Teachers, Asian parents and the missing link.

Hi there. My regular reader Choaniki has asked yet another very good question, which I felt I couldn't do justice in the comments section of my last post. Hence I shall deal with it here instead for it is a complex question that did give me a lot of food for thought. We were talking about how our strict Asian upbringing in Singapore has already instilled a sense of discipline amongst Singaporean children from a very young age but the article was about Singaporean expatriates in the UK choosing to make their sons do NS in Singapore. So here's Choaniki's comment about Singaporean expatriates in the UK to kick us off: "However at the start of the article you talked about children of Singaporean who are UK long term stayers. So saying that the Singapore education system would be strict and teach them discipline and respect for authority are not exactly accurate since they are probably in the UK education system." Note that there are no 'Singaporean schools' in the UK for Singaporean expats, so Singaporean expatriate kids simply go to British schools for the system is very similar - it is the path that leads to GSCEs and A levels, before the student is ready for university. 

Let's dissect the Singaporean education system.

Now I don't know what kind of impression you have of the UK education system but if my own experience of dealing with my peers and my family is anything to go by, many Singaporeans probably imagine that British kids are lazy, don't study very hard, are satisfied with mediocre grades, lack ambition and are generally, well, quite stupid compared to their East Asian counterparts. It is a terribly racist stereotype that is not true. The system is quite different in some ways but extremely similar in other ways. To begin, the structure of education is pretty similar in that the Singaporean system is essentially based on the British system - exams scripts are still shipped off to be marked in England for the important exams. But where the differences lie are in the teaching methods and attitude amongst parents towards academic excellence. In Singapore, there is a lot less tolerance for kids who do not excel academically - there is a huge social stigma directed not just as the kids, but at the parents as well, as if the failure of their children is a reflection of their poor parenting skills. This emphasis on obsession with grades in Singapore is really quite extraordinary, such as in the case when a 64 year old man was asked for his O levels certificate despite him being not just trained but experienced in the job. Well, people simply are not judged as harshly in the UK - my boss doesn't even now which university I went to.

Singaporean kids are under a lot of pressure to excel - this pressure comes from a multitude of sources: from their parents, their extended family, their teachers, their peers, their friends, from social media, from society in general but most of all, from themselves. I invite you to watch the clip below which I have used before - it features Amelia, a student in Singapore and it is clear that she is a highly disciplined, motivated and hardworking student. Now if you were to move Amelia and her family to the UK (imagine if her father's company decides to move him to their branch in London), would she suddenly change? That is not likely to happen - she is going to be pretty much the same Amelia, still working very hard to achieve straight As. You can take the girl out of Singapore, but you can't take Singapore out of the girl. It doesn't matter whether she is in Bedok or Boston, Bukit Batok or Birmingham. Likewise in the UK, there are plenty of British kids who are just like Amelia and are as hardworking and motivated as she is - there are also British parents who do push their kids as hard as Amelia's parents. There are various factors which would affect how hard parents push their kids to achieve a lot in school here in the UK - the key difference is the peer pressure Singaporeans kids experience to excel.

This is when the British social class plays a huge role - the kids who tend to excel academically in the UK tend to be those from the middle and upper classes, whilst the working class kids suffer in the system. The parents of middle and upper class kids are likely to be graduates themselves who have good jobs, they would want their children to have a bright future and that means pushing them to study hard, in order to get into a good university. Whereas on the other end of the food chain, the kids whose parents are doing menial work for very little money lack aspiration and when the parents lack aspiration, the kids will lack motivation to try harder. Why bother working so hard when the government has a safety net for you should you become unemployed and will pay your rent for social housing if you don't have enough money? Sure there are success stories of kids who have struggled against the odds and have succeeded (don't we all love a feel good story like that) but when you look at the students at Oxford and Cambridge, they are still overwhelmingly those from the upper and middle classes, whilst those who have succeeded despite having the odds stacked against them are in the minority. Now that's one aspect of Singapore that never ceases to impress me - even those at the very bottom of the food chain in Singapore push their kids to work hard and succeed because of this belief in themselves and/or the system; whereas their counterparts in the UK often give up without trying because they believe that there is no way they can ever succeed when all the odds are stacked against them by the fetid British social class system.

