So why do Singaporeans equate good grades with good morals?

Hi guys, allow me to do a follow up to my last post which is a hot topic in Singapore right now: if you commit a crime in Singapore, you're far more likely to get a lenient sentence if you are a an undergrad with good grades. I know that many of you feel very strongly about this and I can understand why so many Singaporeans are extremely pissed off with the system because regardless of your GPA, the actions of these criminals on their victims remain the same. A scholar and an illiterate man should stand equal before the law - but that's clearly not the case in Singapore. In today's post, I want to discuss why there's this misconception that somehow better educated people have better morals and when they commit a crime, it is a temporary moment of folly that's completely out of character. But when a lowly educated person commits a crime, the legal system is far less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. Why is this the case in Singapore then? Well, to understand the issue, we have to try to find the origins of this mindset - so let's go back to my childhood in Singapore in the 1980s. Are you ready for a trip back in time? So, here's some retro 1980s music to get you in the mood. 

Back in the 1980s, a lot of Singaporean parents had a rather simplistic approach to morals when it came to their children - obedient children would stay at home to study whilst the naughty ones would be roaming the streets looking for trouble; so the assumption was the the students who delivered the good results at school delivered those through hard work, by staying at home to revise instead of going to hang out with their friends, thus straight-As were a sign of good behaviour. By the same token, if students had bad results, it was assumed that this was because they didn't stay at home and revised, instead they were out having fun with their friends and that was why their grades suffered. Of course this was extremely simplistic, but remember the parents of that generation (who are probably in their 70s and 80s today) weren't that educated and most of them had never been to university, so they did make many ridiculous assumptions that we would never make today. We are far more aware of the randomness when it comes to the distribution of IQ - unfortunately some people are just born plain stupid, their poor academic performance not a reflection of laziness or a bad attitude but they are limited by their lack of intelligence. Likewise, some kids are simply born clever, so their excellent results are not so much a reflection of their hard work, perseverance or a good attitude towards their education - but simply a question of winning the genetic lottery when they are born with higher IQ than their peers. What I have just described is no more than common sense but alas, Singaporean parents a generation ago lacked basic common sense.

Can you study until you become a genius? Clearly not.

But a lot has changed since then- you see, back in the 1980s, if you stayed at home you weren't exposed to external influences: you weren't making friends with new people and getting into the wrong company. Back then parents assumed that there was a correlation between allowing your children to go out all the time and them becoming 'morally corrupted' by all the bad influences they could encounter in the big bad world, as long as they were at home studying, they were considered safe from these bad influences. But in the age of the internet, everything has changed: as long as you grant your children access to the internet, your child can be doing anything form looking at hardcore pornography to playing violent video games to indulging in cyber bullying without even leaving the bedroom at home. Parenting in the age of the internet is a lot more complex as you would have to deal with all these things that your children could and will encounter online though a lot of Asian parents simply haven't caught on to that. It was bad enough that they made such ridiculous assumptions back in the 1980s and the 1990s, but those parents are very old today and I do wonder if younger parents on this current generation are any more sensible? I am not sure - you need to pass a driving test and get a license before you are allowed to drive a car, but anyone can just get married and have a child, even though you are woefully unprepared to be a parent and unfortunately in this case, many people simply do what their parents did, thus passing the same problems onto the next generation especially so if they allow their parents to get involved in raising their children.

Allow me to talk about my own experiences: I was a product of the Singaporean system - I had good results and went to the best schools in Singapore, eventually getting three scholarships along the way to my degree. I have this rather bizarre memory from my secondary school days when my father met one of my friends from school - let's call this friend Ah Pui (that's 'fatty' in Hokkien). Well, as you have guessed, Ah Pui was obese, he was extremely fat and he was my classmate. We were working together on a science project, that's why he ran into my father. Now for some bizarre reason, my father was shocked that Ah Pui was so fat because he was a smart student in the best school in Singapore - how could this happen? I rolled my eyes in disbelief - I had to remind my father than Ah Pui earned his place at the school based on his good results, rather than his physical fitness or his waistline. But my father saw Ah Pui's obesity as some kind of moral flaw - he accused Ah Pui of lacking discipline when it came to exercising self-control, he said that Ah Pui was probably sleeping too much, snacking too much and not helping out with his parents around the house but most importantly, my father was shocked that a student from a good school could be so morally flawed. Now I had to tell my father than the school actually didn't really do much about the issue of obesity - Ah Pui wasn't the only fat student in the school, far from it. And secondly, why did my father assume that smart students from good schools would somehow be thin as well - as if there was some kind of correlation between one's grades and one's waistlines? My father didn't make any sense at all as he assumed that kids who were smart enough to get into good schools wouldn't make such mistakes.

