Scholar groomer or slave master?

‘Slaves’ they may be, but they certainly don’t come cheap.

Choice quotes:

“They were all my officers in Mindef, from the day they started work, they grew up with me. I can give you a long list of slaves,’ he chuckles. ‘So it’s not all my work per se, I leave a lot of these slaves behind who continue to work.”

At the end of the interview, he strides out briskly to keep his lunch appointment with a group of newly returned A*Star scholars – new slaves, he jokes. As they exchange greetings outside his office, he asks them: ‘Who built the Great Wall of China? Who built the Sphinx and the pyramids?’ Before they can reply, he chuckles: ‘Slaves! Slaves! So, remember, slaves are very important!’ ”

Philip Yeo gets interviewed by the Business Times.

Full text available at Wayne’s blog.

Edit (2 Mar): A reader of BT replied.

Published March 2, 2006

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
A lack of humility and graciousness

I REFER to the Philip Yeo interview (BT, Feb 25). Certainly, the learned civil servant has a lot to be proud of.

However, with all his qualities, he lacks humility and graciousness.

If only he had a modicum of humility, Mr Yeo would be a perfect human being.

Successful civil servants have no need to be inflated with conceit.

In the real world, with the brutal and cold-blooded cuts and thrusts, I’ve seen many Ivy League MBA-types biting the dust.

Without EQ, interpersonal skills and basic courtesy, in addition to the liking and respect of the masses, there is no guarantee that civil servants shooting off their mouths and operating from lofty heights can flourish.

May God have mercy on us if there’s more than one Philip Yeo; it’s just as well that he is ‘irreplaceable’.

Michael Loh Toon Seng,
PhD
Singapore

Hymn to the Motherland

To the curious reader who asked:

There is a reason why I listed Hymn to Red October as my favorite music piece. I was humming that song in my head that day I left for my undergraduate studies. (Do I hear anyone say wtf???) There aren’t that many orchestral choir pieces that combine feelings of pride, excitement and sadness so succinctly in the first few minutes. Parts of the lyrics were very relevant too.

HYMN TO RED OCTOBER

Words and Music by Basil Poledouris
Russian Translation by Herman Sinitzen

Holodna hmoora.
>> Cold, hard, empty.
Eemruchnoh v’doosheh
>>Light that has left me,
Kak mohg znat ya shtoh tee oomriosh?
>>How could I know that you would die?

Do svidonia, byehreg rodnoy
>>Farewell again, our dear land.
Kak nam troodnag pridstahvit shtoh eto nyeh sohn.
>>So hard for us to imagine that it’s real, and not a dream.
Rodina, dom radnoy,
>>Motherland, native home,
Do svidonia Rodina.
>>Farewell, our Motherland.

Ay. Avepakhod, avepakhod, nass val nahmarskaya zhdyot nyehdazh dyotsyah.
>>Let’s go; the sea is waiting for us.
Nass zah vootmarskaya dah, ee preeboy!
>>The vastness of the sea is calling to us, and the tides!

Salute otsam ee nashem dedum
>>Hail to our fathers and forefathers.
Zahvietum eekh fsigdah vierney.
>>We are faithful to the covenant made with the past.
Tepierre nichtoh, nee astanoivit,
>>Now nothing can stop
Pabiedney shark, radnoy straney.
>>Our Motherland’s victorious march.

Tiy pliyvee, pliyvee bestrashna,
>>Sail on fearlessly,
Gordest say viernykh marieye.
>>Pride of the Northern Seas.
Revoluytziye nadezhdah sgoostk vierif sekh luydeye.
>>Hope of the Revolution, you are the burst of faith of the people.

the last two stanzas repeat a couple of times, then…

V’oktyabreh, v’oktyabreh,
>> In October, in October,
Rahpar tu ium miy nashe pabiediy.
>>We report our victories to you, our Revolution.
V’oktyabreh, v’oktyabreh,
Novie meeir fahli numnashy dehidiy.
>>And to the heritage left by you for us.

