A fitting conclusion.

The Mother Tongue issue is closed now, with the government’s categorical reassurance that Mother Tongue weightage at the PSLE will not be lowered. Fairness has – for once – triumphed in this country.

I expect this to be one of the last letters the Straits Times is going to publish about the issue, hence the title.

Government should have stood firm (13 May 2010)

I COULD not believe yesterday’s report, ‘No change to PSLE mother tongue weightage’. I have long admired the Government for sticking to the right decision even if it was an unpopular one.

Times have clearly changed and the Government has caved in to the demands of a parochial group in a particular community.

How many times have we tried to teach the mother tongue in different ways but inevitably ended up with the same unsatisfactory result?

The fact is, we cannot expect English and the mother tongue to be accorded equal weighting because it is unrealistic to do so.

Our environment is oriented in the English language, so how can we expect young minds to be moulded otherwise?

Why do our children have names like Megan or Bryan, and why do our national table tennis players adopt English names like Joy and Tiffany?

Those who fear a loss of culture without equal mother tongue weighting should ask themselves why their children or grandchildren are called by their English names, even when there is.

Imparting culture, like religion, is the parents’ job, and should not be forced upon us by public policy.

As a mother of two kids in primary school, I have first-hand experience of pupils’ struggle to learn an utterly foreign language and the consequent unnecessary stress and demands on them.

Parents like me are not demanding the elimination of the mother tongue, but merely appealing for a smaller weighting in the PSLE score to help children who excel in English, mathematics and science earn their rightful chance to qualify for a place in a better secondary school.

Long ago, the Government wised up in the weighting game for the GCE O- and A-level exams. How much longer do we have to wait for the PSLE to fall in line?

This is truly a fitting conclusion. It has it all – overbearing selfishness, tunnel vision and poor argumentation. It is a culmination of all the previous terrible letters calling for the imposition of a completely unfair policy on this country. It is both easy and desirable to demolish every argument it puts forth.

First it attempts to cast the maintenance of equal weightage as a parochial opinion that lacks wide public support. I wonder where our author gets this impression from. A newspaper poll of 200 respondents found 65% in favour of maintaining the weightage. As of last week, according to the Straits Times, 80 out of about 100 letters sent in about the Mother Tongue policy were supportive of maintaining the weightage. The Straits Times, mind, is an English-language paper. Although these statistics cannot stand on their own to indicate how popular the Mother Tongue policy in its present form really is, there is no indication either from numbers such as these that maintaining the current weightage is a mere parochial opinion. So, unless our author has actually conducted a much larger poll of her own, which I heavily doubt she has, she is basically making things up. If anything, what the figures point to is that the opinion for reducing the weightage is the parochial one.

So, a good start. Next? This:

How many times have we tried to teach the mother tongue in different ways but inevitably ended up with the same unsatisfactory result?

Yes. How many times? I genuinely have no idea. Perhaps our author can enlighten me?

In any case, what is an unsatisfactory result? This statement is far too vague to be anything else than an appeal to emotion. Our author, again, is putting out a weighty statement that requires quite a bit of hard proof, without providing any of that at all. Unless she did, and the editor cut it out, but somehow I doubt that’s the case here.

The fact is, we cannot expect English and the mother tongue to be accorded equal weighting because it is unrealistic to do so.

And it is completely unfair to thousands of students out there to cut the mother tongue weighting. Ever given any thought at all to that?

By all means tear down this current PSLE grading system and reform it completely. But to call for the current system to be kept and only one single subject weightage to be lowered is an incredibly selfish act. Face it, the world doesn’t revolve around your offspring and the sooner you teach them that the better.

Our environment is oriented in the English language, so how can we expect young minds to be moulded otherwise?

Maybe your environment is. But even though more Singaporeans now speak English at home than the mother tongues, there are plenty who still utilize the latter extensively in day-to-day communication. I am one of those. True, the working language in Singapore is English, and well it ought to be, but it is too much of a simplification to say that the prominence of English means Mother Tongue lacks all importance.