Now that's an example of my father putting students from good schools on a pedestal. So it didn't come as any surprise years later when I wrote a long piece about my experience of getting bullied in secondary school - it was a tough time for me as I didn't fit in. My parents' reaction was complete denial of course: firstly, my parents couldn't believe that bullying could exist in such a good school given how high the academic standards are. Yeah right, that school had an extremely toxic environment when it came to the culture of bullying - there is simply no correlation between bullying and a school's academic performance, it is a problem that is faced by all schools alike because it has far more to do with the social dynamics amongst the students rather than whether or not they were scoring As in their exams. Secondly, my mother actually said this, "well, your grades didn't really suffer, you still did very well in your studies, so the bullying couldn't have been that bad lah." My mother had assumed that students with good results could have been neither bullies or victims of bullying - which is totally untrue since I did become a rather nasty bully after having been a victim of bullying. I did some pretty nasty things to others in the school which I am not proud of, but in my defence I have to say that I was a product of a very toxic environment. But the bottom line was that there was absolutely no correlation between students getting good grades and students having good morals in that school given how utterly toxic that environment was - but people like my parents simply focused on our academic results as an indicator that everything else must've been just fine regardless.

Actually, I do need to try to explain my parents' rather bizarre logic - don't get me wrong, I still think they were totally out of touch with reality and were woefully oblivious of the kind of responsibility they had as parents but the fact is they have a problem that a lot of peers had: they were stuck in survival mode despite the fact that we were not starving. You see, my parents came from rather poor families - my dad's family were not exactly rich, but my mother's family was so poor she suffered from chronic malnutrition as a child. My grandparents on my mother's side had so many children then my grandfather had to die very young, leaving my grandmother to bring up all the children - it was the kind of situation that would trap a family in poverty. So when you're that poor and barely clinging onto survival (my mother's sister died as a child as a result of an illness because they couldn't afford the medicines), then you learn to forgo things that are not essential - Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains this very well. For example, birthdays simply weren't celebrated because it was something they could do without, it didn't pertain to survival. Survival was all about clinging onto the most essential things you needed to stay alive: having enough money to pay for food, water and shelter - everything else beyond that was routinely swept aside as unimportant. So in this context, my parents were prioritizing my grades over my emotional well being because as long as I had the grades to go to a good university then get a good job, my future was secure whereas any emotional damage resulting from the bullying was not considered as important as long as it didn't get in the way of me making money in the long run. Now my family weren't rich when I was a child back in the 1980s, but we most certainly weren't starving or barely clinging onto survival - but that was this survival mindset my parents had grown up with, it was thus very hard to break them from that mindset and adapt to the modern world. More on this later.

Allow me to point out the obvious: students in these elite schools weren't given any extra lessons on morals or ethics, no this simply wasn't a part of the curriculum. The teachers were there to teach certain subjects, not give lessons on morality. The mathematics teacher taught mathematics, the history teacher taught history, the geography teacher taught geography, the physics teacher taught physics - it was pretty clear what their jobs were and their agenda was to help us perform well in the exams, rather than deal with any issues to do with morality. And in either case, here's a piece of reality for you: allow me to remind you that each teacher taught several classes, each class had anything from 30 to 40 students. So most teachers struggled to remember the names of every student in the class - it was usually the ones who stood out who got the teachers' attention (for example, if you were exceptionally bright and performed very well, or if you were a real troublemaker who drove the teacher up the wall). Thus the teacher could even teach a whole class for an entire year without knowing all the names of the students but that really didn't matter as long as the teacher delivered the lessons well and the students absorbed enough knowledge to perform well in the exams at the end of the academic year. However, given how very shallow the relationship between teachers and their (many) students can be, it then becomes completely unrealistic to put any kind of responsibility on teachers for their students' morals and this is the case purely as a result of the teachers' workload. So even if the kind and caring teachers wanted to do much more for their students outside the curriculum, they are often unable to do so because of the constraints of time and their very heavy workload.

