A class apart? Meritocracy, social mixing and effects on national unity

By Grace Ho, Senior Political Correspondent, The Straits Times, 21 Feb 2021

A friend told me that having lived in a condominium all her life, she grew up thinking she was poor.

"You see, all my classmates lived in landed houses," she said.

Like her, going to a top school was, for me, an eye-opener. Some of my peers seemed to inhabit a different world - one where it was possible to have never set foot in a hawker centre, or visited a classmate in his HDB flat.

Do Singaporeans of different socio-economic backgrounds now mingle more readily? Or do they live in distinct bubbles that have drifted further apart?

What can be done to encourage diverse social networks, and how do they affect national identity?

These are questions that a new book by National University of Singapore associate professors Vincent Chua and Tan Ern Ser, Institute of Policy Studies deputy director Gillian Koh and urban planner Drew Shih seeks to answer.

Paradox of meritocracy

Titled Social Capital In Singapore: The Power Of Network Diversity, it draws insights from fieldwork involving some 3,000 Singaporeans.

It begins with the observation that for a country with no natural resources, meritocracy has been the best way to grow Singapore's human capital. As founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew said: "We treat everybody equally. We judge you on your merits... If you can perform, you get the job."

The alternative is a system based on social connections.

Minister in the Prime Minister's Office Indranee Rajah said at a conference in 2019 that meritocracy was adopted as an antidote to corruption and nepotism. "Doing away with meritocracy would be an invitation for those ills to resurface and weaken our system."

But the paradox of meritocracy is that its winners and losers increasingly enter their own social orbits, with little mixing between them.

Early on, meritocracy brought people of different socio-economic backgrounds together in common settings such as elite schools. As this meritocracy matured, and the positions of earlier winners and their descendants became more entrenched, it has become more class-segregated.

Former Raffles Institution (RI) principal Chan Poh Meng put this across starkly at the school's Founder's Day six years ago, saying that the school "can no longer afford the comfortable illusion that RI is truly representative of Singapore".

He said its students must lend a hand to those who need help, such as foreign workers, the elderly and the poor. "I put it to you that this is our wider duty... to serve as a social glue between parts of the community that have little or no contact with each other."

Eddie Teo: What 18-year-olds tell us about Singapore's future

As chairman of the Public Service Commission (PSC), Mr Eddie Teo interviews 350 young people vying for scholarships each year. In this excerpt of a speech at an Overseas Singaporean Unit event in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept 24, he outlines the strengths and weaknesses of these teenagers, as gleaned from their essays and interviews.
By Eddie Teo, Published The Straits Times, 10 Oct 2015

Every year, my colleagues and I interview some 350 of the top students from our junior colleges and polytechnics in order to offer them scholarships to study in university, both locally and overseas. (The 350 have been shortlisted from some 2,500 applicants for the PSC scholarship. Although there is no quota or cap, we award some 70 scholarships a year on average.) Those who accept will serve in the public service, initially under a bond of between four and six years.

During the half-hour interview, PSC has the opportunity to ask candidates questions not only to determine how suitable they are for the public service but also to get a sense of how young Singaporeans feel about our country and its future. One of the topics they have to write an essay on is indeed what kind of Singapore they would like to see in 15 years' time.

POST-LEE KUAN YEW GENERATION

What can we say about the present generation of 18-year-olds, judging by the essays they write, their school records, their psychological profiles and their responses at PSC interviews?

Our young people are not unaware of the values espoused by our founding fathers, particularly Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

They may not be fully conscious of them, and they may quietly rebel against National Education taught in schools, but because they live in Singapore, go to Singapore schools, and have grown up with family and friends, they are still cast in the same mould as previous generations of young Singaporeans. Many of them have heard the Singapore national narrative. This narrative was emphasised a hundred times over during Mr Lee's funeral and the recent SG50 celebrations: how Singapore was cast adrift post-Separation and survived against all odds, how vulnerable we are as a nation given our size and the neighbourhood we are in, and how we must remain exceptional to continue to prosper. How our people must work hard and stay disciplined because no one owes us a living. How social benefits must not be allowed to erode our work ethic.