Young minds are like sponges. Of course they can be moulded. It just depends on the effort educators and parents want to put in. Obviously it’s not easy, but what aspect of parenting and teaching is easy?

What our children need to learn at the very least is there is more than one world out there. It is not desirable to limit them to a singular English-speaking worldview just because English happens to take prominence in a large part of their lives. Learning another language will shape the way they think from a young age, allowing them to understand and better appreciate a whole other culture.

Why do our children have names like Megan or Bryan, and why do our national table tennis players adopt English names like Joy and Tiffany?

Hilarious logic here. I’ve not yet met a Singaporean Chinese without a Chinese name. So by our author’s logic Chinese is still important. Good work shooting yourself in the foot, I suppose.

Parents like me are not demanding the elimination of the mother tongue, but merely appealing for a smaller weighting in the PSLE score to help children who excel in English, mathematics and science earn their rightful chance to qualify for a place in a better secondary school.

Why should only children who excel in English, Maths and Science deserve a chance to qualify for a place in a better secondary school? What about those not as good in these subjects but better in Mother Tongue? What are they, chopped liver? They have as much of a right to challenge for places in good schools, and lowering the weightage – no matter by how much – is going to infringe on that right. Empirically speaking it is definitely going to disadvantage them, and this is not fair.

Ideally, we need to have an education system that allows every child to maximise his or her potential, and all children have potential in different areas. That’s the sheer difficulty of it. The argument for dropping weightage always appeals to the point that children should not be hobbled by being poor at Mother Tongue, blocking their chances to maximise their potential, but look at the other side of the coin: if we drop the weightage, are we not also blocking a whole other swathe of children from maximizing their potential? No matter how small the cut, this group who are good at mother tongue will be placed as a disadvantage. Some will most certainly lose out. But this is okay for the crowd who want the weightage to be dropped, I guess, because it’s not their kids. So, really, what they want is for a certain select group of students to be given a special privilege to help them succeed. I think any sensible person can agree that this is not fair, reasonable or desirable for our country.

Ultimately the big issue in this entire saga, for me at least, is not anything about culture. I’m written on a personal level about that, but the best argument against cutting the weightage is still the issue of fairness – of giving all students an equal crack at things. Somehow, to the bunch who want the weightage to drop, fairness is when the students who can do well in everything except Mother Tongue get a leg up on the rest. I do wonder if some of these people can at least appreciate the hypocrisy of their position.

This just isn’t stopping.

Today: yet more simplistic dismissals of the Mother Tongue policy.

Exercise policy rationally (11 May 2010)

THE basic purpose of public education is to produce self-sufficient citizens, that is, those who are proficient in a common language, with enough mathematical skills to survive in the open marketplace and a basic understanding of how the world works.

So mother tongue should ideally be left to the children’s parents, not mandated by our public education institutions.

The requirement is an emotional link to our ancestry, put in place at the time of our nation’s founding.

We are Singaporeans – not Chinese, Malay or Indian – and we rightly picked English as our common language.

The requirement that 75 per cent of us be adequate in Chinese, another 14 per cent adequate in Malay and another 10 per cent adequate in Tamil is counterproductive to national unity. It would be better if we all learnt one language and learnt it well.

For too long, we have believed it necessary for our children to be educated in two languages. It is this lack of focus that results in some children not being proficient in either language. It would be advantageous for children who are unable to master two languages to drop the mother tongue and be proficient with the common language.

I am not advocating that children forgo learning mother tongue completely, but it should be an ‘opt-in’ programme for parents at the Primary School Leaving Examination level.

Even if it were an opt-in subject, I do not believe subscription to our mother tongue classes will drop by much, judging by the concern among Singaporean parents in ensuring that their children perform well academically.

It is always advantageous, but not a necessity, to be proficient in more languages. But it is necessary that Singaporeans understand one another well and be proficient in their common language.