Now let's talk about university and the environment there - you see, for people of my parents' generation in their 70s and 80s today, very few of them went to university. Even if you were smart enough, your family may not have the money to pay for your fees. So anyone who was a graduate back in 1950s and 1960s was indeed put on a pedestal, because they clearly were considered much smarter than the average person and a simple example of that is my (now retired) family GP Dr Quek - obviously, he went to medical school to qualify as a doctor and my parents would put him on a pedestal as this super genius who had authority on anything and everything. They would say things like, "if you don't know, go ask Dr Quek!" (Remember, this was a long time before Google came along.) And it wasn't just about medical stuff, it would be about every issue under the sun from further education to politics - Dr Quek was put on a pedestal because he went to university when my parents didn't. With all due respect to Dr Quek, he is a really nice guy who performed an important role in the community in that part of Ang Mo Kio where I grew up, but let's put things in perspective: he's just a GP. I know of plenty of doctors who are specialists and thus are way more highly qualified than him and I also have friends who certainly earn a lot more money than Dr Quek. By that token, I'm not that impressed by someone who has become a GP - I certainly wouldn't put him on a pedestal just because he went to medical school. In 2019, the situation has changed a lot - now almost everyone has a degree and we have to check if they went to a prestigious university only accepting the very best students or one at the bottom of the league tables. So whilst it no longer is a big deal to go to university these days, somehow Singaporeans still have that respect for graduates that's probably a hangover from the last generation.

I had a scholarship to go to UCL - which is one of the top 5 universities in the UK and a popular destination for many scholars from Singapore who wish to study in the UK. There was nothing at all during my time at university to suggest that there was some kind of moral or ethics content to our education there - no, if you were doing an engineering course, you were taught engineering. If you were doing a biology course, you were taught biology. If you were doing a course on linguistics, you were taught linguistics etc. There is therefore an assumption on the part of our parents that when you put a lot of intelligent students together in the same place, they would influence each other in a very positive way in terms of their morals and ethics - that assumption is based on the fact that you got into that great university by being a good student who never drank, never partied, never hung out with friends at the mall and instead sacrificed a vibrant social life to study very hard for your exams and achieve those top grades. The basis of this assumption was that the good student had made the conscious choice to sacrifice fun for future reward in terms of good grades that will lead to admission to a top university. There is a huge problem with that assumption because there are some students who are extremely hardworking but they will never achieve the grades to gain admission into somewhere like Harvard or Oxford. This is not because there's something morally deficient about them, but simply because they just weren't born intelligent enough to do well in those exams and so that makes them stupid, but it doesn't imply that they are immoral. I met loads of super intelligent people who got to UCL because they were simply born with much higher IQ and not because they had worked hard to get there. Life is not fair like that: you have no control over how intelligent you are no matter how hard you study.

During my time as a student at UCL, we did have a lot of very interesting debates and discussions during our tutorials because every single student in the room was very intelligent and articulate. A lot of great things can happen at top universities when you put loads of great minds together. But to assume that simply being in the constant company of intelligent people would automatically influence my morals outside the classroom is just taking it a step too far - an important part of university education is to teach students to think for themselves, that's why we had to produce independent research on topics that we had to come up with on our own, rather than just memorize information from the textbooks. Such an education will give you the framework to think independently for yourself, but it doesn't point you in a specific direction when it comes to your morals. It does quite the opposite, it gives you the intellectual tools to decide for yourself what your morals are rather than force you down a certain direction the way religion does. Thus a lot of the morals of the students have been established way before the student has set foot in the university - by that time, the student is already an adult and has already made up their mind of a whole range of issues pertaining to morality. Sure we would have experiences during our time at university which would influence our morals but different people can be subjected to the same experience but respond quite differently to the same experience. It is very optimistic to assume that people will always react positively to the experiences they are subjected to but that's not always the case of course.