The ideal citizen envisaged by Mr Lee is someone pragmatic, responsible, disciplined, frugal, hard-working, well-behaved, family-focused and puts society before self.

Mr Lee also expected public servants to have all these values as well as stay incorruptible.

Singaporeans often take our zero-tolerance policy for corruption for granted, but many foreigners regard it as exceptional and want to learn how we do it.

But the young, while cast in the same mould, are not exact copies of the old. Older Singaporeans should not be surprised that the younger generation has different views and different aspirations - even different values. All they have to do is speak to their own children or grandchildren.

Their values have changed, leaving the old somewhat bewildered. When Mr Lee visited Australia during my term as High Commissioner, he asked me to organise tea with ex-Singaporean migrants in Perth. He wanted to hear from them why they chose Australia over Singapore.

When one of them told him that he gave up a well-paid job in Singapore to migrate there so that he could work half-day and go fishing in the afternoon, Mr Lee nearly fell off his chair. He just could not understand why anybody would make such a lifestyle choice. To Mr Lee, it was irrational. You see, Mr Lee came from the era when the term "work-life balance" had not been invented. To him, life was work and work was life - it was the same thing, no need to balance the two.

Besides, we should be worried if the young are not different from us. If they imbibe everything they are taught uncritically, it means they are not thinking for themselves and have closed minds.

To what end, all the President's Scholars?

By Lee Wei Ling, Published The Sunday Times, 30 Aug 2015

When the A-level results of my cohort were announced in 1973, I was named the top science student. I did not expect it and was pleased and surprised. I remembered feeling that I had performed extremely inadequately after completing every paper.

My results also earned me a President's Scholarship. I don't know where the scroll is now, nor does it matter. I wonder as well now whether the scholarship had a positive effect on my life's journey subsequently. That may astonish some, given the acute prestige associated with being a President's Scholar. Yet, the same prestige exerts extra pressure on the recipient to perform. Winning the scholarship attracts jealousy as well, and I have experienced both.

I was among 11 students in the class of 1972 who received the scholarship. Since then, I am aware of the progress of six. Three - Teo Chee Hean, George Yeo and Lim Hng Kiang - were also Singapore Armed Forces scholars. As many Singaporeans know, the trio became household names after they entered politics and rose to become senior Cabinet ministers. A fourth boy, Chan Seng Onn, is currently a Supreme Court justice.

As for the female recipients I know, Lee Bee Wah and Yap Hui Kim, like me, joined the medical faculty of the University of Singapore (now the National University of Singapore). After obtaining our basic degree, all three of us specialised in paediatrics. 

Bee Wah and Hui Kim were inseparable best friends who had studied in Methodist Girls' School and National Junior College. By contrast, I was dubbed a "Martian" - a term medical students in the 1970s coined to describe students who went it alone. While I knew my classmates, I did not forge deep friendships until after medical school.

I don't know how others felt about me when I graduated top of my class with MBBS Honours. But I certainly knew that news of the only examination I have ever failed, a requisite part of the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) which led to a post-graduate diploma, spread swiftly here as soon as the results were announced in Edinburgh where I had sat the test. People were glad that I failed and subsequently decided I was likeable after all.

In my contacts with other President's Scholars over the years, I discovered that some did as well as they expected while others did not. One observation that dawned on me was that several of these scholars as well as their circle of family, friends and community expected comparable achievements to continue by default. If a scholar did not do well, or as well as perceived, a sense of betrayal over what was deemed an entitlement to success crept in.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Public Service: How has it changed and how will it continue to change in future?

Values that stand the test of time in public service
Three abiding values in Singapore's system of governance - the pillars of incorruptibility, meritocracy and impartiality - need to remain in the future, although the definition of meritocracy and the recruitment process need updating.
By Eddie Teo, Published The Straits Times, 28 Apr 2015

WHEN I joined the public service in 1970, Mr Lee Kuan Yew already had 11 years to work on transforming the public service which he inherited from the British to one which better suited an independent Singapore.