Our education system needs to change to reflect this fact. We need to refocus it to produce a self-sufficient citizenry, proficient with at least one language and not merely adequate with two. The second language requirement serves no rational purpose to our nation.

Singaporeans have previously been accused of having a one-track mind. I can certainly see why, as here we have yet another letter that is narrowly focused on only the economic benefits, disguised as “rationality”, of the Mother tongue policy.

Of all the mother tongue languages in Singapore, Mandarin is of the greatest significance, not just because 75% of the population is Chinese but also because Mandarin is arguably as much a global language as English is. In terms of absolute numbers, more people speak Mandarin than English and you can find it spoken in virtually all corners of the globe. Within Southeast Asia, every single country has large Chinese minorities. You are going to find peasants in the countryside (as I did, on my travels) with whom your only form of verbal communication is Mandarin. So naturally the entire debate has focused around Mandarin, to the exclusion of the other mother tongue languages.

At least for Mandarin, therefore, I can certainly see its practical value very clearly. In terms of economics one can certainly argue that English-speaking businessmen have been making money in China without knowledge of the language. Societally, however, Mandarin’s importance lies in linking the different cross-sections of Singapore’s Chinese population. Our author, despite supposedly thinking rationally, appears not to have considered this at all. There is no way any ethnic Chinese in this country can shut himself or herself in an English-speaking ivory tower for an entire lifetime. We can’t afford to have more barriers go up within the population.

Moreover, with Mandarin also widely used in all our neighbouring countries, would we not be denying our students opportunities to live, work and travel in these countries if we implemented a monolingual policy?

Less tangibly, learning two languages teaches our students that the world is a diverse place. Learning Mandarin even at a foundational level gives students a glimpse into the world of Chinese culture, which can be vastly different from the normally Anglo-Saxon (so to speak) influences that English inevitably brings. Our younger generation can learn that they should respect and appreciate the cultural diversity of the world’s population, that English is not the only language out there; in fact, not the only global language. They may be able to obtain different perspectives and will gain some knowledge of the wider, non-English speaking world that surrounds them.

But of course this is all lost on our author. He is simply much too “rational” to see beyond the end of his own nose.

Tweak in weighting good in the long term (11 May 2010)

THE objective of teaching mother tongue languages in our schools is clear – to enable our students to read, write and communicate effectively in these languages when they grow up.

And the ability for students to take the language to higher levels beyond primary school is also available.

Therefore, the proposed change in mother tongue weighting in the Primary School Leaving Examination does not affect the existing system. It allows those with a flair for languages to reach their goals while not penalising those who are less proficient. It does not lessen the importance of mother tongue, as has been suggested.

In the case of Chinese, I am told that the increasing trade with China necessitates the upgrading of our children’s proficiency in the language. I find this unconvincing as there is nothing in our present system of teaching the language that cannot meet that demand, albeit with slight adjustments.

Besides, millions of young mainland Chinese are now learning English at the behest of their government. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, they would be ready to meet their friends and business associates halfway, thus dismantling the communication barrier that Chinese now poses.

English plays a key role in Singapore’s progress and will continue to do so far into the future.

We must not put hurdles in the way of our children who are good in English but find the mother tongue somewhat beyond their depth. To do so would be to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water.

I support any tweak in mother tongue weighting. It’s good in the long term.

I’ve got almost the same points for this letter as the one above, but an example of rather baffling (to put it kindly) reasoning is why I singled this one out.

Therefore, the proposed change in mother tongue weighting in the Primary School Leaving Examination does not affect the existing system. It allows those with a flair for languages to reach their goals while not penalising those who are less proficient. It does not lessen the importance of mother tongue, as has been suggested.

I don’t get his reasoning here at all. Lowering the weightage will definitely penalise those with a flair for their Mother Tongue languages while benefiting (NOT “not penalising”) those who are less proficient. Even if it is a tiny drop in weightage there will still be some penalty as the Mother Tongue language will not count equally in calculating the score. This is an empirical fact, mathematically speaking. So how has our author managed to reason past this empirical fact?