At the end of the day, if you want to achieve great things in the UK such as get a scholarship, go to one of the best universities, get a great job, make loads of money, be extremely successful in your career, well there's no need to reinvent the wheel here. The kind of Singaporean/East Asian work ethic does go a long way in helping you make your dreams come true and if you were to look at some of the most successful people in the UK, they have an amazing work ethic that well and truly puts me to shame. The only difference I suppose is that kids in Singapore face far more peer pressure to excel and succeed than their British counterparts but I am still trying to battle this Singaporean misconception that "Angmoh = lazy" and really, it isn't that straightforward. Some white people are lazy whilst others are hardworking, being Caucasian doesn't automatically render you lazy - the same way there are indeed East Asians who are lazy. A lot of it depends on your social environment - who are your neighbours, your classmates, your colleagues, your friends and your bosses? Who do your kids play with? Who is exerting peer pressure on you and your kids? That's when we go back to the British social class system - the answer to all of those questions would depend a lot on your social class. Singaporeans often completely ignore that important part of the equation when passing judgement on 'lazy Angmohs'.

Well, let's look at the situation in Singapore, whilst all Singaporean children are subject to the strict, demanding education system, not all turn out to be straight-A students who go on to become scholars. Some struggle through the system being just mediocre or below average, whilst others completely go off the rails, drop out and turn to crime. What plays the most crucial factor then, since these young people are all sitting for the same PSLE and O level exams, are all subjected to the same system in the same country? The answer is simple: the home environment. Think about it - there is only so much a teacher can do when there are 30 to 40 students per class. There is only so much attention a teacher can give each individual student with such a ratio; thus the Singaporean education model only works when the teacher can simply give instructions with the confidence that the students will do as they are told. The parents often play a big part to ensure that: now each student has two parents, compare student : parent ratio to the student to teacher ratio and it is pretty obvious, the parents play a big part in the process. In fact, parents and teachers work hand in hand: the Singaporean parents bring discipline to the table by bringing up their children to be very respectful of figures of authority, so the moment the child enters the classroom, the child is very well-behaved, cooperative, eager to learn and will never be disruptive.

However, if you have a situation whereby the parents are not enforcing enough discipline at home - say the parents allows the naughty child to get away with misbehaving all the time, then the child will have boundary issues and have the audacity to challenge the teacher in the classroom. This can leave the poor teacher very frustrated as the teacher just wants to get on with teaching the syllabus without having to deal with discipline-related issues! Perhaps I am showing my age here but when I was in primary school, all the teacher had to do was threaten to call your parents and the student would immediately beg for mercy. It would be considered a huge shame if the teacher had to call up your parents and drag them to school to talk about your behaviour - that would almost certainly mean facing double punishment, from the teacher and a far harsher punishment from your parents. Modern teachers have a far better relationship with the parents of their students today, but the essentials of that partnership hasn't changed over the years. Without parents bringing up their children properly, they can be impossible to teach in the classroom and the teacher is not a magician, you cannot realistically expect the Singaporean teacher to solve all the problems that the parents have created in the first place.

A teacher is there to teach, not to discipline your child.

To put things in perspective, a history teacher in a Singaporean secondary school gets about 6 periods a week with his class and that teacher would teach several classes in the school in a term. Now each school may have different ways of organizing their timetables and the length of periods may vary from school to school, but you get the idea - the teacher has no more than a few hours a week with his students and at that rate, he would have trouble even memorizing the names of each student in the first few weeks! That's why some teachers make students wear name tags (or at least have their names written on a piece of paper on their desk) during the first few lessons. At this rate, can you realistically expect the history teacher to take the time to sort out discipline issues? No, the teacher is just trying to bludgeon the students through the syllabus and make sure he has covered every item the students have to cover that term. There would be a teacher in charge of discipline in the school, so if a child misbehaves, then the history teacher would say, "I will let Mr Fong deal with you later!" Now this Mr Fong probably has never taught the child, doesn't understand the situation well and isn't going to do anything more than just punish the child for having misbehaved in class. I remember there were kids in my primary and secondary school who drove "Mr Fong" nuts because they were regular visitors to his office, no amount of his punishment could make them change their ways. Punishment and rehabilitation are simply not the same thing but many people assume they are: it is actually a far more complicated process than most people imagine.

These problem kids who drove 'Mr Fong' up the wall often had parents who didn't enforce any discipline - perhaps they were neglectful parents who didn't make the effort to spend enough time with their kids, or you have the other extreme, where the parents have no concept of parenting and simply let the kids get away with murder at home. But it is evident that even in Singapore, with Singaporean kids so entrenched in the Singaporean education system, things can go wrong if the parents simply do not play that vital part in supplying a healthy dose of old fashioned Asian discipline. Furthermore, even when you do have extremely dedicated, loving parents doing their utmost for their child, the child could still turn out to be mediocre or even below average for other reasons, such as having a somewhat below average IQ. Thus even in Singapore, with hardcore Asian parents driving with their children through the Singaporean education system, results aren't always guaranteed. You then have a 打肿脸充胖子 situation whereby the parents realize their child isn't particularly intelligent, yet they are hoping to somehow no one else will realize that if they can somehow still get their child to produce decent results with the help of tuition teachers. Such is Singapore and the kind of shame society heaps on those who do not perform well academically. It is something they will gladly keep up for many years, paying for expensive professional help until the day the child finally gets a job. Then at that point, they can turn around and say, "How can I be stupid if I have managed to get good results as a student? I'm a graduate! I've a degree!" Singaporeans take it to quite an extreme, even sending their kids to private universities when the degree isn't even worth the paper it is printed on.