There was already a strong ethos of incorruptibility.

I recently met Mr David Rivkin, the president of the International Bar Association, who asked how our ethos of zero-tolerance for corruption was imparted to, and sustained in, the public service. I told him there had been no training classes or brainwashing sessions.

But public servants watched and followed the example shown by our political masters. We were incorruptible because they were incorruptible. We saw that they lived simple, frugal and unostentatious lives and dedicated themselves totally to nation-building and improving the lives of Singaporeans. All the older public servants who worked closely with our pioneer generation political leaders will have stories to tell about their frugal habits. To people like Mr Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Goh Keng Swee, there was no such thing as work-life balance. Work was life, and life was work.

For public servants, the national narrative of ensuring Singapore's survival was also very powerful and very inspiring to anyone who looked for meaning and purpose in his career. We also saw how the law against corruption was applied to all, regardless of position, by the CPIB (Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau). So we were motivated by the exemplary conduct set by our bosses and the inspiring goals they set out, and, at the back of our minds, we were restrained by fear. Money as a form of incentive played no role then.

Meritocracy

MR LEE also inherited the Public Service Commission (PSC), but he made one important change to the British way of governance. He replaced promotion on seniority with promotion on merit. Hence, for the first time, we saw young able officers overtaking their older colleagues in the public service. This clearly upset many older public servants, but Mr Lee and his colleagues paid scant attention to that. To them, meritocracy meant not only promoting people on the basis of merit and not connections, but also doing it on an age-blind basis. The best, not the most senior, got promoted.

I recall that in the early days, some public officers made it to permanent secretary in their early 30s - something unheard of today. I was appointed director (of) SID (Security and Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Defence) when I was 31. I recall one grey-haired Japanese intelligence chief trying to unsettle me at our first meeting by saying I was the same age as his grandson.

There is a common misconception among members of the public who still think that public servants are selected and promoted on the basis of their academic credentials. It is true that Mr Lee sometimes gave the impression that to him, academic brilliance was of prime importance. But even he knew that character was more important than intelligence, and I recall him saying that having a smart crook in our system was worse than a simple crook.

As early as in 1976, Mr Lee had said in Parliament, when defending the public service against criticisms by a PAP MP: "Can he get a job done? Can he get a team to work for him? Is he a talker or a thinker, or a talker and a doer? The best, of course is the man who thinks before he expounds and, having expounded, he then acts. It has nothing to do with whether he has got a PhD or a school certificate or even a Standard VI qualification."

Ho Kwon Ping: Singapore Society and Identity

Singapore must 'embrace diversity as its strength'
Ho Kwon Ping sees nation becoming increasingly diverse in next 50 years
By Charissa Yong and Nur Asyiqin Mohamad Salleh, The Straits Times, 10 Apr 2015

SINGAPORE'S sense of nationhood and unity has never been stronger than in the past weeks when hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans came together to mourn the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew, said businessman Ho Kwon Ping yesterday.

But in the next 50 years, post-LKY, the country will be increasingly diverse in ways that run up against rigid expectations of racial and social attitudes.

Singapore's challenge is to embrace this diversity as its strength and as an integral part of itself, said Mr Ho in his fifth and final lecture as the Institute of Policy Studies' (IPS) S R Nathan Fellow.

In his 50-minute address, he examined how this openness and acceptance of Singaporeans who may be different from the mainstream can be a defining characteristic of Singapore's identity.

He said Singapore is ethno-culturally more similar to New York City - where culturally distinct neighbourhoods coexist cheek by jowl - than to the homogeneous cities of Tokyo or Shanghai. "New Yorkers, for all their amazing diversity, all love their city. Like New Yorkers, Singaporeans must also embrace each other as individuals and not as categories."

For one thing, the traditional racial categories of "Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other" oversimplify Singapore's diversity, he said.