Moreover, dropping the weightage will certainly lessen the importance of Mother Tongue. Let’s say I have 4 business deals of equal difficulty to close in a limited time. 3 will bring me $50 million and 1 will bring me $25 million. Which ones am I going to work on first? Ideally of course I want to close all 4 deals to get all the money but obviously more effort is going to be put on the deals that are worth more cash. Similarly, if Mother Tongue weightage is dropped then parents and children everywhere are going to put in less effort for it and think of the subject as being less important as the rest. Will this not lessen the importance of Mother Tongue?

It doesn’t stop there:

We must not put hurdles in the way of our children who are good in English but find the mother tongue somewhat beyond their depth.

So how about those good in English but poor in Maths and Science? Should we also lower the weightage for maths and science? After all, Maths and Science will be hurdles for these students too, and Maths and Science arguably have even less importance to the futures of the vast majority of our student population, than Mother Tongue. I mean, the most Maths people need to learn in their daily lives involves being able to add and subtract. So to avoid putting hurdles in the way of children who are good at English yet terrible with numbers (of which I was one) should we have 100% of their PSLE score dependent on English?

Somehow even a letter this defective in basic reasoning can get in the papers. How did this get published, indeed.

It’s all about the money.

Irony of learning “mother tongue” (8 May 2010)

SINGAPORE’S colonial history, present and future progress have always been based on English language proficiency. Our annual foreign inflow of capital investments worth billions of dollars comes primarily from English-speaking countries or multinational companies (MNCs) that use English as their official language, and whose decisions to do so stem from their ease and confidence in operating and communicating in an internationally accepted language environment which is prevalent here.

With such an open economy, ‘mother tongue’ language has no relevance to one’s race or culture. If parents speak a different language at home other than one from their own culture, it is to be expected that their children will speak that language as well.

As more families use English at home, we need to then approach Chinese language education similar to science and mathematics. We need to do so without being culturally chauvinistic or nationalistic, but in a practical and impersonal manner with the main focus on overall education quality and well-roundedness of students.

Forcing pupils to learn a language they are not familiar with from childbirth or is like forcing pupils in China or India to learn German. If culture is so important, the Government should mandate that all families speak their true ‘mother tongue’ at home. We will then not have this debate as the respective race or culture will know Chinese, Malay, or Tamil well.

It is a well-known fact that education here is stressful for most pupils and a language proficiency requirement that is not important to one’s economic success is not productive at all.

We hear of productivity improvements needed in industry, but we also need to discuss pupil as well as parent productivity, as the amount of time and energy spent by all on mother tongue proficiency does not show any greater return on their investment.

It does make one culturally confident to know one’s mother tongue but then again there are millions of educated Chinese citizens who are economically disadvantaged. They speak Mandarin very well, but Chinese MNCs continue to hire expatriates as the locals do not speak the international language.

Just a reminder before we begin – this entire debate has been about Mother Tongue at the primary level. The whole purpose of primary education is to lay a solid foundation in key intellectual areas and to impart values considered desirable. It appears that a considerable number of Singaporeans neither want even a foundational level of mother tongue knowledge for their children, nor desire to teach them important life lessons like the value of hard work and the importance of working to overcome one’s own inadequacies.

What do we have instead? As this letter shows, an unhealthy emphasis on the monetary value of education.

Before we get to that, however, let us dismantle some of the usual unsound presumptions.

Forcing pupils to learn a language they are not familiar with from childbirth or is like forcing pupils in China or India to learn German.

I would be thoroughly amazed if a child was born who was familiar with any language at all from the moment he or she exited the womb. Horrible phrasing aside, I get the essential point – that making children learn a language with which they have little contact from childhood is akin to pulling teeth. Rephrasing it to make sense doesn’t make it any less of a flawed argument however – because I suppose all children have intimate contact with mathematics and science from early childhood? Don’t children all also have to work hard to pick up the principles of mathematics and science when they get to primary school?

