Speak Good English Campaign - Year 47

Copyright: Mr Brown (and his copyrighted source)

Coming to you proudly from the country whose working language is English, whose lingua franca is Singlish (a quarrelsome, polygamous marriage of Chinese, Hokkien, Malay and English) and the nation responsible for Hainanese Chicken Rice, electronic road toll and the only democratically-elected authoritarian parliamentary regime in all of post World War 2 history with selective native-linguistic amnesia.

Speech By Bilahari Kausikan

This is a speech that Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr Bilahari Kausikan, made at his high school alma mater, Raffles Institution. The transcript is available on the school website and I am reproducing it here without edits. The reason is because I know Mr Kausikan in his capacity as Permanent Secretary, and have had the privilege of being on occasion, privy to his ideas and caustic comments. Mr Kausikan is one of the -- if not, the most astute, brilliant and erudite man I know. It's the civil service's privilege to have him steering its foreign policy, although I believe his profound sense of irony and sometimes brazen contempt for stupidity (and there is lots to go around) is mistaken for arrogance. Those who think so would know they are wrong after reading this speech, and he says a few things that all of us, no matter which branch of philosophy or ideology or fervency we may each espouse, should heed. For those of you who have less than a fleeting interest in existentialism, Mr Kausikan gets to his point in the middle of the speech, at which point you begin to understand why he chose to begin with a ramble about the meaning of life to a bunch of pubescent boys. Enjoy.

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SPEECH BY PS (FOREIGN AFFAIRS) BILAHARI KAUSIKAN AT RAFFLES INSTITUTION’S 189TH FOUNDER’S DAY ON 21 JULY 2012 (SATURDAY) AT 9 AM AT ALBERT HONG HALL, RAFFLES INSTITUTION

                  When your Principal, in a reckless act of folly, asked me to be Guest-of-Honour at this 189th Founder's Day, my first instinct was to do us both a favour and refuse. But I hesitated and in an instant was lost. The temptation to savour the irony was too great. For what I am about to say, I absolve her of all responsibility.

                  My comrades and I spent our six years in Raffles Institution waging insurgency against all established authority. At a very tender age one of our teachers told us we were all born to be hanged. And if that extreme did not come to pass -- perhaps I should say, has not yet come to pass -- several of us were at least caned. Our then Principal failed to achieve his dearest ambition of getting us all expelled only due to our dumb luck. So here I stand before you, living testimony to the role of chance and serendipity in life; a role more often than not, insufficiently acknowledged if not ignored, particularly by Singaporeans of a certain ilk. And that is my theme.

                 Eighty-five years ago an American writer by the name of Thornton Wilder published a short novel entitled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book has never been out of print, but deserves to be better known. The novel begins at noon on a certain day in 1714 when a bridge in Peru -- "the finest bridge in all Peru", writes Wilder -- inexplicably collapses and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing, plummet to their deaths. The tragedy is witnessed by a devout Franciscan monk, in Peru for missionary work among the natives, who immediately asks himself “Why did this happen to those five?” The monk is convinced that it was not a random event but some manifestation of God's Will for some greater end and vows to investigate to so as to prove to the natives the necessity of divine purpose. But his investigation runs afoul of the Inquisition and he is burnt at the stake.

                Wilder poses, but never directly answers, the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” The point, of course, is that it could have been anyone of us on that metaphorical bridge. I do not think that there is any particular meaning, pattern or direction, divine or secular, in the drift of human events. History, as Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked, is just one damned thing after another. The innocent die young and the wicked flourish; and not necessarily in equal measure either because to the wicked the innocent are often prey.

                 The world is far too complex a place to be comprehended in any holistic way by the human mind. It is made up of too many moving parts interacting in too many unpredictable ways for human reason to grasp. I mean, of course, the social world: the world of human interactions, human relationships and human institutions; of love and hatred, politics and economics, war and peace, infused with emotions like anger, pity, joy and sorrow, and not the material world of rocks and stones and trees and the earth's diurnal course.

                 In the material world, the apple will always fall whether or not Newton was there to observe it. In the material world, all phenomena must ultimately conform to the laws of physics. In the material world, when we return to earth and ashes, we too will confirm to the laws of physics. But in the meantime we inhabit a social world of sentient beings who observe, think and respond so that our every effort to act or comprehend alters what we try to comprehend and every thought and action begets a never ending, ever shifting kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities that makes all social science an oxymoron.

                 Reason may distinguish man from beast, but the sum of the interactions of different reasons; of many logics, is only coincidentally and occasionally logical. That is why actions always have unintended consequences even if they are not always immediately apparent, and our best laid plans and most fervent hopes are constantly ambushed by chance and events.

                 Most things eventually fail. The shade of Ozymandias hovers unseen but omnipresent over every human enterprise, biding its time.The ancient Greeks advised us to call no man happy until he was dead. This is good advice. We can be reasonably certain of something only after it has occurred. The only true knowledge is historical, and even then there is always room for argument over interpretation. None of us ever sees or understands the same thing, no matter how conscientiously we try to observe or communicate.


                As I stand here speaking to you, at least three different things are occurring simultaneously: first, what I think; second, what I say to convey what I think which, whether because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think: deception and self-deception are intrinsic parts of human nature; and third what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey which is again not necessarily the same thing.

               One could call this, after the title of a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Rashomon phenomenon. It makes for a world without fixed meaning, which accentuates its fundamental incomprehensibility. A world in which the past can only be partially known, the present is largely unknown and the future certainly unknowable.

               None of us asked to be born. Yet having had life thrust upon us, we must, unless bent on suicide, nevertheless live. Although we can only, if dimly and darkly, know backwards, we have to live forwards. No one can live in a constant Hamlet-like state of existential doubt. We must profess a certainty that we do not necessarily feel. To keep the metaphysical horror of unfathomable meaninglessness at bay, we all, singly or collectively, consciously or unconsciously, adopt mental frameworks to simplify a complex reality in order to deal with it.

              Since the Enlightenment of the 17th Century, belief in Reason has replaced belief in God as the primary organizing mental framework of society. We are all the creatures of this western defined modernity and the most successful of the non-western countries, Singapore among them, are precisely those who have embraced it the most closely.

              Reason's children include law and justice, philosophy, literature and the arts, economics and other social sciences and even the very belief in reason, progress, technology and science. But the fundamental mode of thought that underpins these trappings of reason is still theological in that whether our belief is in Reason or in God, it is still mere belief and not epistemologically provable beyond all doubt. There is no end to philosophy any more than there can be an end to history.

              Stated in another way, none of Reason's children have an autonomous reality separate from our apprehensions of them. They are socially constructed artefacts; frameworks of ideas that we have chosen to believe in, in order to comprehend the world and comprehend in order live in a particular way. Their utility is thus purely instrumental. They are at best all only partially and contingently right which means, of course, that they are all also always at least partially wrong. That includes, by the way, the ideas I am presently expounding.

               I advance these arguments not to instil cynicism or despair but to suggest the possibility of liberation and hope. A rock is forever only a rock. But human beings are defined by their potentialities, and since there is no predetermined meaning to the unfolding of events, the potentialities are equally boundless. Were it not so, Singapore should not exist as a sovereign and independent country.
 
              The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves. This is, to my mind, an absolute duty imposed by the human condition, even if we know that uncertainty and error are constants and that we are always writing on sand before the advancing tide. Our duties to our families, our friends and our country endure when even hope is dead.

              I am sure that by now many of you are harbouring a thought that you are too well brought up to speak out loud: this idiot exaggerates. Of course, I exaggerate. But only a little, and only for clarity's sake and not to distort or mislead. So let me restate my essential point in a different way.

