Scholarship, meritocracy and equality.

162 students received their scholarships yesterday, and some of them are those who have worked their way up from Normal stream to ITE and Poly. Their stories are inspiring. 

Steven, 19, comes from a family of 10 and his mother is the sole breadwinner. His father had to stop working due to health reasons. Steven was an active member of the student council at ITE Graduation 2021 ceremony yesterday. Steven received the Tay Eng Soon Scholarship.

Fiqri Nur Haziq Abu Bakar is another. He was a nurse during Covid-19 pandemic. The 21-year-old graduated from Ngee Ann Poly last year and “spent six months caring for migrant workers infected by Covid-19.” Fiqri was from the normal stream and he hopes this inspires other students from the normal stream too. 

Another ITE student, Koh Yan Xi, 19, also received a scholarship, the Ngee Ann Kongsi Gold Medal in recognition of her achievements. She had “to juggle a part-time job at McDonald’s with co-leading a class entrepreneurship project to sell vacuum-packed soup and using the proceeds to purchase food for school cleaners.” 

There are many more, and I guess that is the trampoline effect where, regardless of which station in life you are from, you stand an equal chance to bounce your way up just as long as you work towards it and don’t give up.

Let me share that I once had a conversation with a young adult and he told me that if one doesn’t work hard in Singapore, he will end up in ITE or Poly. I shook my head and told him that education ought to build character first and foremost before knowledge. For without character, your knowledge is all puffed up and it serves no purpose in society except to divide it further. 

We as a society suffer the consequences of our own pride, and a prideful mindset alienates humanity. It is not just self-serving, it is self-destroying. 

Ultimately, we can choose either to look at society from a one-track, chronologically challenged mindset, or look at it from a wide lens when the sun shines on everyone, regardless of schools, status or stream. 

But, what is chronologically challenged Mike? Well, it is a clock preset by the meritocratic discipline master with a deadline or quota to meet. Each child is thus put through the grind, that same and uniform grind, even when each child is gifted differently. One indiscriminate ruler is therefore used to measure all heights, even though each child grows at their own pace. 

And then that child is forced to compete with the others, while he carries loads of expectations on his back, all the time hoping to make his parents proud, and trying in vain to find acceptance and a sense of identity and belonging in a society that is wound up by a less than kinder development clock. 

This brings me to what Minister Chan said the day before. He invited all parents to take stock. He asked us to have “more frank conversations with our children and families on the definition of success.”

He took himself as an example. “As a parent myself, I have come to realise that success must be defined by helping my children realise their own potential, developing their own strengths and helping them to be confident in themselves.”

He said: “The greatest assurance parents can give their children is to provide them with confidence to find their own way.”

Those words are power words. They are a good reminder for parents with children, and a timely comfort for children yearning for understanding. 

Let me just say that I have always thought LKY was right to say that a rising economic tide raises all boats. He is still right about that now, for what good is democracy if you can’t even feed your family. 

But, like meritocracy, if it goes unchecked, or on autopilot, it risks crossing a threshold where the society is divided, between the haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor. It is just a matter of time. 

And the spillover effect of that is a progressive downward slide, which yields another risk, that is, a society in crisis. We are in fact leading the trend here as our inequality gap is one of the widest, compounded by a high cost of living. 

While Minister Chan made good sense when he said that “the greatest assurance parents can give their children is to provide them with confidence to find their own way,” yet if the landscape that the child is supposed to navigate has not changed, or has changed little, with a gaping income/social hole, then isn’t the child embarking on an impossible journey which may just bring him back to square one?

And that is why I highlighted the scholarships awarded to students of different backgrounds, and that is one of the crucial steps (amongst many) to taking a wide lens view of things where the sun truly shines on all, on each and every child, regardless. 

For the wide lens’ view sees the whole journey of a child’s potential, while the microscopic one sees only a particular point in time, and on that narrow/rigid basis, it judges a life that has yet to bloom for a lifetime.

 

Clean wage, Clean Government, missed opportunity?

We should just let it go, let it go. It has been frozen for years, and now the Auditor-General's Office (AGO) is thawing it.