Young minds are malleable. It takes some doing on the part of the author to invert blame and take a potshot at the system when it is parents’ inability or unwillingness to expose their children to two languages from a young age, that makes learning a second language so difficult for their kids. The mother tongue requirement is no secret to anybody who has a child here. Even if a couple is English-speaking, it is surely not too much to ask for them to attempt to expose the child to Mandarin from an early age. There is lots of Chinese-language media out there, lots of Chinese books in the libraries and bookstores, and lots of people who speak Chinese. At least make the effort. Our author apparently does not believe in this and instead thinks it is the system that is flawed. Yes, for sure it is flawed, but the answer is, again, to refine teaching and assessment methods rather than resort to the easy way out of simply cutting the weightage.

If culture is so important, the Government should mandate that all families speak their true ‘mother tongue’ at home.

I fucking wish. I wish that Singaporeans realized culture is important and will stop seeing education as a merely a means towards accumulating financial wealth.

It is a well-known fact that education here is stressful for most pupils and a language proficiency requirement that is not important to one’s economic success is not productive at all.

Alright, she came right out and said it. This is the main point of the letter, succintly expressed. The only purpose of an education is to create economic success. Forget imparting values, forget equipping children with the less tangible skills they inevitably need in order to navigate through life. The only reason anyone should go to school is to learn how to make money, and all the things they learn must be geared towards making money. So much for the well-roundedness our writer spoke of earlier in her letter, eh?

This is a terrible point of view to take. Of course a part of education is to train students to be able to support themselves and the country financially as adults, but it has to be more than that. From schools come morals and the equipping of students with the necessary social and communicative skills to be properly-functioning members of society. And in our diverse society, these skills necessarily require at least foundational knowledge of a language other than English. A very common example would be a doctor here in Singapore – he is likely to encounter a large variety of patients who for instance can only speak Chinese or dialect. If he can only speak English, will this not make life considerably more difficult for him? Won’t it be a lot harder for him to understand and care for his patients?

Knowledge of a second language also makes it much easier to be in contact with society around one. Playing down the importance of this second language gives off the impression that one would rather remain in the monolingual ivory tower, far above the peasants below. Rather than trying to communicate with and understand those who cannot speak English, it appears that people like that would rather form a small, closed cabal of English speakers. That cannot be good for the country, and it is anyway an exceedingly unpleasant attitude to take.

Besides, other than what’s already been covered ad nauseam, what sort of message is this sending the kids? That the main objective in life is to make tons of money? That sure as hell is not what I would ever want my children to learn. There is much more to life and much more to school than just making money and learning to make money. We cannot send such a message of avarice to our younger generation.

Suffice to say that this letter is awful for the very unpleasant message it contains on several levels, and my hope is that this message does not contaminate the minds of our younger generation.

Let parents decide (8 May 2010)

WE HAVE seen so much feedback and negative comments on the proposal to reduce the weighting of mother tongue in the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), but the solution is simple.

Give parents the choice.

Those who are strongly against the reduction, for their own reasons, can choose for the weighting to maintain at 25 per cent for their children. Those who prefer it reduced, like me, can choose that option.

The curriculum can still remain the same but the decision on percentage value can be made by parents before Primary6, as they will then realise (I hope) their child’s level of understanding of the language.

If parents feel strongly about their mother tongue, they will be inclined to choose to maintain the 25 per cent weighting for the language.

I prefer to follow many others and give my two children the best opportunities possible in their long journey ahead, with minimal restrictions.

Please allow me to choose.

I am disturbed by this letter because its main point is that parents ought to very early on decide what their children are good at, based mainly upon examination results (he doesn’t explicitly say this, but come on) in primary school. Interest does not come into it, and the child’s own views seem not to come into it. I should think by that age the child is old enough to at least give some input and influence the process.

And of course, if it is specifically only for Mother Tongue, that will again leave those who are poor at other subjects out in the cold. It can be a stopgap solution at best but only if parents – and children – are given such a choice for the other PSLE subjects as well. It is important that Mother Tongue should not be singled out unfairly.