              Do not confuse the depth of sincerity with which you or others hold an idea, or the number of people who sincerely hold an idea, with its validity. Sincerity is an over-rated virtue, if indeed it is a virtue. All of you may be suddenly seized with the sincere conviction that that pigs should fly. But pigs will nevertheless never sprout wings no matter how devoutly you hope for them to escape the surly bonds of earth.

              And if you, ignoring the possibility of error, sincerely believe that pigs ought to fly; or that God's Will has been revealed to you; or that you are one of the elect to whom the direction of History's cunning passages has been vouchsafed, then it is but a tiny step to being convinced that anyone who does not share your conviction is not just ignorant but evil. Then for the greater glory of PIGS or HISTORY or GOD, all spelt in capital letters, it is only a tinier further step to seeing it as your bounden DUTY, again spelt with capitals, to expunge the evil.

               And it all inevitably ends as Wilder's poor monk did, in flames at the stake. Rather than sincerity, if we want to do some trifling and ephemeral good or at least to minimize harm, we should approach life with an ironic and humane scepticism. Irony to ensure that we retain a sense of proportion and as ballast against the inevitability of unintended consequences: today's error being the correction of yesterday's error. Humanity so that we may empathize with logics other than our own, if only to better manoeuvre to impose our will because in a world of competing logics, if we hope to do any good, we cannot hope to do so by logic alone. And scepticism because the possibility of deception, our own self-deceptions if not those of others, casts constant shadows over every human action.

               I have chosen to dwell on this at what you may consider inordinate length, because Raffles Institution likes to consider itself unique. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that RI is no longer unique.

               You are now only one of a number of similar elite educational institutions from which will come a disproportionate number of scholarship recipients and a disproportionate number of leaders in the civil service, the professions, business, the Arts and the academy. And all these institutions are united by a certain sense of entitlement, possibly so profound as to be quite unconscious.

               I do not blame you for this. All of you are highly intelligent. You will be very well educated. And the odds are that you will be more than averagely successful in your careers. But understand that you will therefore also be more vulnerable to the curse of the highly intelligent, highly educated and highly successful: this curse is the illusion of certainty; the conviction of the omnipotence of your ideas.

               This is the delusion that your ideas or words are validated by mere virtue by being thought or uttered by you! YOU and not some lesser being. And the more intelligent and the more successful and the more highly educated, the deeper the delusion. "The learned", Adam Smith is reported to have said, “ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”

              Shortly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, a powerful and erudite man, confessed in testimony to a Senate. Hearing that his intellectual assumptions of a lifetime had been shaken and he was still trying to understand what happened. I do not know if he has since come to any conclusions. But it was clear that prior to the near global disaster, he had never even faintly contemplated the possibility that his beliefs may have been in error. We are all still paying the price for his certainties.

              Yours will be a generation that that will live through times of more than usual uncertainty. A global transition of power and ideas is underway. Transition to what, no one can yet say. We have no maps and will have to improvise our way forward the best we can. It will be a transition measured in decades and not just a few years, and it is your misfortune that it is occurring as the technology of the internet is making us solipsistic.

             The internet conflates and confuses our opinion with information and tempts us to immerse ourselves only in a circle of those who share and reinforce our own interests and views. It shortens attention spans and privileges the new and novel over any notion of lasting value. Social media like Facebook have perverted the common meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’ beyond all recognition. Only a solipsist or, what is much the same thing, a narcissist, would think that what he or she had for lunch would be of wider interest; and only those with vacuous minds would be interested. And this at a time when the safe navigation of uncharted waters requires a prudent modesty, openness and some minimal capacity for sustained thought. And yet the internet and its associated technologies is indispensible to modern life. We need it to prosper. But what its ultimate effects will be on society, on governance, on international relations, on the very way we think, no one yet knows.

               I certainly have no answers. As you, the anointed ones, ready yourselves to assume authority and responsibility under these challenging circumstances. I can do no more than to remind you of what Sir Olivier Cromwell wrote to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1650. He was trying to persuade the Scots not to embrace the Royalist cause of King Charles the Second and so avert civil war. Gentlemen, he wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ” -- and I should explain that in the 17th Century the bowels were considered to be the seat of pity or the gentler emotions -- Gentlemen, Cromwell wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken”.

              So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 21st Century, I too beseech you from whatever portion of anatomy you consider most dear, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

              Before I conclude, you may wish to know how it all ended. Cromwell's advice was not heeded. Shortly thereafter, the third English Civil War broke out. This set in motion a historical trajectory of political, social and economic changes that led to modern Britain, the industrial revolution, the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Empire, the founding of Singapore and ultimately, you and I.

              And all because good advice fell on deaf years. What better way to appreciate the irony and contingency of events than to ponder what may have happened if Cromwell's advice was in fact taken and civil war avoided. And as you do so, consider also the possibility that you may be mistaken when you think you are mistaken.

             And with that final paradox I will end.

             Thank you for listening to me.
                                     

My Own One Child Policy

Yesterday, in an informal setting, my boss remarked that it wouldn't be long before I had another kid. I hastily rejoindered that I was stopping at one. Like anyone who has heard me say that, my boss scoffed that her colleague had said the same thing and after a few years (from the first baby), she was now trying for the second. My boss is single but lest anyone assumes she is anti-natal in her management style, she has very definite opinions about gender equality and the right of female employees to maternal benefits. I was extremely heartened to hear her do a mathematical comparison between the amount of (paid) time off a male employee takes for annual obligatory military reservice for the 15 or more years during the peak of his career, which far exceeds any amount of maternity leave a woman might potentially take to bear a child. (If anyone is wondering, it's 4 months, going by our total fertility rate of 1.2 children per female). 

I've posted elsewhere about how the clowns who call themselves policymakers can improve our abysmal fertility rates (ameliorate social inequality for example) and encourage earlier marriage (which increases the odds of 2 or more children being born). The same clowns who beseech you to marry earlier (and settle for the one who's second to ideal since you won't ever find the ideal partner) and have kids would tell you in the same breath that marriage and parenting is a personal choice (as if this absolves the state from its policy failures in this department). I've already zoomed in on our rising social inequality and the status anxiety of middle class people as a root cause of this problem.

I'm going to state categorically today that meritocracy breeds inequality, cements it and reproduces even more inequality.

And why should we care? Because the more unequal society becomes, the less likely people will have 2.1 children and the less likely you get economic growth of the sort that isn't perverted by cheap foreign labour. Of course this is not the whole answer, it's just part of the equation, but I'm not an economist and I'm here only to show that an unfettered meritocracy is not only harmful to the good of society (mental and physical health outcomes, social stability, low unemployment), it simply raises the overall cost of having children.

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Meritocracies Favour the Rich

Jason DeParle's article in the New York Times described how latest trends in American households showed that the greatest increase in economic inequality was seen in families with children (see diagram). Why should we care? Simple: the more worse-off or well-off you feel, the less or more likely you are to have babies.

As the article notes, one thing affluent do with their money is buy enrichment activities for their children, such as tutors, sports and private schools. The gap between what upper- and lower-income families spend in this way has grown rapidly, from about $2,700 a year in the early 1970s to $7,600 a year in the mid-2000s.

