Political apathy vs 'creating a peasant class'

Hi! I have to respond to this article on degrees for two reasons: firstly, it is wrong on so many levels. And secondly, that sounds like the kind of misinformed statement that I would have made when I was a teenager, so as an older man at the age of 38, I would like to offer a response with the benefit of hindsight. I'm not trying to defend the PAP here (I am vehemently anti-PAP)  - but I think the argument that this blogger Jacky has offered is fundamentally flawed. Allow me to explain why having a degree doesn't naturally make you an intellectual who would question the government.

1. You don't need a degree to question the government's policies. 

Of course you don't. There is a certain amount of intellectual snobbery going on here if you think that only graduates have the right to question any of the government's policies whilst the opinion non-graduates do not count or matter. Anyone has the right to question the government's policies regardless of their education status because the government is there to serve the people and the people need to hold their elected representatives to account. I remember already forming opinions about the government's policies way back in secondary school and JC, years before I went to university. I was too young to vote then, I didn't have a degree then, but a least I was in a conducive environment where my teachers and classmates encouraged us to talk about things that mattered to us. I had began to question the PAP's policies back then, way before I earned myself a place at university. As long as you are in an environment where you are not afraid to speak out, where you know there will be people interested to hear what you have to say, you will feel confident to form political opinions and voice them.

In Singapore today, thanks to the internet, there is a space for citizens to freely express their opinions, no matter how vehemently anti-PAP they may be. This is a far cry from the pre-internet days in the 1980s where people were far less willing to speak up against the government. There is quite a democratic process going on in cyberspace - the good writers who present a cogent argument will attract more readers whilst those who spout rubbish incoherently will be ignored. This cyberspace is open to anyone and everyone, graduate or not. There is simply no direct correlation between having a degree and having a desire to question the PAP - you need to look at the causes of political apathy instead.

Would a degree in mathematics make you question the PAP's policies?

2. Most degrees will not give you any insight into the government's policies.

Say you have a degree in engineering - how is that supposed to help you form any insight about any of the government's policies which does not pertain to engineering? Let's get real here - a degree doesn't suddenly turn you into some kind of brilliant intellectual who is able to form an informed, useful opinion on every topic under the sun. Many degrees are focused on very specific areas - say you get a degree in electrical engineering: that puts you in a good position to get a job in that field, but it doesn't actually make you more assertive when it comes to questioning the government's policies. I have discussed this in a previous piece about the ridiculously high expectations that Singaporeans have of a degree. Get real, time for a dose of reality, please.

If you want to be a well-informed, articulate intellectual who is able to hold the government up to account, then don't expect the university to make that transformation - they are there to educate you, not to make you a better person. So much of this education and nurturing needs to start from a very young age - it starts with the way the parents bring up the child at home, with the kind of primary and secondary education the child receives. So let me be blunt: if a young person has suffered the misfortune of a bad upbringing and a crap primary/secondary education, then don't expect a university degree to undo all the damage already inflicted on the that poor kid. The university cannot deliver a miracle like that!

Education matters from an early age.

This is why I say, hindsight is 2020. I was young typical Singaporean student back in the 1990s, I studied hard and was raised to believe that my academic grades were the most important thing in my life, that getting a degree from a top university was my ultimate goal. Then I graduated, came out into the big bad working world and realized that there's so much more to getting ahead in life apart from paper qualifications. There is fundamentally, a huge difference between passing exams and being able to function in the working world, being productive, adding value and getting along with colleagues. It is important to students see the big picture, to see their place in the work beyond their student years.

3. Some degree holders are politically apathetic whilst others may be very pro-PAP.

That's right - did it occur to you that some degree holders are very pro-PAP and love the government? Singapore is a successful country, it is rich and it is prosperous: some people do better in this system than others, so if you have a good job, your family is happy and life is generally very good - it may be very easy to be totally satisfied with the government. Furthermore, some degree holders simply do not hold a strong opinion about the government - they are politically apathetic, that means they are not at all interested in matters concerning politics. Why should having a degree in dentistry or English make you any more politically astute? Again, whether or not you're pro-PAP, anti-PAP or just plain politically apathetic has far more to do with your upbringing, rather than whether or not you have a degree.