Come August this year, charging teachers for parking fees will melt into reality and they can expect to pay either a monthly or annual sum for occupied spaces in schools.

However, letting it go or otherwise, MP Seah Kian Peng had recently raised the issue again in Parliament.

He said: "For too long, we have made decisions based more on an economic compass, as if the use of one dollar has the moral equivalence of the loss of another...It is time we recognise money is merely a proxy for value, and at times, a very bad one."

MP Ong Ye Kung's reply to MP Seah is simple. It is about equalizing the civil service. It is about fairness to all. It is about "cleanliness".

He first talked about teachers being flagged by the AGO "for going against the civil service's policy of paying clean wages," that is, wages with no hidden benefits. In other words, he is saying that the government shouldn't "subsidise" teachers with free parking.

And then, he put the matter to fiscal rest when he said: "This finding went against years of MOE practice. Yet, we have to respect our internal system of checks and balances. We cannot pick and choose which (AGO) finding to address or comply with - we take them all seriously. This is about upholding the value of self-discipline."

Now, to be fair to Ong, at one point of his speech, he did resonate with MP Seah's POV when he said that "governance and running a public service system is not always about taking a purist market approach."

Ong added: "Perhaps for the same reason, for a long time, we didn't charge parking for teachers in schools and servicemen in camps".

At this point, I wonder, what Ong meant by "perhaps for the same reason, for a long time, we didn't charge parking for teachers in schools and servicemen in camps"? And this is to be read with: "this finding (that is, AOG's unclean wage) went against years of MOE practice (that is, allowing for free parking)"?

It is tempting to ask: How did MOE (and our servicemen) get away with it for so long? More relevantly, why did they get away with it for that long? What then broke the camel's back of the AGO to finally put a stop to it and charge teachers for parking?

If "governance and running a public service system is not always about taking a purist market approach," a noble sentiment which MP Seah shares, why change now?

Are we then returning to a purist market approach by charging teachers after a long respite, because our government can't stand the cognitive dissonance on the economic front and therefore has come to their dollar and senses?

I ask this because, admittedly, if it has been going on for years, if not decades, for our teachers and servicemen, then it is invariably entrenched, even silently accepted by the majority at large.

So, considering human nature, uprooting it now would surely disrupt expectations, to put it mildly. And it has indeed ruffled many feathers according to the last survey on the social media landscape.

Many are not happy about it, and MP Seah must have felt the anguish on the ground to deem it fit to have the issue canvassed in Parliament.

Yet, Ong came forward to justify the charges as about "upholding the value of self-discipline".

Are they then going to instill further self-discipline by charging servicemen (which they are doing for some camps now), parliamentarians, ministers and volunteers during meet-the-people sessions?

In the end, this is Singapore. This is how the government rolls. This is what Ong calls a clean government.

And in his own words in "defending the clean wage policy as a moral idea," Ong said that "all public servants subscribe to it", adding: "This is one of our core practices to ensure a clean government.

Well, just for corniness sake, it is also a fine city.

But levity aside, I always thought that when a politician answers another in parliament, and if it is a good and sensible answer, it leaves one with less questions than before. It also leaves one thinking about why he had asked the question in the first place.

However, when Ong defended the clean wage policy as a moral idea in Parliament, somehow, it left more questions for me than before. It also made me want to repeat my question I'd asked in the first place (because I don't think he got the point).

I mean, how is returning to a presumably purist economic approach as manifested in the carpark charges for teachers this August considered "a moral idea"?

At best, it is amoral, or a neutral point. As Professor Sandel puts it: "Explaining how markets work is central subject of economics. So why has economics failed to provide a convincing basis for deciding what should, and what should not, be up for sale (or whether teachers or servicemen should or should not be charged for parking)?"

To that, he said: "The reason lies in the conception of economics as a value-neutral science of human behaviour and social choice."

That's the essence of MP Seah's point, which Ong had curiously overlooked.