Do we see the same trend of income disparities between the top and bottom wage earners in Singapore? I couldn't find the same breakdown in terms of families and singles, but I found 2011 figures for individuals in households that attest to the widening gap between rich and poor:

Source: Department of  Statistics, Singapore (2011)*

Even if you look only at the red line (income after accounting for transfers and taxes), the top earners here made about 8 times what the bottom did. The two spikes took place during the 2007 global financial crisis, when income inequality in Singapore spiked to the highest ever in a decade.What does that mean? In any serious market aberration like a financial crisis, the poor are the worst hit. So wealthier people not only have more resources than a poorer counterpart to spend on each child, they are less vulnerable and susceptible to financial gloom and doom.

Given this basic cost-benefit analysis, you and I would logically have only one child to increase our kid's odds in a zero-sum competition with other kids. In fact, this is the reality in China: in Shanxi province where the one-child policy was suspended, data showed no increase in TFR. The Chinese, when given the choice to have more than one child, chose not to.

Let me recover from the shock (duh). China's income inequality is notorious, especially in coastal cities like Shanghai. Going back to the meritocracy system (one in which people are rewarded according to their abilities rather than status or caste) which is essentially a system of social inequality, unequal outcomes is defended as logical in order that (a) the most talented people do the most important jobs and (b) these talented people are appropriately rewarded so it balances the cost of doing these jobs (like time, effort or the training required to do the job, e.g. studying medicine). 

This is classic functional theory (a la Davis and Moore ) and the criticisms of this theory is just as obvious. Who determines what is a more functionally important job, and who determines what is an appropriate reward? If meritocracy were as perfectly operationalized as it is idealistic in its claim to fairness of opportunity, then CEOs of major banks and tobacco companies should make about as much money as a high school mathematics teacher or a doctor. In fact, a doctor in Germany or Norway doesn't make that much more than a teacher or a waste collector. Obviously, the doctor pays more taxes than the waste collector, but the status of the waste collector and high school teacher isn't as starkly lower in Europe as compared to Asia. Basically, meritocracy cannot guarantee that the subjective and differential social status of a job (which is also culturally determined) does not affect the economic value of the job and thereby, how much said worker is paid. The Europeans figured this out and that's why they worked out a system of redistribution (what our politicians pejoratively dismiss as the welfare-state) to make sure that the postman is able to have as many children as the doctor, and that his children would be accorded the same opportunities in education and health as those of the doctor.

It makes perfect sense then, that in highly developed and highly meritocratic (read: unequal) societies like Singapore and the United States, people who want access to more vital resources like education, healthcare would choose to have fewer children. Fewer children means more income to procure the very resources needed for each child to success in a meritocracy. Immigration is the only reason the Americans are not experiencing what the rest of the OECD is experiencing in low birthrates. You can have a meritocracy, I am by no means denouncing this as the least objectionable system of rewarding people, but just like democracy is the least objectionable form of governance, you need something else to fix the bad effects inherent in any system. And this system, call it welfare or call it a donkey-kong, depends on what that society deems is most important for all. In this respect, I admit that democracies are the best tool to ensure such an outcome.

Don't quote me, see the evidence out there that inequality is associated with lower levels of fertility (Perrotti, 1993).  Scholars have emphasized the role of equality in allowing individuals to overcome fixed costs of investment in human capital: if a society is more equal, given the same level of income, a higher fraction of its poor would be willing to undertake investments with considerable fixed costs. There are good reasons to believe that education investment is precisely characterized by fixed costs and increasing returns.

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The Myth that Meritocracy and Inequality are essential for Economic Growth

Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire (1998) showed that there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in asset distribution and long-term growth. In fact inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but not for the rich, which gives you a clue why your highly-paid politicians keep telling you that our GINI coefficient is okay and still lower than in "other countries". It's funny how they tout Finland and Denmark as role models in terms of education and innovation but leave out the fact that they are also highly equal societies. When someone brings that up, you will hear the automatic reply that the Finns pay more taxes. Hello, if I could get universal healthcare, 2 years of paid maternity/paternity leave (without fear of the chop) and free quality childcare (and not some half-baked, overpriced pre-school programme) in exchange for giving up 30% of my income (which is higher than the average Singaporean's anyway), I AM WILLING PAY MORE TAXES, HAPPILY.

Plus, more and/or better redistribution doesn't necessarily equate to more taxes for ALL segments of society. You just need to tax the richer (who, at the moment are paying ridiculously low rates). Warren Buffett called for the government to increase taxes on his and his peers' incomes, for crying out loud. And if you do a check, you will see that the amount of taxes collected through our famous ERP (road-use toll) last year outstripped personal income taxes by manyfold. Where's all that money going to?

Inequality can be harmful to long run economic growth by making it harder to implement economic reforms. Inequality can reduce the base of support for fundamental structural transformations necessary to embark on a path of high growth because inequality tends to result in polarized societies and polarized societies may be in a weaker position to undertake fundamental economic reforms (I'm thinking of Greece now). Rodrik (1998) has provided empirical evidence that unequal societies are less likely to carry out the adjustments necessary to respond to negative macroeconomic shocks. Indeed, Rodrik finds that what is particularly destructive is a combination of high inequality and poor institutions of conflict management (such as social safety nets, democratic institutions, rule of law, and efficient government institutions). In Singapore, we can say that these had always existed, and were a major reason why our country managed to pull out of each major financial crisis when other countries buckled. 

You may say that Singapore does fine, as we have a bunch of technocrats helming the ship, but however benign and sagely your authoritarian regime may be, it's contingent on the same regime being able to replenish its ranks. The Chinese do not believe that the wealth of a family could outlast three generations for this reason. We cannot rely on a bunch of technocrats who are the bottom-feeders of the meritocratic trench.

Today we are seeing the effects of policies that supported an unfettered economic growth and inadequate resources channelled to remedying the ill effects of that "growth". The ultra rich here do not pay enough taxes to ameliorate the stagnant incomes of the lower classes and the toxic outcomes of inflation. At a time when more and more people need universal healthcare, comprehensive insurance and a level playing field for school-age children, you see trends that instead reveal rising income poverty (the poor are taxed more than the rich when it comes to falling sick and basic goods and services), and rich-poor divide. The Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the best record of psycho-social health (Wilkinson and Pickette 2009).

Back to my proposition: babies have everything to do with meritocracy and how unequal a society is. I'm not feeling very well-off as an individual. I do well on a statistical graph of average incomes in Singapore but it tells you nothing about how confident I feel in my ability to provide a reasonable amount of resources to my child. This story is not found in the median incomes chart or the GDP growth chart. It's in the other chart that your politicians would rather not address. 

What would I do then? As an individual without much power to mobilise for lofty social change, I do what the other 2 million or so of my countrymen would obviously do: Stop At One. 

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*Dept of Statistics Singapore: Key Household Income Characteristics and Household Income Trends, 2011

Deininger and Squire, 1998, New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth, Journal of Developmental Economics, 57(2): 259-87.

Perotti, Roberto, 1993, Political Equilibrium, Income Distribution, and Growth, Review of
Economic Studies 60(4): 755-76.

Rodrik, Dani, 1998, Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Growth Collapses and
Social Conflict. NBER Working Paper 6350.

Learning Chinese: A Reality Check

According to the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin is one of the five most difficult languages in the world for native English speakers to learn. The Institute quotes 2,200 hours as the minimum number of class hours required for attaining fluency in Mandarin (that's over 2 years if you put in 3 hours a day, 6 days a week and do that without a break for 2 years) but I do not know their exact definition of "fluency" since most students who clock those hours report being completely lost when they get to China. The other four languages are Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Cantonese. (Yay, I have limited proficiency in two of the world's 5 hardest languages!)

