MP Lim Biow Chuan:

Are we happy with the values of the young Singaporeans who have gone through the school system? Do they bear the positive traits that we want to see in the future generation of Singaporeans? Are the scholars that we produce, the GEP students, the top tier students in the IP schools, our university and polytechnic graduates - Are they humble, considerate, kind, grateful, compassionate, willing to help others? Do they appreciate all that Singapore has done for them and the many opportunities that they have been given compared to other third world countries?

My problems with this:

1. The assumption that gratefulness is a good thing. Now, it is clearly a good thing for people to be grateful to those deserving of their gratefulness, say people who have done them significant favours. But it is also clearly not a good thing to be grateful to people who have, say, harmed you. We would say there is something terribly wrong with the sexually abused child who is grateful for being sexually abused. In implicitly praising gratefulness Lim fails to delineate the conditions under which he thinks gratefulness is desirable. This primes his audience for the next rhetorical trick:
2. He then asks if students are grateful for what Singapore has done for them compared to other third world countries. Having been primed by his previous laundry list of ‘desirable’ values, the audience is asked if young people lack gratefulness for a particular thing. They are supposed to assume that young people should feel grateful for this particular thing. But it’s not so clear that one should be grateful as long as one’s living standards, opportunities etc. are better than those in third world countries. Furthermore, the MP had to throw in an ‘other’ there, as though Singapore is still a third world country. So there are two levels of framing going on — firstly, framing the issue as though gratefulness in general is a good thing; secondly, suggesting that Singapore is part of the group of countries we think of as third world countries, and hence that the latter is a fair group of comparison.