We stopped the car while on the way to the airport, and took a pic similar to the one above.

On that cool August early morning, I felt like I was the Red October. Being pulled guided to the harbor entrance (airport) by the two parental tugboats, and the ropes were released at immigration. Then I watched them fade gradually as I made my way to the gate. Even back then, I knew it won’t be a short sojourn overseas.

Incidentally, the Red October in the movie defected to the US, but I guess you shouldn’t draw any parallels here to my real life, should you?

The soundtrack is available on Amazon.

Ties that bind

I like this piece by Colin Goh.

THE STRAITS TIMES
DEC 7 2003
Look at the big picture
By Colin Goh

I attended a party in Manhattan some time back, and got to talking with an Iranian woman.

When I told her I was from Singapore, she said she’d studied in the United States as a teen, and that one of her schoolmates was a Singaporean girl, but they’d lost touch when she returned home.

The Iranian woman was roughly my age, so I asked her what the name of her Singapore schoolmate was.

She seemed puzzled as to why I would even bother asking. After all, the odds of us – strangers from halfway across the world – having a friend in common must have been astronomical.

Six degrees of separation? More like three hundred and sixty. But she humoured me and told me anyway.

Her puzzlement turned to shock when I told her that her Singapore schoolmate had been my junior at university in England.

For her, the coincidence was like some creepy Twilight Zone experience. As a Singaporean, however, the connection was far from weird.

If your parents get posted to the US in circumstances where you get to attend an international school, you probably come from a certain strata of society.

And if you go home to Singapore, there’s an equal probability that your social status means you’ll go to junior college (JC).

Since only a small proportion of Singaporeans go to the relatively small number of JCs, I felt that as a former JC attendee of roughly the same age, there was a decent chance I might know this person.

Bullseye! (Or as my BMT platoon mates would put it, ‘Choon choon, char bee hoon!’)

My Iranian friend shook her head and uttered the thoroughly justified cliche, ‘Isn’t this a small world!’

And my response was, ‘Especially when you’re dealing with a small country!’

I suppose this bit of chance should have made me feel all warm and fuzzy: Two people from different countries suddenly finding something real in common. Cue Heal The World by Michael Jackson, and come on, children, let’s all hold hands.

Except I felt just as disturbed as if Jackson were holding my hand.

Singapore may be small, but not that small. That I could make such a swift personal connection only showed how small – and privileged – my educational cohort must have been.

My horror was compounded by a series of meetings with fellow expat Singaporeans thereafter, when the question consistently arose: ‘Which JC did you come from?’

Worse, certain JCs were more represented than others. (Go on, guess which ones. It’s not Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.)

Instead of being comforted by the proximity of the familiar, I felt claustrophobic; stifled by the predictability and homogeneity of encountering the same bunch of people over and over again, even several continents away.

There are some who’d say, get over it. It happens in every country, every society. There’s always a group of fortunate swine, and thank your lucky stars you’re in it and not out.

Maybe, but it would be a positivist error not to question why the status quo should not be challenged.

I think it’s a cause for concern if a particular group – in this case, globalised, cosmopolitan professionals – is held out as a model, and their members seem to be drawn from the usual bunch of suspects.

And it’s of even greater concern when forces seek to make this group even more exclusive.

I can’t help but wonder what it’ll be like in a few years, when JCs are differentiated even further by schemes like the Through Train Programme.

We’d like to believe that streaming benefits people by putting them in appropriate tracks, where they can be amongst others of similar ability. Yet, we’re always striving to be in a lane superior to the one we’re placed in.

Further, when did we stop valuing diversity and interacting with people of different talents, shortcomings and backgrounds?

It strikes me that in a world increasingly polarised by various fundamentalisms, to- lerance and open-mindedness are more important in our educational institutions than some mindless race to access some arbitrary elite.

It may be a small world and we may be a small country, but we need big ideas to stop the shrinkage.