A disclaimer before proceeding: I studied Chinese (writing, reading, speaking) for all 12 years of my formal schooling (the last 2 years are what the British call college, what is junior college in Singapore and is not mandatory) and have a Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK5) Intermediate certification. While this might qualify me as proficient in the language, I do not claim to be a native speaker as I am more proficient and comfortable in English. In fact I have lost maybe half my 3000 or so characters along with 80% of my academic proficiency at age 18. I am, however, able to converse with a native speaker from China and have had prolonged conversations with my Taiwanese friend whose patience outstrips my Mandarin vocabulary. Those of you who already know me would know that I am ethnically Chinese, my grandparents were born in China and I use informal Chinese on a daily basis in a predominantly English-speaking environment although Singapore is a multicultural society with an ethnic Chinese majority.

To begin, I'm not putting anyone off from learning the language. As a new parent whose single biggest challenge is to bring her child up in 3 languages (including Chinese), I think I am entitled to say that this is not a walk in the park. It's closer to a swim across the Pacific with your hands tied behind your back. You're more likely to drown before you get to Hawaii. Many westerners who have put in their hard yards to seriously learn the language have paid their dues and pretty much all of them agree that Chinese is pretty damn hard to learn (read a great tongue-in-cheek piece from American scholar David Moser or input "Chinese is hard to learn" in Google and find all of these people easily). There are plenty of good blogs out there which explain in great detail the difficulty in achieving minimal proficiency in this beautiful yet exasperating language -- David Moser's is a must-read for all beginners, Hacking Chinese gives good and practical advice -- but what else can I add to the conversation? 

Well, as an almost-native speaker,  I can comment on the difficulty of learning the language and the claims about what strategies work best, since I spent a good 12 years at it and during this time, I have been in the shoes of Western students who have never learnt a tonal language.Yes, I have wanted to tear my hair out staring at a list of words I had to memorize (we learn writing and reading at the same time) before a test and wishing to God and The Cosmos that I could quit Chinese was a weekly -- sometimes daily -- prayer. Ask any Chinese student or student of Chinese who didn't do it voluntarily. This is my version of a reality check for anyone who's deciding whether to embark on this journey. Oh, I'm not saying it isn't worth every bit of effort you're going to put in, it's damn well worth it after the 5 or 6 years you've been at it; but for those of us who like to live life without the blinkers of delusion, painful as it may be, here are a few things that some of you might find helpful if you are thinking about taking Chinese on, or wondering whether to call it a day.

1) Your Chinese-speaking husband/wife/girlfriend ain't gonna be much use

From first-hand experience, I can tell those of you who are thinking of or who recently acquired a partner who speaks Mandarin to forget it. If you think he/she is going to be your free tutor, conversation partner, you're better off speaking Mandarin to your dog. Your dog would be more interested. As others can attest to this, spouses and lovers are in your life for other reasons -- communication, getting intimate and the other half of the chores -- and they don't have the time or patience to be your teacher. 

My husband Daniel is German and in our 4 years together, he has not picked up enough Chinese from me to have a conversation beyond two sentences at the coffee shop. I, on the other hand, have enough German (from being self-taught) to have a protracted conversation with his relatives: me in broken German is a lot more comprehensible than Daniel with any Mandarin. A big reason for the disparity in our ability is the requirement for me to speak German in order to communicate with his parents (they don't speak anything else). You may think that's a real pain, but it's like a little accelerator for any student of any language. That's why you always hear about immersion and people advising you to go to China or Taiwan to really accelerate your proficiency. It's the deep end of the pool. Do or die. And most of the time, when you have no choice but to use the language, you do almost what any baby does naturally in language acquisition: you soak it up. 

But what if you don't want to spend 6 months in Beijing (in the smog) stuttering to locals and ending up having a conversation with them in English? There's plenty out there. Watch movies or TV from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (here we get Taiwanese and Hong Kong stuff dubbed in standard Mandarin, putonghua) online. Lots of Chinese pop music available, Jay Chou has atrocious enunciation, but he's a good starter kit to Chinese pop culture. Youtube will give you hours and hours of Chinese lessons (only helpful for students who already have some foundation and need practice), Chinese programs, and pop culture. Or you could just come to Singapore, aka "Asia For Beginners". There's enough Chinese resources here you can get on the cheap (books, libraries, media and the people) while having the safety of falling back on English when you feel like you're going crazy.

2) You can't escape rote memorizing
Many have commented that the learning curve at the beginning is steepest and it gradually gets easier as you ease into the grammar and gain traction with the tones. I would say the first year is akin to jumping off a cliff into a black abyss and then climbing back up again and repeating this another 5 times with every new word. Alright, I'm exaggerating it, but people who hate memorising and got by learning their French and German and Spanish relying on the alphabet system and cognates should take me seriously. The steep curve at the beginning for all novices is due to the fact that you must learn to recognise and pronounce enough individual words to have a basic conversation about the weather. Many students think it's sufficient to speak Mandarin and they choose to be illiterate. This is well and good if your aim is simply to have a couple weeks holiday in Taiwan or Shanghai. My view: Chinese is the hardest thing you're ever going to attempt to learn, may as well go the whole hog.

Native speakers have the advantage of having been exposed to the language since birth, so that syntax and all that grammar stuff becomes second nature. You instinctively know how to form sentences and express yourself in the native lingo. This might take the non-Sino learner maybe a year or two, depending on how much practice, interest and determination you have. But if you are doing this at the same time as you're learning new vocabulary (and this is the labour intensive part), it really feels like you're heavy-lifting all the time because you are consciously acquiring the entire system of word recognition, memorization, pronunciation and sentence formation all at once. It can be really daunting and I get it. I've given up learning German grammar because it's too hard. German isn't my passion and neither is cracking the magician's code that is their grammar. Hell, thinking about the genders in German is enough to make me take a sleeping pill. I need enough German to be understood and to understand and nobody has any problem with that. So if you're bent on becoming fluent and proficient in Chinese, make sure you're doing it because you have nothing else in your life that's more important than devoting the next 3 years of your life to this project. Because it WILL take that long, at the very least.

3) Give it up if you're tone-deaf

I'm serious.  Daniel is as close to tone deaf as one can be, but to his credit, the man tries hard. He gets by being understood even with his atrocious tones, but he can't really understand someone who's speaking in Mandarin because he can't tell the difference. This is crucial. I've had many conversations with Daniel that went like this:

Me (speaking to Juju): 帮妈妈把垃圾丢掉 bang Ma Ma ba la ji diu diao (Help Mummy throw away the garbage)


Daniel: Why did you ask Ju to throw away the spicy chicken? (辣鸡 la ji)

Me: It's 垃圾 (la1 ji1) not 辣鸡 (la4 ji1) ! 