An important aspect of attending university is learning to be independent, living away from your parents and this is especially the case if you go to a university in another country. There was a neighbour (well sort of, she lived two streets away) I knew from Singapore - let's call her Elaine. Now she was a very bright student who earned herself a place at a medical school in a prestigious university in the UK. For the first time in her life, she was living away from her parents and her parents had paid for her to get a very nice studio apartment so she wasn't going to compromise on her standard of living. However, finding herself in an apartment all by herself at night was way too much of a shock for her - she was afraid of being alone, she installed extra locks on the door and windows even though there was nothing to suggest there had been any kind of threat and she was so paranoid she was even afraid to turn the light off at night. Her mother flew over to try to help make sure that everything was okay, but even her mother admitted that the apartment block had a robust security system complete with a 24-7 security guard at the entrance, but no - Elaine simply couldn't cope with living on her own mostly because she was the kind of Asian student who had poor social skills and failed to make many friends. Back in Singapore, that didn't bother her as she was very close to her mother but once she was cut off from her mother in the UK, she simply couldn't cope at all. She became withdrawn and depressed when she was unable to make new friends and it was the loneliness and an inability to take care of herself which eventually forced her to give up her studies in the UK and return to Singapore, when she then enrolled in NUS having lost a year. I'm the same age as her so whilst all this was going on, I was serving NS and that made my parents very nervous about me going to the UK later.

However, there was a key difference between Elaine and myself - I had to serve NS first before I could go to university and Elaine being a female didn't have that liability. Surviving 2 years 4 months of NS had made me a lot more independent and able to cope with living on my own and I actually really enjoyed being away from my parents - I loved the idea of being in such a big city where there were so many possibilities to meet all kinds of people, make new friends and redefine myself as an individual. Being away from her parents made Elaine crumble, but the very same thing was exactly what I needed to blossom as a young, confident adult. Should it have come as a surprise that Elaine and I reacted so differently to this aspect of studying abroad? Hardly, we may have been of the same age and grown up in the same neighbourhood in Ang Mo Kio, but we were very different in character and thus had vastly different experiences during our childhood. Furthermore even within the same group of undergrads on the same course, we will have vastly different experiences based on our social backgrounds. I remember the rich kids from posh families discussing where they wanted to go on holiday, the places where they went shopping and clubbing at the weekends whilst the poorer working class students were talking about how to get better paid part-time work to earn just a little bit more money to make ends meet. Thus it is a complete fallacy to treat the 'university experience' as a monolithic entity when even the students on the same course can have very different kind of experience during their time at university. By that token, to try to make any correlation between going to university and somehow developing better morals is completely impossible.

But why do people still make this link and assume some kind of validity in this correlation when there's little to suggest that there's any kind of link between good grades and good morals? Well I have found a possible link that is tenuous but worth exploring: politics. In a place like Singapore, practically all the politicians have a degree and it is rare to find a politician who isn't a graduate - non-graduate politicians do exist in the places like the UK of course, but they are indeed in the minority. In fact you're far more likely to find politicians who are from universities like Oxford or Cambridge currently in the government. Thus many ordinary folks look towards politicians for some kind of moral compass as they are the ones running the country and if they are graduates, then some people will make the link between having a degree as a prerequisite to taking a position where you can have some kind of moral authority. There is something extremely naive and childish with that line of logic because it does assume that politicians and indeed anyone in a position of authority is a person of good morals and can be trusted - given the shit storm that is Brexit, the trust we have in politicians in the UK is at an all time low. I am hoping that people in Singapore are at least observing carefully what is happening and taking notes. After all, sure our current government is made up of highly educated politicians, but do they have the trust of the people? Do we see them as politicians we can trust to make the right decision for the country, or just a bunch of greedy, evil, self-serving crooks interested only in lining their own pockets whilst crashing the UK out of the EU without a deal?

Let's tackle another argument which has been used in many cases such as Terence Siow's: if the criminal has good results in society, then he could still reform and become "a value-adding member of society" - oh that's such a weird phrase and I was quoting Siow's letter of apology to his victim. Good grief, that sounds like something relating to the "add value machine" - like what on earth is a value-adding member of society and where do we draw the line? Okay, if you're someone like a nurse taking care of very sick patients in the hospital, then nobody can question the fact that you're doing a very important job and contributing to society (despite not being paid enough for this kind of work). But Siow is studying mathematics for crying out aloud - what kind of job can he do that will have any kind of positive impact on society? Is he going to work with refugees, disabled children or cancer patients? Not with a degree in mathematics, no way. If he was a nurse for example who had committed a crime, there may have been an argument to spare him a jail sentence if the patients at the hospital would be neglected should he spend a period in jail and the hospital would thus become shorthanded. But seriously, what the fuck can a maths student at university do for society that can justify sparing him a harsher sentence? He's still an undergraduate for crying out aloud and he's unlikely to retrain to become a nurse or a social worker after he finishes his maths degree. And if he is really remorseful, then he would gladly accept a jail sentence and then there's nothing to suggest that he cannot go on to do become (in his own words) "a value-adding member of society". This is why I get very incensed when people make this link between having a degree and morality.