4. Non-graduates are not illiterate peasants - far from it.

In any case, why do you draw this black and white distinction between degree holders = intellectuals who question the government and non-degree holders = non-intellectuals who never question the government? It is not that simple - non-graduates are not the same as illiterate folks who can't read and write. Primary and secondary education is more than enough for anyone to pick up a newspaper, read what is in the news and form an opinion about what is happening in the world today. You can hardly refer to someone as of the 'peasant class' just because s/he doesn't have a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Stop looking down on non-graduates.

5. What did the government actually say? 

The PAP never discouraged anyone from pursuing a degree per se, kindly read the full clarification by education minister Heng here. It is quite rightfully questioning the way every Singaporean feels compelled to have a degree at all costs. A degree is not for everybody and I feel really sorry for those students who are not academically gifted but are bludgeoned through the system, made to study extremely hard with endless hours of private tuition only to end up with mediocre or below average grades that simply will not earn them a place at a respectable university. I also feel really bad for those parents who spend their hard earned money on a second rate degree for their children from a university on the wrong end of the league table - let me be blunt here: you're wasting your time and money with such useless degrees.

Do you have a good degree?

Can we have a sensible conversation about the return on investment (ROI) you get on your degree please? Allow me to quote minister Heng on this, he cites "the example of a student who has spent much time and effort in getting a degree from a private school only to realise later that her employer found her degree irrelevant to the job she was doing, and paid her the same salary as an entry-level diploma holder. Mr Heng thus advised Singaporeans to look beyond qualifications and and recognise that there are other attributes which matter in striving for success. These include the right attitude, deep skills, knowledge and experience."

What he said is 100% true and fair. I'm afraid so many Singaporeans are so bitter about the PAP giving out so many scholarships to foreigners from Sun Xu to Alvin 'Alvivi' Tan that when the minister actually does come up with something totally logical and sensible, he is shouted down in social media as nobody is willing to actually listen to what he has to say. Now despite the fact that I am vehemently anti-PAP, I have to say, minister Heng makes absolute sense in this case and he is right. At no point did any PAP politician actually discourage Singaporeans from pursuing degrees, they are merely asking Singaporeans (students and parents alike) to make careful and wise choices when it comes to further education simply because degrees are very expensive thus you must be careful before making such a big investment.

The issue of foreign scholars in Singapore is a touchy one.

I live in the UK where we have a slightly different culture when it comes to further education. British students are expected to fund their own further education through student loans and government grants - some rich parents may be happy to pay for their children's degrees but in most cases, the students will have to bear the cost of the degrees themselves. Thus they will have to ask themselves the difficult question, "is it worth getting into years of debt with student loans in order to get this degree? Will it be worth the time and money getting this degree or would I be better off without it?" This does lead to a lesser number of British students choosing to go to university - but is that a bad thing?

In sharp contrast, Singaporeans tend to get their parents to pay for their expensive degrees - even in lower income families, the parents make all kinds of grand sacrifices to beg, borrow and steal just to finance their children's further education. Often children take it for granted that their parents should pay for their education and they do not question the kind of burden they are placing on their parents to find the money to do so. I say, if your son or daughter has managed to get himself a place at Oxford or Harvard or even NUS, then by all means, beg, borrow and steal to get the money to pay for the degree. But as in minister Heng's case study, there's absolutely no sense in a student wasting all that time and money for a totally useless degree from some private school - that student should be thoroughly ashamed of herself for having wasted her parents' hard earned money on such a useless degree. Why didn't you do any research before embarking on that useless degree? Good grief. Didn't you try to speak to anyone about that degree? #Alamak #Aiyoh

It boils down to money at the end of the day - your parents' hard earned money!

I simply do not buy the argument that most Singaporeans give me, that if everyone has a degree, you need one too or else you simply cannot get a job when you're competing with other graduates. Allow me to speak as a gatekeeper who rejected many people from jobs over the years - gatekeepers are not bloody stupid. We know the difference between a degree from Oxford and one from a university at the wrong end of the league table that no one has ever heard of - if we are not sure, we can go online and check, it would take me about 60 seconds or less to find it on google. By all means get a good degree if you can, but who are you trying to kid when you spend waste your parents hard earned money on a useless degree from a crap university? 

So people, let's be fair to the PAP. They are by no means trying to create a society of uneducated peasants who are too dumb to question the PAP. That is certainly not happening in Singapore - the issue here, is not whether Singaporeans are educated enough, but whether they are engaged in the political process. It is not the lack of graduates that is the problem - rather, it is political apathy that allows the PAP to win election after election. You can have the world's most highly educated society but if they are politically apathetic, they are still not going to question the government.

Please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you think about this. Thank you for reading.