But to Daniel, all the la ji sound the same. Here's a fun sentence to demonstrate tones: Lao3 shi1 lao3 shi lao1 dao1. If you know that Lao3 shi1 means "teacher" and lao1 dao1 means "nag", you could figure out that lao3 shi is probably "always" = "Teacher is always nagging". Western learners make a big deal of the tones, but I always tell people there are only 4 plus one neutral tone, it's not so hard, as long as you figure out those 4. It's really like singing in only 4 or 5 notes. Which brings me to my next point:

4) Learn to read

Yes, we have tones and it's a real pain to have to memorize every word with its exact tone. That's why you need to learn to READ THE CHARACTERS. Hanyu pinyin is a romanised form of the language which makes it really convenient to type on the keyboard, look up a word in the dictionary and figure out how to pronounce the word, but only if you already know how to read and write! It's really not a solution for learners who can't read. I'll tell you why: learning solely with Pinyin is like playing the piano without seeing the notes on the score. You're half blind. Think of the piano keyboard: it has several octaves but only 8 white keys and 5 black keys representing a note in each octave. There are 8 possible C keys and 7 possible C sharps. You can't possibly know which C sharp to press unless you can read the note on the scale. It's the same for Chinese. My previous pinyin example, la1 ji1 on paper doesn't make any sense unless you read it together with "ba3 la1 ji1 diu1 diao4" and you figure out that diu1 diao4 means "to throw away", by which you understand that I meant 垃圾 the garbage and not spicy chicken. But if you could read the characters, you would have no doubt about what I meant. In fact, when I learnt French, I would make it a point to look up every new word I heard to make sure I knew the spelling. I am a highly visual person and seeing the French or German word in my head reinforces my memory of it so I can pull it up again in future. If you can see the word in your head, you can remember it a lot better, and this is even more critical in a tonal language with pictograms in place of an alphabet.

Take the word 老 which on its own is an adjective which means "old". If you heard someone say 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) you would naturally guess they were referring to someone old or something which was old. In fact, you would need to know that the three words go together to make another word: commoner or common folk, which has nothing to do with being old. Again, 老板 lao3 ban3 (the boss) has very little in common with being elderly (although some bosses could be aged) nor a wooden plank which is what 板 is. Wait till you get to 4 word proverbs like 老当益壮 lao3 dang1 yi4 zhuang4（to gain vigour with age). So you need to learn individual characters and words that are composed of 2 or 3 characters and then proverbs and idioms (there are more but I won't go there). 

5) Context is everything

The Chinese don't like to get to the point. Even after they've finished the sentence, you still have to figure out what they meant because there are not tenses that resemble the Germanic or Romantic languages. It's worse than the Germans making you wait for the verb at the end of the sentence. When you're deciphering Mandarin, you need to replay the entire sentence in a split-second to work out the meaning because the context sets the meaning. Take this example: "Wo3 qu4 de2 guo2" and "Wo3 qu4 le de2 guo2".

Context A:
Question: Ni qu na li du jia? (Where are you going on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I am going to Germany).


Context B:
Question: Ni qu le na li du jia? (Where did you go on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I went to Germany).


Context C:
Question: Ni qu guo na xie guo jia? (Which countries have you been to?)
Answer: Wo qu le de guo (I've been to Germany).


Context D:
Question: Shang ge xing qi, ni qu le na li? (Where did you go last week?)
Answer Wo qu le de guo (I went to Germany).


Without the question (which sets the context), you would not have any idea if I was going to Germany or I had gone to Germany; whether I've been to only Germany on holiday or if I went to Germany last week. But then again, some people find the lack of tenses totally refreshing, since there are fewer arbitrary rules to learn. There isn't any better or worse here, it's just a completely different way of orienting your comprehension of what is being said. Instead of relying on tenses, you rely on an intuitive reading of the context.


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If you aren't put off already, I'll throw in two more cents on the arduous learning of Chinese. It's true what they all say about immersing yourself in an all-Chinese environment and memorizing every single word. But if you can see yourself making this commitment, the other reasons for learning Chinese is just as compelling as the challenges I've just listed. That's why I love the language, it's like the Tao of Ying and Yang: what is black is also white, and what is agonizing is also beautiful. Learning to write is a wonderful skill and the journey can be an endless puzzle of discovery for those who love puzzles or a perpetual endeavor of frustration. I've written elsewhere in this blog about how to write Chinese characters. In school, it was typical for students to write pages and pages of "xi2 zi4" (Writing Practice) for every new lesson. This was anything from 100 to 1000 repetitions (we would write 10 repetitions per new word) a week, sometimes twice a week. It does get easier because once you learn enough, you can use what you've got and this reinforces your long term memory. Your "core" 2000 word vocabulary will get you by in most situations. 

As students, we also read a lot (out loud), what is called "lang3 du2" (recitation) to practice our enunciation and pronunciation. In Primary school, our teacher would get the entire class to recite the entire essay (sometimes 3 pages) three or four times per lesson. If we didn't recite with quite enough expressiveness or if our tones were too flat, we'd have to do it from the top. There is only one word for this: arduous. At times you wanted to bash your 10 year old head on the cement floor you were sitting on. But I must say the 6 years of reciting ensured that I have perfect tones. This is the shit of Chinese poetry reciting, it's an actual art form. To become fluent, you'll need to do this a lot, and the best part is you can actually practice lang3 du2 on your own. Of course, having feedback is a lot better, so you'll need to attend class or get a tutor. It's like playing music, you really need someone to correct and encourage you. 

Finally, if you can get through all of that, you get the satisfaction of connecting with any Chinese speaker in the world (and there are many), discovering the magnificence of a 5000-year-old culture and just taking simple pleasure in being able to read stuff that, to any other person, looks like hieroglyphics. You do need a certain amount of proficiency to be able to do this, but like the circle of Tao, if you love the language, you'll master it eventually, and then you'll love it all over again. 

Project Baby: 14th Month Update

Juju is 14 months old and continues to intrigue, amaze and enthrall us with his antics. This month I will talk more about the management of behaviour since Ju appeared to have developed overnight a proclivity to do exactly the opposite of what we wanted. I refrain from using the word "discipline" because at this stage of his growth, he isn't capable of autonomous self-control. Toddlers this age also don't understand logic or the concept of rules. Ju is still ahead of the usual milestones in gross motor and psychosocial development. His verbal development is slower although cognitively he's as sharp as a needle.

Cognition and Language

According to Piaget's theory of how children acquire schemas, Ju should be actively assimilating new information into his existing schemas of the things around him. Although it's hard to determine this since Ju doesn't yet talk, I've noticed that he has some mental models of the world around him. For example, he understands that the word "mao" or "katze" or "cat" refers to an actual living animal, usually found lurking under the cars in the carpark. This is because when I say "let's go find the cat", Ju would squat down on his haunches and peer below the cars, presumably searching for the elusive cat. He has seen this cat, make no mistake, so the only mystery now is whether his schema of "cat" includes other cats aside from the resident one at his Grandma's apartment building. He is also familiar with the words "dog" and "gou gou" and "Hund", although he recognises that they apply to his stuffed dog (which accompanies him to sleep) and the real dogs he meets in the neighbourhood (that wag their tails and run about). How that schema would work is beyond me, since it's not likely he's worked out a schema for "toy dog" i.e. a representation of a dog. Same with the representations of dog and cat in his books. He points to certain things in his books, like the bird or grapes and I make it a point to label whatever he points at so that he can work on those schemas.

Ju also started shaking his head in response to questions and suggestions, and boy, he does it vehemently! We don't know when he began to understand that head shaking represented rejection, but it's no surprise that he picked it up before nodding, since he's been hearing and seeing "NO" since birth. It was totally adorable when he first started shaking his head when we offered him food but now it's getting quite frustrating because he shakes at pretty much everything he doesn't like, food, water, and recently, to go for a diaper change. Just like pointing, head shaking is an evolving language skill and it's quite effective for Ju himself as he takes a lot of glee in telling us "no". He is responding more consistently to verbal requests like "say Bye Bye" and "Kiss Kiss". The cutest one is when we ask him to "Ai Ai whomever" (Ai = to love or show affection) and he reaches out his hand to touch your face. He also repeats actions that get him a laugh from his audience. He continues to play peek-a-boo and derives pleasure from it. He continues to babble, but no new vowels in his repertoire. Instead, he's taken to making more razzing sounds and doing comical things with his mouth. Yesterday, he found his tongue with his fingers and tried to pull it out.