After all, there are people like social workers and nurses who certainly can have the moral upper hand when it comes to how much value they add to society - yet these are jobs that often do not require a degree and are most certainly not very well paid. A graduate with a mathematics degree can go into banking or accountancy and can get a fairly well paid job, but are they making the world a better place? Of course not. I work in corporate finance and I am a self-serving capitalist at work, I am there to make money. I move money from A to B and I take my cut in the process. But at least I do contribute to various charities to give back to society in a very practical way. Yet somehow society offers people like me more respect than say a nurse who works with disabled children mostly because I earn a lot more money. Good grades at school allows you access to a good university, doing well at university in turn gives you access to better job opportunities that allow you to make money - at no stage in that equation do morals come into the picture at all. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have equated the ability to earn a lot of money with good morals - how did we get here in the first place? Let's go back to when my parents were children - all the way back to the 1940s during WW2 when Singapore was under Japanese occupation. My mother was born into a poor family, her parents were so poor that my mother had a sister who died of malnutrition - there were days when she went to bed hungry, having had so little to eat. Thus being able to provide for your family, to have enough money to buy food to feed your family was such a priority that people starting equating being able to make money as having good morals - a hardworking man will work hard to ensure his family gets enough to eat. It was the kind of society that was stuck at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Fast forward to 2019, people are no longer so poor their children are dying of hunger, but that mentality of equating the ability to make money (and thus having the good grades to enable one to do so) with good morals still hasn't gone away, even if our kids are so well fed now we have an obesity epidemic. Basically, there is an assumption that altruism plays a major role in these university student's motivation in getting a degree - I'm not saying cases like that don't exist but they are highly unlikely. In most cases of course, kids who end up doing well at university are not doing it out of some altruistic desire to take care of their families - rather, they have been pressured by their parents into studying very hard and achieving those good results. In fact, the way this has evolved in a strange way: children naturally seek the approval of their parents, so the way to please one's Asian parents is to get good grades at school and so if you are the kind of child who can make your parents proud of you, then you are considered to have good morals. But of course, you can do all that without actually adding any real value to society, without making the world a better place - it is time we stop treating university students like 5 year old kids. We have low expectations of 5 year old kids - as long as they obey their parents and don't cause problems, we're pretty happy. But by the time they are old enough for tertiary education, we really should be asking them what they have done to make their country proud, how they have served their communities and how they have made the world a better place rather than simply being satisfied that they have obeyed their parents - the benchmark for good morals needs to be raised a lot higher. It is 2019 - families are much smaller and richer today but our mindsets simply haven't evolved as fast as our society has, it is out of sync because we are blindly copying our parents.

Perhaps this is a rather sad reflection of the state of our morals - we can't equate good grades with morals, but there is clearly a strong correlation between those who have done well in school and university and their earnings. You're far more likely to be earning more money with a good education, so are we simply respecting people who have money and equating the ability to earn money to good morals? That's a sign of just how materialistic we have become as a society - we put people who can earn more money on a pedestal and we yearn to be like them as we want to be rich too, that's why we equate the ability to earn money with good morals. I don't have a problem with people who earn a lot of money, but you can tell far more about a person by the way they spend money. What if a man earns a lot of money but he spends it on fast cars, whores, booze, blows it all at the casino whilst treating his family like crap? How would you compare him to someone who works as a social worker helping disabled children, but earns very little money? So here's my question for you: has our society become so very materialistic that we have equated having the ability to make money to having good morals? Or is this equating good grades to having good morals a hangover from the previous generations, where our parents' (and grandparents') generations were faced with very different social conditions after the war and all the way till the 1980s - we've simply used their parenting methods without questioning if they are woefully out of date and relevant to the modern world we live in today? Or perhaps it is a complex combination of both of these problems? So that's it from me on this issue: let me know in the comments section below please and thanks for reading.