You are considering your options for tertiary education. Education. What do you care more about? Whether a university can provide you with a good education, or whether it is perceived to be ‘good’ (in any number of probably extremely vague respects)?

It seems obvious that reputation and quality of education provided aren’t perfectly correlated. However, a rather annoying fact I’ve noticed in Singapore is that the distinction between the two is almost entirely eroded, to the point that there is hardly an independent notion of quality of education. Part of this may be because Singaporeans have no idea what a good education is in the first place. But the larger part of it (and this may be related to not knowing what a good education is) is that education isn’t seen as an end in itself, hence the weighing of how ‘good’ a university is does not include the quality of education provided. Instead, it primarily includes the consequences of education typically valued in this society, namely monetary reward and reputation. There is practically no independent* notion of what or how one should learn; instead, the preeminent normative consideration is how I should be equipped to earn lots of money.

I was forced to this depressing conclusion after many, too many, conversations with people on this where I found out they actually have fundamental misuses of vocabulary concerning ‘good’ versus ‘perceived as good’. It took some hammering to help them chisel out the difference between the two. And I think a reasonable hypothesis for why their vocabulary could get so mangled is that there wasn’t a difference in the first place, in their minds.

And that is why I think, even if Singapore were to set up a liberal arts-style program, it would quickly be misused by the materially and socially ambitious. Because almost no students will enter with the objective of actually wanting to educate themselves. They’d enter for the purpose of having a good headstart in their career, to look good in front of their family and peers, and so on. They’d be the kind of students who participate in discussions only because it’s included in their final grades. It would be a huge waste of tax revenue to subsidize small intensive classes for such people. (And if it isn’t subsidized, then whoever takes part could have afforded to enroll in an overseas liberal arts college anyway.)

*To see more clearly what could be an independent notion of what one should learn, consider this. Someone with such a notion would think that even if the person getting the education were to die immediately after finishing the particular course concerned, it was still a good thing that he was educated. Whereas someone who ties the value of education completely to its consequences would consider it a waste of effort on the part of those who contributed to his education.

Take a gander at this heartening headline: Public will be given full account: Wong

Actually read the article, though, and you’ll find out that “details involving the Whitley Road Detention Centre” will not be made public, for security purposes. That pretty much seems to rule out any explanation of how Mas Selamat escaped (since that would involve explaining the security lapses at the detention centre, which presumably falls under “details involving” it).

Your typical lazy reader who just skims the headlines, though, isn’t going to know that.

I am watching CNN now and the sensationalistic, information-poor coverage has disgusted me enough to make a brief remark about American politics and the media, namely: Do your math.

Two anti-Obama shots in the ST’s Insight Section today: the first a syndicated opinion piece from Kathleen Parker deriding the support for Obama as a religious craze:

So what is the source of this infatuation with Mr Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

[…]

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society…

[…]

Here’s how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: “When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa … ”

This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It’s all religion by any other name.

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

The second anti-Obama shot is on the next page, nestled in John McBeth’s column deriding the US, headlined the “Land of hype and corny?”. I have no idea why they picked that headline since “Land of Hope and Glory” is a decidedly British song, and the puns they used weren’t so brilliant as to merit using the title of a song so wholly unconnected with America. But to get back on topic, here’s the anti-Obama shot:

We have all been watching the presidential campaign with a certain horrid fascination. While they may be a necessary part of the political theatre, those rallies where the candidate is “just so happy to be back in south Texas” just seem so contrived.

Does anyone actually believe rhetoric so lacking in substance? It is only now that commentators are waking up to the fact that as charismatic as he is, Democrat Barack Obama does little more than mouth generalities and platitudes.

A young voter told CNN recently that Mr Obama “will make us look good in the eyes of the world”. I’m not so sure about that. Isn’t he the same man who said that if the circumstances warranted it, he would order the US military into Pakistan — with or without Islamabad’s permission?

I am not bothering to link to the McBeth piece because I am sick of having to clear all my SPH-related cookies in order to log in to the Straits Times’ website. Awful, awful website.