He is ahead on these things typical of 18 month olds: he points to pictures in books; he can point to more than one body part when asked (mouth, hair, nose and sometimes ear in at least 2 languages). He also seems to be engaging in an early form of pretend play. Pretend play is important to a child's overall intellectual, social and emotional development (I will blog more about this later when I'm feeling violently opposed to videos and iPads). We successfully taught Ju to clink cups and say "Gan Bei!" or "Prost" (Cheers), he not only does this when asked, he also pretends to drink from the cup. We noticed that he also pretends to drink from other jugs and containers he plays with without being asked to Gan Bei. This little game is also a useful little distraction when he wants to mess around with whatever we're drinking.

Psychosocial

His psychosocial development is typical of 15 to 18 month olds: he can play by himself or alongside other children but he doesn't play with them. He does not respond to sharp scoldings or discipline (like a smack on his wrist) or cajoling. He is in fact expressing oppositional behaviour by doing exactly what I stopped him from doing, like messing around with my stone Buddha on the balcony or climbing onto the coffee table. After a few weeks of this behaviour (I would tell him NO! sharply or smack his leg and push his leg back down on the floor, he would look at me gleefully and do it again) I decided that it was counterproductive to use scolding or smacking. In fact, after I slapped his hand for playing with the laundry poles, the next time he did it, he turned to me and smacked his own hand before I could do anything. It was as if he knew this was what he would get for playing with the poles and he didn't mind at all. So at this point, I hadn't researched defiance or oppositional behaviour. I sat down and thought about Ju's reaction. He obviously didn't mind being smacked or slapped and he took a lot of satisfaction in doing it again and again despite the smacking and scolding. I concluded that it could be the attention we were giving him that he liked so much, so I told Daniel to just put correct the behaviour the next time but not make a big deal out of it. He might lose interest if we didn't give him attention. And voila! The next time he did it, I pushed him off the table without breaking my conversation with Daniel and paid him no heed. Ju just walked away in search of some other toy.

Groovy! It happened once or twice more that evening, but it became evident that Ju lost interest quicker when we simply corrected his behaviour without fuss. I found out later that  the rule of thumb is that you pay as little attention as possible to behaviors you want to eliminate. Why? Because any attention—positive or negative—is rewarding. If you don’t react, he is more likely to give the behavior up. This is why it’s most effective to stay calm and matter of fact when you set limits. The more emotional you get, the more rewarding it is to her. It’s also important to recognize that your child will not be able to think ahead to stop unacceptable behaviors on her own at this age. That doesn’t mean you don’t set limits, you just need to have realistic expectations. And guess what? It also convinced me that corporal punishment just doesn't work, no matter how much we adults would like to think it does. I told myself that day that I would give up smacking Ju. This is a good website for ways to cope with defiance.

In other developments, Ju is interested in strangers but wary of being picked up by them. He's not particularly shy or afraid. He is perfectly fine with new people entering the house, and he willingly plays the Gan Bei game with my friends or gives them his toy if I ask him to, so no territorial issues here. He is able to follow a request to bring his diaper to the dustbin in the kitchen. Sometimes he would toss it in, depending on whether there are more interesting contents in the bin.

Fine Motor

Ju continues to spy the tiniest objects, often specks of grit on the floor or very small objects like stones or grime. He would sometimes point and grunt excitedly "unh! unh" or pick it up between his thumb and forefinger. He can beat spoons and ladles against his bowl and plate, as well as scoop up little objects from a pail clumsily. He likes to scoop things up and transfer them to another pail or cup, and we use this game during feeding time (see Feeding) to distract/engage him. He is not so adept at turning the pages of his favourite story books yet, instead he ends up shutting the book. His intention is unmistakeable though, as he clearly favours his pop-up book. He impatiently tries to get to the last page where the caterpillars transform into 10 pretty pop-up butterflies, one of which has already been ripped out and mangled up. He has begun to attempt to inhibit his own drooling. He can also push and pull open a door if it's ajar and gets upset if it is shut and he can't open it. 

He is ahead on these things typical of 18 month olds:  he indicates he's peed or pooed sometimes by tugging on his diaper;

Gross Motor

He walks very stably now but sometimes he trips or runs into furniture because he doesn't pay attention to obstacles to avoid them yet. He can stoop and squat and pull himself up without any assistance. He has been trying to clamber up a slide and enjoys sliding down. He climbs up and down the sofa and lately, chairs, which is a bit more risky. He also tries this with the coffee table, which I talked about above. He also walks up steps (with assistance) but prefers to go up simultaneously like adults and not one by one. He imitates us doing housework which is hilarious. For example, he would wipe the floor vigorously with a piece of cloth after seeing the part-time maid do it, and he used a friend's stick-like object to imitate sweeping. 

He is ahead on these things typical of 18 month olds: pushing and pulling large objects (he can push a stool or dining chair from one end of the room to the other); he can pick up heavy objects like foot stools and even the laundry basket and drag it out of the room. He can carry a teddy bear while walking and can seat himself on a small chair or stool.

I will deal with feeding and sleeping issues in a separate post as there are some experiments in progress on this.

Juju Finds His Junk (and why he won't need MOE's new & improved sex-ed)

A couple of weeks ago, Ju started groping around his groin each time we plonked him down for a diaper change. You can just imagine my initial horror as I watched his right thumb and forefinger nab his little penis and start messing around with it. By the way, Ju is only 13 months and a half. A discreet check confirmed that he wasn't doing a premature version of childhood masturbation but I did cast suspicious glances at him every time he tugged at the front of his diaper.

So after I was sure that my baby wasn't wanking off during diaper changes, I wondered about the possible reasons for it and only one came to mind: curiosity. The guy has barely seen his junk since he was born. I mean, he only started sitting up at 5 or 6 months and his belly is so rotund that he hardly sees anything below it even during bath time. So it's no surprise that once he mastered some hand-eye coordination, his hand would stray below his belt, so to speak, to explore and discover the crown jewels.

My husband and friends know me well enough to expect that I would take the most liberal approach to sex education with Ju, but in fact, ever since I became a parent, my attitude towards my son's sexual education  has veered dangerously to the right. Daniel, of course, advocates girlfriends as early as possible (in keeping with Daddy's historical exploits) and losing his virginity at no later than 15. I would protest vociferously and order that Ju will NOT bring any girls home until he moves out of my house, to which Daniel would roll his eyes and our sparring would go on.

This post is starting to sound like a precursor to a flaming of the MOE's latest sex education fracas but it won't be, I promise. There are so many people out there doing it already that I feel kind of sorry for MOE, who didn't really care to get into this in the first place if not for the AWARE saga two years ago. (You can read coverage about it here and a concise, tongue-in-cheek one by The Economist here.)

I find it healthy and helpful for parents to discuss how they want to raise their sons and daughters to approach sex, sexuality and relationships. It's never too early and the conversation between you and your spouse should begin even before your child finds his genitals. I have accepted the fact that my kid will start to have this conversation (be it in his head or with his friends) before he hits puberty and anyone who thinks that an 11 year old is still a child is obviously as deluded as any one of Kong Hee's rabid supporters who attacked the media last week outside the courthouse like the crew of extras from the Planet Of The Apes.