Singaporeans face huge pressure to get a degree. 

Thus for the Singaporean parents of SUKA, bringing their kids up in the UK, you can count on them to play their role when it comes to instilling a lot of of discipline in their children from a very young age. And as for the teachers and the British education system - well, it is not as bad as you think: I know many Singaporeans will imagine that exams are a lot easier, that kids simply coast through the system without putting in much effort. That is not quite true - the teachers in the UK are not that different from those in Singapore, the key difference however, is that there isn't the 打肿脸充胖子 mentality here in the UK. If the kids are natural smart, then they will excel regardless: oh yes, there are kids who are so brilliant they will get straight As without actually working that hard. If they are mediocre or below average, then the parents simply shrug their shoulders, say 'oh well, don't worry, it is no big deal' and accept things for what they are. That actually places the kids of the kiasu SUKA parents in a good position because they make their kids work so much harder than their British classmates and the Singaporean kids in British school often top their classes because of just how hard their parents push them. Note that this is not an exclusively Singaporean trait, but something associated with all East Asians. The infamous Tiger Mum Amy Chua was born in the America to ethnic Chinese migrants from the Philippines - it is clear that our strict East Asian culture plays a big part in this and any link to NS is simply not there, because some East Asian countries have NS (Singapore, Taiwan & South Korea) whilst others don't (Japan, China & Hong Kong).

Thus if the Singaporean parents of SUKA are bringing up their kids the Singaporean way, enforcing a lot of discipline from a very young age, cultivating a great work ethic and pushing them to achieve a lot - then by the time they are 18, they would be extremely disciplined and hardworking. Just in case you think I am celebrating this kind of Asian parenting style, there are certain aspects of the child's development that the this kind of parenting will not nurture. Asian kids who have been subjected to this kind of regime would often find it hard to think outside the box, take their own initiative when it comes to solving problems and work independently without constantly seeking reassurance and approval. A friend who is a professor at a British university told me how her Chinese students constantly drove her nuts, seeking her approval and assurance for every minor detail of their research when her European students were happy just to work very independently as adults and trust in their own judgement. If your child is already like that Chinese student driving his professor nuts, sending him to NS is not going to solve anything because NS is the kind of place where you simply turn off your brain, follow orders and refrain from asking too many questions. When your child is already so extremely Asian to the point where it is causing problems, the last thing you want to do is to send your son off to Singapore for two years of NS to make him even more Asian. In this case, what the parents need to do is to pack the kids off and make them take a gap year, working their way across Europe to make them far more independent. Put them in a situation where there is nobody telling them what to do for a change. That kind of experience would make them grow up in a way NS never will. 

And of course, if you have a problem child - you know, one of those regular visitors to Mr Fong's office - then clearly, there are serious problems at home that go back a long way. Simply saying, "hey I've screwed up as a parent, my child is a loser and a monster - but please SAF, I have faith in you, please sort my terrible son out and I expect a fine young man at the end of two years, thank you very much!" How unreal and unreasonable is that? But that's just a moot point - judging form the tone of the discussions on the SUKA Facebook group, they all sound like pretty decent, typical Singaporean parents and I can't imagine any of them being terrible parents like the way Irene Clennell was.. What I found a bit strange was the way they seem so keen to give the PAP credit for everything: there was this woman whose son was brought up in the UK and he was sent packing back to Singapore to do NS; credit to the young man he's doing just fine. This woman put herself down and her son down - saying how she had to do everything for him, including pack his bags when he was younger and how in just a few short months he has turned into a fine young man, as if by magic! And I'm like, hey, if your son was totally useless he would have floundered and crumbled in BMT like so many others - the fact that he is doing okay means that you must have raised him well so auntie, please give yourself and your son some credit, okay? But this mother refuses to take any credit for how well he is coping and prefers to paint a picture of the SAF has doing her the greatest favour in the world. Such is the mindset of the typical SUKA parent. Go figure, duh.

Do you think NS will sort out a troubled young man?

So that's it from me on this issue - I hope I have explained the complex relationship between the teachers and the parents, the education system and the Asian family in this post and why it really doesn't matter whether the Asian family is in Tampines or Toronto, Bukit Merah or Bristol. It is also nice to have the opportunity to elaborate on some of the points I have made earlier about NS. Let me know what you think, please do leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.