But back to the anti-Obama sentiments. I say sentiments, because they don’t deserve to be called arguments. Parker assumes, on anecdotal evidence, that Obama is popular solely on the basis of having the ability to incite religious allegiance to him in people. The whole article revolves around baseless accusations that his platform is based on nothing but religious or quasi-religious rhetoric, when anyone who has actually bothered to read more about his proposed policies would easily see that there is a lot more than “nothing” there. Perhaps it is true that the majority of Obama supporters were drawn in by his charisma. But it is certainly not true that he is running on “a platform of mere hope”. Neither is it true that he “does little more than mouth generalities and platitudes”.

McBeth’s second criticism of Obama’s statement that he would order US troops into Pakistan without Islamabad’s permission if the circumstances warranted it is even more ludicrous considering that Obama is the only serious presidential candidate left who consistently opposed the US sending troops into Iraq without Iraqi permission. Both Clinton and McCain have already voted for the Iraq invasion. Obama has not voted for any such stupid war, and he has consistently said that he does not oppose all wars. Only extreme pacifists would say that they would not invade Pakistan under any circumstances — to say that Pakistan should be invaded if the circumstances warranted it is hardly extreme. It is not difficult to think of circumstances (say, severe prior aggression on Pakistan’s part) in which a reasonably strong argument might be made for invasion.

Now that my alleged biases are clear, I will air my suspicion about the occurrence of two anti-Obama shots, on consecutive pages, neither of which constitute substantive criticisms. I have not seen any of the other presidential candidates subject to such prominent, concentrated criticism in the ST. Given what we all know about how the press in Singapore operates, I think it is not unreasonable to suspect that someone Up There does not like Obama.

P. S. This is priceless.

Update:
Just went to read the weekend’s Today, and guess what, another anti-Obama article, in prime location (full 3rd page). This one puts forward radical views, to say the least — claiming that Martin Luther King Jr ‘built nothing and taught us only how to take a beating’, and that the rise of blacks’ median income from 50% of whites’ to 62% of whites’ is an insignificant change. This is too much of a coincidence for there not to have been explicit instructions from above to make a stance on the US elections. After all, there were no other opinion pieces about the US elections in either of the two major English-language newspapers.

From Matthew Parris’ comments on Rowan Williams’ suggestion that Sharia law be allowed in Britain:

The State, not family, faith or community, is the guarantor of personal liberty and intellectual freedom, and it will always be to the State, not the Church, synagogue or mosque, that the oppressed individual needs look.

There is no imminent danger, I don’t think, of Sharia law being allowed in Singapore, but there are similar problems that stem from the State’s lack of protection of liberties and its frequent exhortation that we leave the determination of these to be decided by the ‘moral majority’. But just because it’s a majority doesn’t mean it isn’t tyrannical or unreasonable.

It is, in my opinion, highly underrated how tyrannical cultures and families can be. Here our discourse is shaped by deference to cultures, in the name of harmony. Our cultures condone nothing as bad as suttee, but plenty of lesser evils.

Am I the only one finding the States Times’ sentimental tribute/farewell articles on Suharto rather distasteful? The guy was hardly a saint, after all. Perhaps they are merely preparing the ground for the inevitable death of our own Dear Leader? Which would explain why there have been so many editorials harping on the affinity between our Dear Leader, Mahathir, and “Pak Harto”. Can’t start drawing parallels too early, can we?

I was recently at a talk organised by A*Star to promote its AGA scholarships with partner universities. They had gotten professors from the overseas partner universities to come down and interact with potential PhD students. Each university gave a talk selling itself to the audience.

NTU’s talk was plain embarrassing. The speaker, a certain Professor Lye, had bad English grammar and pronounciation throughout. But let us not fault him for that. Perhaps NTU cannot be blamed for having a dearth of senior representatives who can communicate well in English. The truly embarrassing aspect of NTU’s talk was that they were utterly incompetent at hiding or glossing over the fact that taking a scholarship with them is a lousy proposition, because their research is generally lousy and good students could probably go to better universities than them.