Immigrants or foreign workers from China and India, for example, fall into the Chinese and Indian categories respectively, but hardly identify or interact with Chinese and Indian Singaporeans.

Traditional norms of heterosexuality also do not adequately describe "people of different LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) affiliations, or alternative family norms such as single or unmarried parents, or same-sex couples", he said.

Mr Ho suggested abandoning these stereotypes and viewing people as individuals. "Everyone is unique, everyone is quirky, everyone is rude and kind at different times, and everyone has to simply respect and even appreciate the other's difference."

In an ensuing hour-long question and answer session, Mr Ho was asked how a diverse society should be organised. He said: "You cannot change human nature. People find affinity among their own kind... But we should try more consciously to break down barriers to allow people to have more cross-cultural interaction."

His lecture, attended by about 560 people including civil servants and students, followed four others on Singapore's politics and governance, economy and business, security and sustainability, and demography and family.

Mr Ho also addressed two other social challenges: mitigating divides between different classes of Singaporeans, and having a more collaborative style of governance.

Education reform can help level the playing field and prevent Singapore from ossifying into a static meritocracy with only children from rich families making it to the top. He suggested re-looking the system of priority Primary 1 admissions based on distance from homes, as many elite schools are in wealthy neighbourhoods.

As for having a less paternalistic, more participatory democracy, the Government can involve more civil society activists and citizens in decision-making, and give them information to debate issues.

Closing the event, IPS director Janadas Devan said the next S R Nathan Fellow is Mr Bilahari Kausikan. The Ambassador-at- large will research public policy and governance issues.

From humble beginnings to President's Scholar

19-year-old grew up with little, but now hopes to help people as a doctor
By Danson Cheong, The Straits Times, 14 Aug 2014

WHEN he was in school three years ago, Mr Arturo Neo was called into his teacher's office. But he was not scolded for doing something wrong - instead, he was offered cash and kind words.

His Hwa Chong Institution teacher, Mr Joseph Sim, knew that the teen - the youngest of three children in a single-parent family - was struggling financially, and wanted to help with the expenses of an upcoming overseas school trip with his own money.

Mr Neo refused the gift of about US$300 (S$375) at first, but Mr Sim told him: "I'm helping you now, so you can come back and help us next time."

The incident touched Mr Neo, who was also an Education Ministry bursary recipient. It was just one of the many times he had been offered a helping hand, he said.

Now Mr Neo will finally get the chance to pay the debt forward.

The 19-year-old was one of five young Singaporeans who were awarded the prestigious President's Scholarships this year at a ceremony at the Istana yesterday.

The scholarship recipients were picked by the Public Service Commission for their outstanding academic and co-curricular achievements, character and leadership potential. They are the latest in a long line of President's Scholars, going back to 1966.

More to varsity than getting a degree: Indranee

Ultimate purpose is betterment of person, society, mankind, she says

By David Ee, The Straits Times, 10 Apr 2014

GOING to university is about more than just getting qualifications; it should also be about preparing oneself for life and bettering society, said Senior Minister of State for Law and Education Indranee Rajah yesterday.

She was speaking at the biennial Union Forum organised by the National University of Singapore Students' Union, on "the idea of the university".

Students should enrol in university to gain broader knowledge than just the degrees they earn, and "emerge with an enlarged worldview" having learnt ideas with power to have impact on lives, she said.

"The attainment of the degree is not an end in itself. The degree doesn't make you a better person... a good person," she added.

"The ultimate purpose of the university is really for the betterment of the person, society and mankind."

Later, in a panel discussion with NUS provost Tan Eng Chye and Straits Times Editor at Large Han Fook Kwang, Ms Indranee said she hoped Singapore universities would one day become "powerhouses" in generating ideas.

Singapore, she said, tends to "look to other countries for ideas", rather than creating its own. "What I would like is for people to look at a Singapore university and say: 'Hey! That idea came from a (local) university," she said.