Because, sometimes, the old school tie can also strangle us.

Related topics in this blog and elsewhere:

1. Pre-semester gathering
2. thank you mr. goh, for once again articulating things perfectly
3. Being an elite

Maybe that is how MOM sent out that email.

Elite as elite does…;

Was spring-cleaning my mailbox when I saw this email from Aug 2004. The title was enough to make me cringe (again).

Subject: To the Internationally Talented Mobile Singaporeans

Hi folks

I am part of a study-team on how to present “Singapore as a Land of
Opportunity” to Internationally Talented Mobile Singaporeans. I
strongly believe you fit the profile of this elite group! Hence
would appreciate if you spare a few moments to help answer a few
questions, so that we can better understand your group

Rest assured that your identities will be keep confidential and your
responses will only help to be used for the purposes of this study
group.

Would be most grateful for your responses — they might help us
change the way Singapore will be in the future!

Thanks loads!

Rosalind Khor
Research Analyst, Economics Unit
Manpower Planning and Policy Division
Ministry of Manpower
DID: 6317 1680

p.s. Please also feel free to forward to your internationally mobile
talented Singaporeans

———————

“Singapore as a Land of Opportunity: the Internationally Talented
Mobile Singaporeans”

Your profile in brief
1. Age
2. Present Job
3. Academic Background

General questions:
- What does a Land of Opportunity mean to you?
- Do you see Singapore as a Land of Opportunity? How can we make
Singapore a Land of Opportunity?

Here are the questions for talented Singaporeans who are in
Singapore:

- Have you thought about working overseas?
- If so, what would make you want to work overseas?
- At which stage of your life would you make this decision?
- If not, what makes you want to live and work in Singapore?

If somehow we have opportunity to tap views of mobile Singaporeans
who are already overseas, we can ask the following questions:

- What makes you want to work overseas?
- When did you decide that you want to work overseas?
- What will make you want to come back to Singapore (to live and
work)? How can the government help in this process?
- When will you consider whether to come back to Singapore (to live
and work)?

Then I remember this post. Erm, does the Sg civil service do this every year? I was KIVing for a response later, but I guess I didn’t get around to writing it. I wonder if it had anything to do with then-PM (now SM) Goh’s speech in April 2001. Note the emphasis (for students overseas) on studying in top 10 universities; which is at best ambiguous, at worst offensive to those not in (their) list.

…I even met with our Education Minister when he visited Teachers College. Of the questions he asked me, two stood out: “When are you going back to Singapore?” and “When are you going to have babies?” It hit me that I had never spoken to the Minister when I was teaching in Singapore. I wondered: am I valuable to the country only after I leave? – Jocelyn Woo

Does anyone want to call up MOM to ask if a report based on the above questionnaire is out to the public already? Would appreciate if you can post links if you know about it. Thanks.

Of Scholarships (from Singapore to the US)

Pardon me for flogging this dead horse topic again. I always find it a pity that not many A level school leavers and poly graduands have any idea of getting funding for overseas studies other than from familial sources or the Sg-govt/govt linked ’scholarships’.

While Kevin’s entry does provide a good overview of alternatives, the best site for those of you (Singapore-based applicants) interested in a US undergraduate education and concerned with money issues comes from the alma mater. Which ironically produces a sizable share of scholars for the Sg civil service (and related TLCs) annually.

When I see such comments: The scholarship is the only “tool” that one can take up to study overseas , I think this person has done his/her fellow peers a great disservice.

So I will say it again:

Want to study in a US college for your Bachelors degree without a Sg govt “scholarship” but worried about the exorbitant costs? Click here and here.

Study locally for one or two years then transfer overseas is also a possible route.

At the graduate level, your choices increase. So if you aren’t sure about signing on the dotted line for several prime years of your life, ASK AROUND first.

Charmaine, ex-ACJCian, wrote about her getting financial aid (May 11 entry) from Vassar.