The so-called "conservative view" (hitherto espoused by a very silent segment of Singapore because I've so far not heard anyone come out and declare their conservative view, but plenty of people happily repeating said view) makes an erroneous moral assumption that educating kids about health preventive methods (like contraception) is by implication an approval of promiscuity. I cannot emphasize more how wrong this view is and how ludicrously uninformed the assumption. There is NO evidence that people who are informed about contraceptive methods engage in more sexual intercourse at an earlier age (see the Dutch experience). But there is PLENTY of evidence that in countries where people are not formally educated about sex and preventive methods, there is the highest rates of abortion (also due to unavailability of legal abortion). I searched for data on our abortion rates among the developed nations and Singapore has higher rates compared with Holland, Spain, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Japan. This doesn't prove that people from these countries are less promiscuous, but it sure does prove that fewer of their women compared to ours end up with unwanted pregnancies. In Singapore, it is not so much the teens who are seeking abortions but adult women: ignorant teenagers grow up to become ignorant adults. If you still don't see the logic, then try soaking up the number of teenagers -- boys and girls -- getting infected with sexually-transmitted infections year on year (see here and here).

As Adam Lee puts it bluntly but succinctly in his book Daylight Atheism:
"The deepest irony is that the religious right’s rigid opposition to contraception and sex education hasn’t produced a more stable or healthier society, but has resulted in the opposite. Among Western nations, the United States has the highest divorce rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate, and the highest rate of STD infection; and within the United States, the highest rates of these social ills are found among the highly conservative, highly religious states usually referred to as the Bible Belt. Meanwhile, a 1999 study by conservative Christian pollster George Barna found that atheists as a group have lower divorce rates than virtually all Christian denominations, including Baptists, Pentecostals, born-agains, and evangelicals."

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Teenagers are not only curious, they happen to enjoy pissing adults off by doing exactly what adults don't want them to do. You're doing every child a disservice by keeping information from him or her that would save their lives and keep them free of disease.

At 13 months, this is what Ju hears when we tell him NOT to do something cos it's bad for him:

Me: Ju! Get off the table, it's dangerous.
Ju hears: Ju! ba-ba-ba-ba-ba (Mummy is paying attention!)
Me: I said leg OFF!
Ju hears: Ai-ai-ah-ah-ah! (Mummy likes what I'm doing! Let's do it again)
Me: One more time and I'm smacking you (hand raised)
Ju hears: Ba-bah-bah! (ooh, I like being spanked)
Me: That's it (I smack his leg). Naughty boy (I carry him away from the table).
Ju: (Giggles. I'm so bored with this. Ooh, there's my car.) 

And this repeats itself two more times in the space of 30 minutes. You say he's going to exercise more logic and self-restraint at age 13? Let's see what sort of conversation we will have when he is13:

Me: Don't have sex with your girlfriend because sex is special and you should do only when you love her.
Ju hears:  I don't trust you not to fuck her. Plus I don't think you love her.

Me: If you really love her, you can wait till you're married, Ju.
Ju hears: Don't be horny, keep it in your pants till you're 35.

Me: Use common sense! No sex means no HIV, STD, STI and pregnancy. Don't you want a bright future at NUS Medical School?
Ju hears: Just ignore the nice, nice feeling when you go near the girl and your hard, hard dickie like going to explode because otherwise you will get some fuck disease and cannot go to college.

Thanks for the advice, MOE, but no thanks. Anyone who reads any publication other than the Bible and the Straits Times will know that hormones mixed with an increased spike in emotion (during foreplay for example) will prevail over the "rational" logic that abstaining from sex would save you a lot of potential problems. Hey, as a mother, I will be the first one to tell you I would rather pull out my eyeballs through my nostrils than approve of my son humping a 14 year old girl. But I'm going to tell you that there are a few very possible outcomes if I don't teach him what to do if he gets the urge to poke (and yes, masturbation is part of my sex-ed programme):

1) He will not use a condom and he may get a disease or knock up a girl
2) He will not tell me that he is having sex and leave his DNA in some public location or worse, in my car
3) He will rape some girl and say she asked for it
4) He will procure the services available between Geylang Lorong 6 to 24

Of course, I would totally give Ju the guilt trip about screwing around (with girls or guys, I'm no bigot), which parent won't? But I don't delude myself into thinking that my 12 year old would regard Mummy's Word as God's Decree, over and above video games, television, the internet, his buddies and pornography. That's just stupid and the only thing Ju should remember is that Mummy is no fool. 

Why Julien Will Not Go To A Singapore School Part 2

My previous post was highly critical of the pressure-cooking competition in schools here, largely through exams and by this same method, the "streaming" of children into different class types and schools. I cited Kohn's work to show that there is plenty of scientific evidence that subjecting kids to competition defeats the purpose of learning because when kids focus on the end goal of getting a grade or getting to the school of their choice, they lose interest in actually retaining information and their brains pretty much become photo-copy machines and nothing more. The impact on kids' self-esteem is a corollary but no less significant, as fostering a winner-take-all and failure-is-not-an option ideology does not get you creative, broad-minded youth whose enthusiasm for learning suvives in spite of failing at certain things. The government should not waste a single cent more on teaching people to be creative while it is running the most cost-effective machinery to kill it.

I agree largely with readers who championed finding balance between a competitive system and nurturing a kid's healthy self-esteem (and not just shielding him from adversity). While I absolutely agree with those who have commented that parents are not powerless against the system, that the home environment and the attitude with which you take towards parenting can counterbalance the bulwark of the education machinery, I would argue with certainty that the 30 hours a week -- give or take 10, depending on how much "tuition" and "enrichment classes" your kid is enrolled in -- that working parents spend with their kids cannot and will not overcome the toxic effects of the Singapore school. Let me come to this with a little anecdote from my childhood.

Teachers Don't Teach (Much) Anymore

I started promising myself a long time ago, before thoughts of what I really wanted to do as a wage-earning adult came to mind, that I would never become a teacher like my mother had been. Even back in 1990, my mother would wear a perpetually constipated look on her face every afternoon when she returned from work. She would spend the next many years complaining to my father (every day) about how tired she was of the administrative work she had to do which took her away from the actual lesson preparation and grading which is really what was most crucial to teaching anyway. I didn't remember my mother ever smiling on week days. At some point, my father started to go to bed at 9pm when my mother began grading her students' work to avoid hearing the grouses. My mother would then bite at me sarcastically, "Girl, don't ever become a teacher!"

That was the late 1980s. Twenty years on, a lot has changed. But not in the way you think it should have. Ask any one of my friends and colleagues who have quit the teaching machinery (I wouldn't even go so far as to call it a profession because I'm not familiar with teacher training here that resembles international standards) and he or she will assure you that they have had no regrets leaving behind long hours, unrealistic demands from their superiors, unnecessarily copious amounts of non-teaching related work and not enough time to focus on what they felt was most important -- teaching. "Remedial" classes used to be reserved for kids who needed extra coaching because they had problems understanding or keeping up with the class. Now, anecdotal evidence points to remedial class as a permanent fixture in many schools because the teachers simply can't teach the lesson within the stipulated time allocated for class. In some instances, parents report that they have no choice but to resort to private tutors to do the core job of the teacher -- teaching the lesson itself. I hold no teacher to blame, instead, I would like someone to tell me why the students today as a whole require extra classes after school and during school holidays to learn a syllabus which took me and my peers the standard school term to complete in the 1980s.

It cannot be that IQ levels have fallen across the board along with our fertility rate. I was told by more than one person in their late 20s that they would likely fail a Primary Two mathematics test today. I suspect that those who set the agenda for each school may have the answer. For instance, I have many questions about the appointment of principals. I think everyone can remember quaking at the sight of their almost-always rather old and authoritative-looking principal. The fear of being sent to his or her office was enough to make us think twice about whatever misdemeanour we were about to commit. Now, why would I want to send Julien to a school where the principal would more likely resemble his teacher's daughter than her boss?