They did attempt to put a gloss on things, with undisguisedly pompous talk. Lye began by saying that he was “honoured to be in a room with so many potential leaders”. Sucking up to the audience, but anyone who has sat through enough talks by civil servants can see through the emptiness of those words. Then he went on to proclaim that NTU is not aspiring to be any ordinary university. Instead, they think of themselves as the “Next Technological Utopia”. The talk proceeded splattered with feel-good big words that one tends to hear in self-help on entrepreneurship classes: “spin-off”, “global picture”, “ample leverage”, etc.

Next came the attempt to fluff up their research statistics. The latest figure for number of citations per paper (I think it was for 2003 or so) was 2.52. Chew on that. The average paper by an NTU academic has been cited only less than 3 times. That means a substantial number have only one or zero citations. However, this statistic was presented as a sign of NTU’s rise as the Next Technological Utopia, for in 1997 they had only 1.06 citations per paper. In other words, in 1997 about half of the papers produced by NTU had no citations whatsoever.

Now, you might jump on me for being unfair on someone who was trying the best he can. But I don’t think he was. I think he could have done much better. And the reason for that is that the talk right before NTU’s was NUS’s, and they did much better. NUS is not well known for its research strengths. So they did not even attempt to put forward an optimistic interpretation of their research strengths, which would surely pale in comparison to those of UIUC, CMU, Imperial, and the other overseas partner universities. Instead, they emphasised the many opportunities their graduate students would have to participate in exchange programmes with good overseas universities, the special organisation of their graduate programme which would (they claimed) facilitate interdisciplinary research, student-student interaction, diverse experiences, flexibility, yada yada. They also did not attempt to give themselves a corny, obviously pretentious new nickname. And, perhaps most importantly, they did not shoot themselves in the foot during the Q&A session (see below for how NTU did).

NTU’s blatant flashing of their frankly awful research statistics appeared to stick in people’s minds, for there were audible sniggers and whispers when the University of Dundee gave their talk and displayed their research statistics. In biology and biochemistry, Dundee had 27.7 citation per paper on average. In molecular genetics, they had 34.2 citations per paper on average. Now that’s when you can unashamedly show people your research statistics. Not when all you can say is “ooh, some of us have published in Science! And Physical Review A! Look!”

But I haven’t gotten to the most embarrassing part of NTU’s appearance that day. In the Q&A session, an NTU student asked NUS/NTU why one should take up their graduate scholarships when one has the option of going overseas. First, there was a great reply from a foreign professor-VIP, whose identity I still have not isolated, who practically rushed up to the microphone and said, “If you get into a top ten university and get funding from them, just GO!” Oh dear. Damage control time. Most of the defenders made satisfactory glosses, but NTU practically slapped themselves in the face with a huge cream pie. Lye went up to the microphone and started spewing phrases like “I will challenge you”, “the world has also come into Singapore”, “there are 40-over countries down here” (referring to NTU’s mix of nationalities), and ended with this gem: “If you’re an extrovert introvert and you go overseas, you’ll just go to Chinatown!”

Gobsmacking. Quite apart from the fact that it’s a very, very poor reason for choosing to stay in Singapore rather than going overseas (studying overseas is much, much more than immersing yourself in the predominant culture of your host nation), it also insults overseas Singaporeans, particularly overseas Singaporeans who are introverts. Apparently you can have a PhD and still make the ridiculous mistake of confusing introversion with cultural insularity/xenophobia.

Incidentally, if you click through the links for each university’s programme on the AGA website, you’ll notice that A*Star demands that you have either first-class honours or, if you have second-class honours, they will also consider your ‘A’ Level results. This is absurd. We are talking about determining if someone is fit to be a PhD-level scientist and beyond, after the candidate in question has had ample time in her undergraduate years to show her mettle, and what do we look at? Her high school results! Do graduate schools care about your high school results when you apply to their graduate programs? Clearly we have some especially enlightened minds leading the nation’s biggest scientific venture.

