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.