And if the moral element here is about fairness to all, that is, across-the-board treatment, then it is a slippery slope because the benefits, monetary and/or otherwise, that ministers get - starting with their astronomical paycheck and the other perks enjoyed by them - far outweigh the take home pay of the majority by a considerably unbridgeable margin.

Fairness to all is a parliamentary ideal that once the well-endowed parliamentarians step out of parliament becomes a reality gap that our highly unequal society is hard pressed to bridge.

In other words, one man's clean wages is another man's perception of dirty wages.

Having said that, personally, I don't think Ong even answered (or addressed) MP Seah's concerns directly, or specifically.

You see, it seems to me to be quite obvious that AGO is doing its job to use a fine-toothed comb to scour the nooks and crannies of society to see whether they have left anything out for fair and expedient extraction of revenues. That is their technocratic job to be carried out with exactitude, I fully understand it.

Just as no one is left behind, so no one is left unaccounted for (for economic rent-extracting purposes of course).

But MP Seah's point goes further and deeper than that. In Parliament, he called for a rethink on the role of “economic reasoning” in policymaking here.

To flesh it out fully here, his point is about the larger picture, and not just about some issue of self-discipline (or for that matter, about free parking specifically).

In other words, "in the broader front," as reported, "Mr Seah urged the Ministry of Finance to lead a “reform”, and bring about “an explicit recognition (in the Government) of the limits of price, cost and expenditure as a proxy for value, and to allow for greater use of discretion by public officers in recognising moral reasoning as a legitimate form of argumentation”".

It bears repeating that MP Seah "stressed that his call was “not an appeal to populism”. Rather, it is an appeal to the ideas of justice and community that have informed Singapore policy making at the start of our journey 53 years ago.""

And "instead of taking the “cheap, efficient and quick” approach," he added. "Singapore has to look at what is “fair, just and right” in order to truly tackle inequality and other national issues.""

“We must… make (the) language of morality our vernacular in policy matters. It is time we recognise that money is merely a proxy for value, and at times, a very bad one," so rallied MP Seah.

I believe all that had unfortunately flew pass Ong when he replied in what I felt was a non-sequitur manner about AGO's enforcing internal checks and balances and emphasising that the issue is about self-discipline.

Alas, maybe the real issue is more about more self-reflection?

It is said that the eagle who flies high in the sky does not worry about crossing the river below.

Applying this metaphor here, I think MP Seah was taking the bird's eye view of things in the long run of how our government ought to build trust and confidence and close the income and social divide more effectively.

But Ong seems to me to have let a good point slipped by in Parliament by contending with the technocratic struggle to cross the "checks and balances" river on a purely economic approach by not directly addressing the issue at large.

Personally, and this has to be said, the issue is not just about charging teachers or servicemen for parking.

It really goes beyond that to what growth is our government going for or pursuing, that is, is it about putting a price on every nook and cranny spaces in Singapore so as to extract a pound of economic value in order to put more into the nation's already overflowing reserves, or is it about taking the high road to a more compassionate, humane, sustainable and trust-engendering society along the line of what MP Seah has said, that is, "to rethink the role of the market and of economic reasoning."

For there is a saying that we ought to treat everyone the same by treating everyone differently (because of the different stations, growth and fortune in life).

Alas, in Singapore, it seems like we treat some people differently by paying lip service to treating everyone the same. And this is sadly the result of the ever widening income and social divide between the elitist section of society and the rest of the population. Cheerz.

The Curse of the Politician.

A politician has to be religious. He must serve with zealous faith and have a heart of worship. His political shrine consists of three deities. His triune gods are equality, democracy and meritocracy. They are the gods he pays tribute to in the hope that they will bless him with a successful term or two. He must serve them faithfully. He is their bond servant. He was bought with a price. And once lost (in anonymity), he's now found.

The bad news is that his gods are typically capricious with wild mood swings. And they can't get along with each other either. They generally don't operate on the same rules. Equality and meritocracy hate each other's guts. They can't last a minute sharing the same space together without breaking out into an infernal tempest.