Looks like we can’t rely on the States Times to give correct information for even a simple MRT route. In their print edition today, they published an example[pdf] of an onerous route from someone’s home in Ang Mo Kio to her former workplace Pasir Panjang. Part of the route has her taking the MRT westwards from Ang Mo Kio towards Jurong East, then changing trains there to go eastwards to Buona Vista station! Now anyone who has ever taken a train from the eastern half of the North-South line towards the western half of the East-West line knows that the trip across the northern half of the island is very long. It is unfathomable that anyone who lives in Ang Mo Kio would choose to take the train towards Jurong East rather than towards City Hall/Raffles Place. A quick check on streetdirectory.com shows that by this shorter route, it takes only 34 minutes to get from Ang Mo Kio station to Buona Vista station. Compare with the ST’s highlighted route, which takes 52 minutes in total.

Now someone is going to point out that the ST did indeed suggest taking the shorter route if the southbound train arrives first at Ang Mo Kio. But why would anyone take the longer route even if the northbound train arrives first? We often have to wait pretty long for trains to arrive, but the difference can’t be as large as 18 minutes, which is the difference in travel time between the short route and the long route. During peak hours the time between trains is negligible and waiting for the next train is almost painless.

OK, it may well be true that the person profiled in this case, Ms Conceicao, did indeed take the long route on occasion, but her choice to do so despite the obvious disadvantages should not lead the newspaper to convey the longer route as a typical route. If someone chooses to ride his daily train to its endpoint and then disembark, get on the train going back the way he came, and alight at his non-endpoint stop, would I report his little habit in an article on the vagaries of public transport? When we want to demonstrate how inefficient and troublesome taking public transport is, shouldn’t we portray the most efficient (cost- and time-wise) route for our chosen starting point and destination, instead of deliberately adding to the inefficiency?

This is not the only ridiculous spin the ST is putting on Ms Conceicao’s commute. Apparently Ms Conceicao is also in the habit of taking a taxi from Buona Vista MRT to Heng Mui Keng Terrace. This taxi fare of course accounts for most of the $7.86 cost of the featured commute. While a taxi is the fastest way to get from Buona Vista MRT to Heng Mui Keng terrace, there is in fact a straight bus (200) that goes from Buona Vista MRT to the junction of Heng Mui Keng Terrace and Pasir Panjang Rd. Ms Conceicao’s workplace, the Institute of Policy Studies, is a short walk from the bus stop at that junction. Another option is to take bus 95 from Buona Vista MRT to the NUS campus, where there is a complimentary internal shuttle that stops very near Heng Mui Keng Terrace. In short, it is completely unnecessary for Ms Conceicao to cab from Buona Vista MRT to her workplace. Of course, a cab is going to be faster than a bus, but the bus is going to be a darn sight cheaper. Ms Conceicao did not have to take a ridiculously circuitous route, pay $7.86, and 1 hour and 20 minutes to get from home to work each way. She could have taken the shorter MRT route, and/or she could have forgone the taxi ride. The ST’s inflation of the cost and time required for her commute smacks of sensationalism.

Perhaps one of the most telling indicators of elitism and stereotyping in Singapore is the question “What school were you from?” Even primary schools are taken as indicators of character and intelligence. Employers routinely insist on knowing which secondary school and JC you were from, even if you have tertiary qualifications. In casual social interactions, the question is used as a springboard to a slew of generalizations. “Oh you were from X? Then you must be such-and-such!” Not always spoken aloud of course.

Apparently, even our Dear Leader falls prey to this irrational tendency to evaluate a person in the light of her educational qualifications. He asked a journalist at a press conference what school she went to, even though she’d asked him a question completely irrelevant to education (and, indeed, irrelevant to her education in particular). One hopes that he was simply being mean and doesn’t really think that information was at all relevant to the issue at hand. Yes, this is what one is reduced to hoping for from our leaders.

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.

Some organisations and societies alienate those who appear to be cripples. They are useless in the current atmosphere, after all. Others attempt to create pockets where these cripples can flourish. One man’s oxygen is another man’s nitrogen dioxide. Creating an environment with pockets of atmospheres that are toxic to some but health-giving to others is technically difficult. And creates a risk of dangerous accidents. But if you homogenize your atmosphere, you become less adaptable to external stimuli and more at risk of dying out altogether. You may try to accommodate cripples anew, but after chasing them away for decades, winning their goodwill again is not a trivial matter.

*As this was taken from an old notebook, I cannot recall the specfic details of the edition, except that it was in paperback and translated by G. H. von Wright.