Heavy Price due to Aggressive MOE Streaming

The heavy price we are paying for due to agressive streaming,
ranking and branding in our schools are as follow.
After many years of exam-based rankings and streaming,
students lack the capability to understand other students
who are different from them. This has a permanent ill-effect on society.
Instead of having brighter students in the same class to help
the rest, the less brighter students lack the opportunity to learn
from among the best of their peers and often face discrimination.
Due to the ranking system, parents and education professionals
are so obsessed in getting good grades that moral values
declined in the priority order. News like this is becoming common:
"Elite ACS students behave like ruffians by creating din and spewing vulgarities on bus.”
The youths these days are aggressive ( I mentioned earlier on rugby match gang fight)
unmotivated, laid-back and self-centred. The street gangs attacks that caused one life at the Downtown
East Pasir Ris Resort recently.
Is this system undermining our push for a more gracious,
all-inclusive and caring society? Is every individual given
an equal playing field to excel? Give every student true equal
opportunities to achieve good results and an inclusive environment
to learn from and understand one another.
Compared with the youths in
Hong Kong and Taiwan , the typical Singaporean youth does not
have a sense of entrepreneurship, much less to ever aspire to
become an entrepreneur. Can this be attributed to the dominance
of civil service jobs and the presence of multi-national corporations?
The civil service takes in the most talented scholars who might not
have had the exposure to or have ventured into business.
Singapore is a country with good administrators but a society
badly in need of entrepreneurs.

Singapore is larger than the PAP

“So far, the People’s Action Party’s tactic is to put all the scholars into the civil service because it believes the way to retain political power forever is to have a monopoly on talent. But in my view, that’s a very short term view. It is the law of nature that all things must atrophy. Unless SM allows serious political challenges to emerge from the alternative elite out there, the incumbent elite will just coast along. At the first sign of a grassroots revolt, they will probably collapse just like the incumbent Progressive Party to the left-wing PAP onslaught in the late 1950s. I think our leaders have to accept that Singapore is larger than the PAP.”
Ngaim Tong Dow, Ex-Civil Service Chief, 2006, Straits Times

The cost of having a child

I am a customer service trainer who gave birth to a lovely Tiger boy in September. Having my first child has made me understand why the birth rate in Singapore hovers stubbornly at below the replacement level, despite the many incentives given by the Government.

Even while I was pregnant, I was considering having a second child, as I am already in my early 30s. However, the costs that added up from the time of our wedding through to post-natal and infant care have got me thinking again.

My project manager husband and I married in May last year, and got our Housing Board flat in December. Having worked for around 10 years each, we had accumulated a bit of savings to pay for our wedding and flat renovation.

Then I got pregnant.

The monthly checks at the gynaecologist came up easily to $1,500, of which only $450 was claimable through Medisave. When I gave birth, I stayed in a four-bedded ward in a private hospital and had to pay $4,000 in cash, after Medisave.

During my maternity leave, I had help from a confinement woman for the first month. I paid her $2,200. For the remaining three months of maternity leave, I took care of my child alone.

I sourced for help to take care of my child upon returning to work and eventually decided to place him in a nursery with infant-care facilities. This works out to $850 a month. Within a year, the baby bonuses and Children Development Account top-ups would have been fully utilised.

And I have not mentioned costs like maternity and baby clothes, diapers, vaccinations and all the other necessities that come with having a child.

As it is a personal decision to have a child, I am not lamenting these costs.

However, it would be good if we could move towards the 'French way' - one of the possibilities the editorial notes - with free nursery schools and generous tax allowances. This would definitely help ease the financial burden of families who wish to have more children.

Lee Meng Fern (Madam)