PSC seeks more diversity in scholarships

To guard against elitism, it reaches out to students from more schools

By Robin Chan Political Correspondent And Janice Heng, The Straits Times, 18 Sep 2013

THE public service is casting its net wider to schools that do not traditionally produce government scholarship winners, in a bid to increase the diversity in its ranks and guard against elitism.

In an open letter on the Public Service Commission (PSC) website yesterday, its chairman Eddie Teo underscored the value of having diversity in the public service as governance and policymaking become more complex, and demographics and the education system undergo changes.

"We need a diverse public service to avoid 'groupthink' and to appreciate the needs of a diverse Singapore population," he said in a letter penned to mark the start of his second term as chairman of the agency overseeing civil service recruitment.

PSC scholarships are seen as a pipeline for future top senior civil servants. But the perception that they are given mainly to students from top junior colleges is a perennial problem.

Lately, the need to address it has become more urgent amid growing concerns over social mobility and elitism.

In his letter, Mr Teo sought to reassure people that this was not the case.

The PSC, he said, will guard against elitism by taking in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and sending them to a wider range of universities and courses. The proportion of scholarship holders from traditional sources has shrunk, he added, using their schools as a proxy for socio-economic class.

In the last two years, 60 per cent of them were from Raffles Institution and Hwa Chong, a drop from a peak of 82 per cent in 2007. In the last 10 years, these two schools produced 68 per cent of scholarship holders on average.

Joining their ranks in recent years are students from such junior colleges as Pioneer, St Andrew's and Nanyang.

Hoping their presence will dispel the popular perception, Mr Teo said: "A public service comprising only the privileged and upper classes will add to the impression that meritocracy leads to a lack of social mobility in Singapore."

Five awarded 2012 President's Scholarship

Malay student is one of five winners

By Stacey Chia and Matthias Chew, The Straits Times, 16 Aug 2012

SEVEN years ago, he was recognised as the country's smartest 12-year-old, having come out tops in the Primary School Leaving Examinations in 2005.

Yesterday, Mr Adil Hakeem Mohamad Rafee claimed another title - the first Malay student in 44 years to be awarded the President's Scholarship, the Republic's most prestigious undergraduate award.



With less than a week to go before Hari Raya, the news was celebrated by leaders in the Muslim community.

The Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, said: "It shows that it is possible within the Malay-Muslim community for us to produce talented individuals.

"I hope this will motivate many more Malay-Muslim students to try and excel as much as possible."

Although there have been two other Muslim recipients, Mr Adil Hakeem, a 19-year-old Raffles Institution student, is the second Malay ever to win the scholarship.

The first was Mr Mohamed Ismail Ibrahim who won in 1968.

This year, including Mr Adil Hakeem, five students received the award, which was given out yesterday by President Tony Tan Keng Yam at the Istana.

They are: Mr Moses Soh (Raffles Institution); Miss Alicia Tee (Hwa Chong Institution); Mr Jarret Huang (Raffles Institution); and Mr Shaun Lim (Anglo-Chinese School Independent).

Shorter Bonds for Government Scholars

Four years for those who study here, then overseas

By Jermyn Chow, The Straits Times, 7 Aug 2012

THOSE who enter local universities on government scholarships from next year and go on to pursue master's degrees abroad will serve shorter bonds.

These will last four years.

The bond is currently six years for those who earn their first degree here and go for higher studies at American or British universities.

Those who go for further studies at universities elsewhere serve five-year bonds.

There is no change to the four-year bond for those who stay here for their studies; those who choose overseas universities for their first degree will continue to serve six-year bonds.

The secretariat of the Public Service Commission (PSC), the government agency which oversees civil service recruitment and awards government scholarships, told The Straits Times that the change is aimed at encouraging the country's brightest to study at universities here, and then to "diversify their experiences" with master's degrees from overseas.

The change comes amid the annual race among the public and private sectors to snag the top brains; it is also being made to counter the growing popularity of bond-free scholarships offered by universities here.