of education for most singaporean students. There were really no “hard feelings” or whatsoever to most of the other students.

My first encounter with GEP students were in my junior college and no, there was absolutely no loss of faith after seeing them. Most of them were like us, except some of them were pretty deficient when handling human relationship. But all in all, nice people.

But yes, I do agree that elitism is something that we should eradicate. But the contributing factor to elitism is much more then GEP. It is like Pearl say, the definition of an Elite. The defn of elite is always link to the ideal model of success. And unfortunately, in Singapore, “success” is dull and simple: high earning private executive or high flying public scholar. Most of them are not GEPers.

To Pearl
Great article!
I definitely agree that “there is no baseline criteria for determining if a secondary school student enjoying the benefits of the IP deserves to move on to the junior college”,because there are no national possibly “life changing” exams like the Os,the students could simply be swimming and not really absorbing and learning holistically.Isn’t the IP supposed to provide the students with the luxury of time,resources and space to pursue their interests and enhance their learning?
Well Done!

Keep up the good work, and keep those articles coming in!

Cheer up, and all the best :D Though maybe it’s more of the fact that here, if you wanna be creative you’ve gotta do it really well or not at all.

Ah, such is life. But creativity doesn’t work that way, so what are we to do? =/

it’s a bloody small island, and they have been telling you since you were in kindergarten that the ‘only resource we have is PEOPLE’. *think Matrix and the machines using human beings for energy*

Wanna bloom in your own way, at your own pace? Be the next Einstein or win the Pulitzer prize? Not here…we need people to till this land! Financial hub, growing biomed industry, factories all over, best place to do business…you name it we have it and who’s going to form the labour force? So all children must learn the same stuff from Day 1 and it doesn’t matter if you’re not the best in it, you are fine as a worker. The better ones become your leader. The best? Long gone before you discovered their absence.

Once you deviate from the system, it’s a downward spiral, unless you happen to be rich and can afford to find greener pastures elsewhere.

2 cents worth of opinions from endless days of mugging for my exams….don’t study, can meh?

As for the education system, I think it is flawed because of a lack of choices at the secondary level, and an over-emphasis on the sciences. Think about it, why is it that the subject combination you do at secondary 3 and 4 are defined according to how many or what kind of science subjects you do? While it was possible (I’m not sure if it’s still the case now, though) to do triple sciences, why is it not possible to do triple humanities/arts subjects? In fact, out of 9 subjects I did in secondary school, only 2 were counted as humanities/arts – a Social Studies/History combination, and Literature.

I think the problem with this sort of system is that students at the secondary level become defined by how good they are at mathematics and the sciences, which I think is a very skewed way of ‘grading’ and ‘examining’ students. What if a student is good at humanities but terrible at maths and science, and fails to make it to junior college and/or university as a result? Is it not a failure of the education system that a student with the potential to do well in arts and social sciences at the university level is already excluded from the opportunity to pursue further studies because of the restrictions of the science-favoured education system?

Personally, this could have happened to me – in secondary school, I failed every single Additional Maths test and exam, and with the exception of Biology (the only science where you can actually regurgitate information without really understanding), I was barely passing Physics and Chemistry. At one point in time my grades were so bad, I got an L1R5 of 25, which as everyone knows, automatically disqualifies you from junior college and the more prestigious polytechnic courses.

I managed to pull through in the end and made it to ‘one of the top 6 JCs’, and am doing well in my third year in NUS now. However, I always can’t help thinking – what if? What if I had just fallen through the cracks, because I could hardly do mathematics or science, which accounted for over half of my ‘O’ level grades, and was something I did not have a choice about? In my secondary school days, despite being in the ‘top’ class of a well-known girls’ school, I could not help but feel like a failure because I was doing badly for so many of my subjects. It was only in university that I realised the only reason why I was a ‘failure’ was because I was not in my element.

Now, I believe that if a student does not get good grades, it’s only because he/she is not doing or learning what he/she is best at. Everyone is good at something, it’s just a matter of finding out what it is. A good education system helps people discover their talents, and clearly, the Singapore education system is rather lacking in that aspect.

There is also a huge sacrifice that the elite (students) make. A cost so subtle that many fail to recognize it after paying the price.

For those who have not read ; An article about elite education:
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, By William Deresiewicz
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html”

That is so very very true. For those, especially the current elite students, do take a look at it. As an ex-half-elite student, I never knew how much I was missing, what different lives others lead, till I got out of one of the top schools. I spent the first few years getting rid of the accent and learning Singlish (yes, Singlish, and am still trying to catch up even now). I learnt there are other universities around besides NUS and NTU. I learnt that life is very different at different levels of society, and this isn’t just limited to the infamous question of peanuts. Dreams, expectations, views, fears and worries… they’re are all different too. The real world, well, seems so much more real than the world at the top.

Yes, elite students do get many more material opportunities. But are they really worth it? Only you can decide.

And on a side note to non elite students… there’s no need to feel jealous about the elite students. What grades for almost all exams in Singapore really reward is the ability to memorise and regurgitate. Thinking is optional (and often discouraged). I imagine with IP, this only got worse instead of better. I could be wrong of course. There could be vast changes in the educational system since I left it a few years ago, but I doubt it. Besides, when you get out into the real world, what really matters is your people skill. Your EQ and ability to relate and work well with people from all walks of life. Not your IQ (though it does help some), and certainly not how many fancy papers you have (with the exception of civil service, ahem).