It seems to me that the other overarching trumpet theme of our national conscience, meritocracy, as become the pretext by which to defend an increasingly unequal playing field in our schools (if you don't know how to read and write at age 6, you go to the special needs class at Primary One), and an increasingly lop-sided leadership where the same kind of people from the same social backgrounds (elite schools, elite scholarships to elite American or British universities) are making policy and administrative decisions that affect our children. I would like to know what the standard indicators of merit are when one considers candidates for a position as significant as that of a school principal. Does years of ACTUAL teaching experience count more than the number of international ranking magazines that one's alma mata has been featured in?


Leaders can either be very obsessed with the goals they set for the people they lead and whether these goals are reached, no matter the reasons for setting and reaching them in the first place, or they set the direction and tone for the people they lead and trust those same people to take the ship there. I don't know about you, but I despise people who micro-manage, since it belies their distrust in the very people they should trust (after all, the majority of people can't all be morons). I also doubt leaders who lack any vision other than shoring up brownie points so they can get a pat on the head from their superiors. I blanch every time I hear the phrase "Key Performance Indicator" or its acronym KPI. A teacher's only KPI should be how many students she helps and not how many hours of extra classes he schedules. Every child needs help on different levels and in different ways, which is why it is so important to safeguard the autonomy of teachers and to give them the time they need to do their jobs.


The real leadership KPIs
Harvard's professor of psychology, Howard Gardner, 10 years ago in an interview, echoed Plato who had said that the purpose of education is to "make people want to do what they have to do".


Over the years, as I graduated from university and went on to graduate school and then to the several jobs I did, there were always one or two people at each place from whom I learnt greatly. There were professors, instructors and doctors, but there were also people like my colleagues and Singaporeans I had met through the course of my research and work. They each had a story to tell, and I'll tell you that the ones we can learn most from are the ones who have spent a long time doing what they do best, and being good at it after years of honing their craft. You don't become really good at anything because you're born with "talent" or some "gift", and trust me, nobody is born with the "talent" to be a great leader. When I listen to great musicians like Lang Lang and Valentina Lisitsa talk about their path to greatness, they talked a lot about working their butts off, even when they had been labelled "musical prodigies" as children. Being "gifted" wasn't any guarantee that they would have successful careers as concert pianists and thousands of hours of practising later, it still doesn't work out for many gifted pianists.

I don't think kids now appreciate how greatness takes time, effort and cultivation of oneself. How can they, when so many are told that at age 9, they're "gifted", as if being "gifted" is like being set for life, as long as you don't fall off the tightrope that's the education path which has been set out for you. I have no doubt that we have brilliant and go-getting individuals among the youth here who are handpicked as precocious children for super-loving-care by MOE. Not all of them are ingrates who take scholarships on tax-payers' money just for the spring board to the US and then turn their backs on the bond they owe to government service for the lure of Wall Street. I don't know enough about the wheels and cogs of the system enough to critique it, but as an outsider, I see that we are losing the very people that our schools need: the educators who want to make a positive difference in however small a way, and the leaders who want to change the system for the better, and not for the pure sake of looking proactive and justifying their accelerated career advancement.

I would like Julien to at least grow up with an understanding that what he has to do is essentially to earn his place on this earth. That he should aim for a lot more than sucking up oxygen and excreting crap on his way to his grave and no, earning bucketloads of money is not on Mummy's list of Making A Positive Difference to the World. I want him to respect every individual for what they have done with their lives and what they can teach him, regardless of their age and stature in the hierachy, and I want him to have the ability to think about things that his teacher didn't write down on the whiteboard. When I take him to the park, he should notice that there's always a hunched, white-haired old lady picking from the garbage cans and he should ask me why she's doing that when his and his friends' grandparents are doing other stuff with their time. When he's at the supermarket, he should ask me why we sometimes take our own grocery bags and sometimes we don't, and why some customers look like they're bagging food with enough plastic to take to the bottom of the ocean. Don't take my word for it when I tell parents not to lose the forest for the trees and over-focus on grades, qualifications and brand-name colleges. Listen to what this HR consultant has to say about Singaporeans and their attitude towards their CVs.

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One more story before I wrap this up.

Half a year ago, my husband was headhunted for a position in Stuttgart, Germany. The talks went on for almost 6 months and throughout the process, we discussed the reasons for staying and leaving, and the factors that were prerequisites for leaving Singapore (remuneration for example). You see, I know that there are many anti-Singapore system bashers out there who would readily tell anyone in our position to pack up and leave. I also know personally of many Singaporeans who have returned from many years abroad, and in the same vein, many more who are currently overseas and who wonder when to return. Our dilemma was a rather pure one because we had not sought out this opportunity, it had come to us. So we were really at a crossroad wondering whether to take the new path that's appeared.

Our decision-making process was a mixture of the rational and the emotional. Like any good forward-planning Singaporean, I thought about how this choice might impact our small family 5 years on, and of course, I couldn't do much more than a probability outcome based on limited information such as the global financial situation, the industry prospects and social support in both cities. The Germans are actually quite similar to us, and most of our friends and relatives in Germany remarked that it would be a difficult transition from a place with plenty of family and social support to a city that is 3 hours' drive from my husband's hometown. However, Stuttgart has a vibrant culture, is comparatively more cosmopolitan as a German city because of the many international companies based there and high quality and affordable childcare is abundant, unlike in Singapore where standards are dismal and at best, uneven. My husband would have more time with the family as he would work shorter hours so he would actually get to see his son during daylight hours on weekdays. His parents would finally see their grandson more than twice a year. The choice was clear, wasn't it?

It wasn't. The toughest decisions to make are the ones where there are no extenuating circumstances (at least one overriding factor, such as better monetary reward) pushing you in that direction. And people rarely find themselves in that situation when it comes to the big things in life, like which country to live in and which man to marry (I've been in that one and trust me, it's no walk in the park). And I am not an anti-Singapore basher with a chip on my shoulder. This is my home and I am very clear why it is so: my family is here, my friends and work are here, and the source of my support and identity is here. I consider myself adaptable and flexible, and people have told me the same, so in our discussions, I told my husband to take my ability to adapt to Stuttgart out of the equation. In the end, the pros-and-cons checklist was getting us nowhere so we asked ourselves what our gut was telling us. Both our gut feelings were to stay. We have a good life going even though it's not perfect and we hate a lot of things about here like the working hours and the bad traffic and transportation (this is big, studies have found that the commute to and from work is one of the biggest sources of stress). But for the sake of the boy, Singapore offered both of us better career prospects in the medium term. And for 30-somethings like us, career still matters a lot.

You see, the merits of a country does have a lot to do with the economic and financial.  People have to feel safe, secure and confident before they want to set down roots and raise their families. Singapore has done exceptionally well in providing this, and I can give the government due credit. But the next big bugbear, the next deal-breaker for families like us would be the education system.  For many in the lower income bracket, the system of rising education and economic inequality has become intolerable, and it is becoming exceedingly harder to bear for the middle class. Expats, as anyone is well aware, love Singapore, and schooling is no issue because they can afford international school.

We could live in any country with a comparable standard of living, but we both share the same values and convictions that underpin our decision not to raise Julien in the education system here. Opportunities have come, and more will come along, as I am sure is the case for many other families like ours. Last month's decision was a hard one to take, but in 5 years' time, when Julien is ready for school, the decision to leave would be much, much easier.