You see, meritocracy is about, well, merits. And equality is about, well, equals. So, in a world of diverse skills, talents, and genes, even looks, nothing based on merits is ever equal. For every leader, there are hundreds of followers. For every corporate innovator, there are thousands of employees. And for every government, there are millions to govern.  Show me a world that is equal in every way and I will show you a world that is monoculturally bland, lame even.

In other words, in the university of diversity, the bell curve distribution is, well, curved. It is not flat or undifferentiated. It is not uniformed. It's diverse for god's sake.

So the deities just don't play well together. Whether equality likes it or not, meritocracy will always be the pain in its derrière. In the end, whatever good intentions, meritocracy's Calvary road is not only tough but limited with this Calvinist tag: Many are called but few are chosen or elected. Quite unavoidably, the majority - for whatever genetic, socioeconomic or personal reasons - will be left behind while the gifted/privileged few will race forward.

And as the gap widens, equality will be eating the dust left behind by meritocracy. Yet, which deity has the last laugh is anyone's guess because what equality lacks in merit, he makes up for it in numbers. In any society, those left behind are always simmering in the majority. Equality therefore has its divine numerical strength. It is the other 99%.

Not to be outshined, meritocracy is not without its divine assistances like the high walls of elitism and the delusion of promised hope. Alas, the petty squabbles between the deities are simply endless. As such, the devout politician walks a tightrope overlooking a precarious chasm of insatiable demands and wants. The poor man is torn between worshipping equality to the ire of meritocracy and kowtowing to meritocracy to the wrath of equality. The politician is therefore seldom at peace with himself even though instilling peace would normally be the job of the triune gods in return for his regular worship.


But then, I have deliberately left out the other God in the triune complex. He is democracy. Regardless, the hapless politician would be a fool to count on him to settle the eternal disputes between equality and meritocracy. Among the three gods, democracy is the weakest of them all. He is a crowd-pleaser and he blows hot and cold. His divine repertoire is limited and his reach is short.

The earnest politician who prays to him can only keep the rage of the other two deities at bay. It is just a matter of time before the levee breaks and the floodgates open to create havoc in the politician's world. You see, democracy acts as an umpire of the other two deities but he is easily swayed by them. His divine power is supposedly fairness at the ballot box but what is fair is mostly about who has the deepest pockets. And when it comes to having the deepest pockets, meritocracy has deity friends rallying in support.

His buddy is none other than capitalism. This is one deity-friend who is debonair and flashy. He hires democracy to do his bidding. He tempts him with heavenly currencies. Democracy is often a sucker for anything that glitters. His knees buckle at the sight of material fortune.

But equality is not without deity friends of his own. He is not without the pull of charisma like meritocracy. Equality used to ride high on the back of communism and socialism to sway votes. But now, after the end of history, they are too tainted and loaded to be of any assistance. So, to force the hand of democracy, equality appeals to his heart - a heart that is laden by idealism. And at the heart of this idealism is egalitarianism, liberalism and human decency.

In terms of touted rightness, however pretentious that may be, equality always charms his way with democracy. It is like a child tugging at the heartstring of his mother with a helpless pout. Meritocracy just doesn't have that charm; that warm human touch. He may shower pecuniary gifts but only equality moves heart.

Yet, notwithstanding of the divine arsenals at the disposal of equality and meritocracy, the winner of the two is never clear-cut or permanent. Their clashes are rather indissoluble and endless.

As such, the religious politician is at the mercy of the triune gods, in particular, equality and meritocracy. He is always being played out by either one or the other. And his invocation for democracy's intervention is as effective as trying to drown a fish in water. It is for this reason that the devout politician is both disillusioned and jaded with all three of his divine idols.

Meritocracy sabotages him with social isolation by kicking the ladder off once it reaches the top. Equality screws him up by expecting so much more than he can offer. And the soul of democracy invariably goes to the highest bidder. This is the curse of the politician and it is a curse that often drives him to be a closet political atheist.

Ironically, he will soon find out that paying lip-service to the triune gods and playing religion between them, while secretly serving his own interests by doing what it takes for self preservation, is the best Pascal's bet he has to secure a place in that promised land of eternal bliss. Cheerz.