Defective Reasoning.

Make language learning fun (7 May 2010)

WHEN I read news reports of a possible cut in weighting in mother tongue in the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), I was delighted. However, Tuesday’s report, ‘PM Lee: Mother tongue education still vital’, got me worried. I hope the Ministry of Education (MOE) will not stop pursuing this.

Far from being short-sighted, the move to cut weighting will have a positive outcome in the long term. While teaching mother tongue is important, some things just cannot remain the same. At present, pupils learning Chinese must memorise proverbs, phrases and whole passages if they want to do well. Is this kind of learning not archaic?

The learning of any language should be fun, not a drudgery. Rather than spending endless hours in classrooms and tuition centres studying and memorising for the PSLE, pupils could use some of that time on more effective and practical learning. For example, they could listen to talks by Chinese-speaking DJs, visit clan associations and hear stories in Chinese, sing Chinese karaoke, watch a Chinese movie and write a review of it in Chinese, or even write Chinese movie scripts.

The point is, there are many ways to have fun with the language that are impossible now, because pupils must cram for the PSLE.

Contrary to popular belief, learning Chinese did not open me to Chinese history, customs and culture. History lessons did. Listening to stories by my late grandparents who communicated in dialect did.

Language is not the only tool for the preservation of heritage. On the other hand, keeping heritage alive and relevant may preserve appreciation of the language.

It is right that the education system focuses on equipping students with all-round skills for future success. However, in the process, the system should not become a stumbling block instead. The fact is that because of Chinese language, many children in Singapore are sent abroad for studies. Why is there no room in the education system to keep all bright students?

Mother tongue – and in particular, Chinese language – has been a bane, not a boon, to many children. Reducing its weighting in the PSLE may actually change pupils’ perception of mother tongue because more time can be spent on hands-on learning rather than rote learning. Bring it on, MOE.

If I follow this letter correctly, a cut in weightage for Mother Tongue and a change in syllabus would make children more interested in learning the subject. This appears to make sense superficially, but actually the reasoning behind it is highly defective.

The most basic question is: why is there even a need to cut weightage if the syllabus is to be changed?

Weightage on examinations, yes, can be cut to reduce the stress on students, with marks diverted to forms of assessment like creative assignments and suchlike. But overall, there is absolutely no reason why the entire weightage of the subject, relative to the other subjects, ought to be changed. It is the form of the syllabus that is currently the biggest problem, and it is the format of assessment that makes the subject such a huge stumbling block for students. Mandarin by nature requires memorization due to lacking an alphabetical script, but making schoolchildren memorize words from the infamous 手册 for exams is tantamount to learning English by reading the dictionary. It is not fun and does little lasting good.

So for once our author is on the right path but there is nothing in the letter to support her view that the weightage ought also be cut. There is no question that the current syllabus and format of examination needs considerable improvement, but the essential importance of the subject should not be discounted by lowering the weightage. We can certainly have hands-on learning even while not lowering the importance of the subject vis-a-vis other subjects and disadvantaging a large swathe of the student population. Format and weightage are two quite different things, and the author’s inability to differentiate these two things make me wonder if she is yet another “concerned parent” merely more adept at cloaking her personal agenda in the issue.

Regardless, even this letter is not short of laughable assertions and let’s look at them:

It is right that the education system focuses on equipping students with all-round skills for future success. However, in the process, the system should not become a stumbling block instead. The fact is that because of Chinese language, many children in Singapore are sent abroad for studies. Why is there no room in the education system to keep all bright students?

The system is a “stumbling block” for those poor in Mother Tongue? Oh, cry me a river. Do you think it’s less of a stumbling block for those poor in maths or science? In fact, if anything, far from being just a stumbling block, the system is a high wire fence spiked with concertina wire for those poor in English. Is that a reason to lower the weightage in English? Why should Mother Tongue be treated any different?

Furthermore, implicit in this paragraph yet again is the assumption that the bright and talented are only those hobbled by Mother Tongue. There are plenty of students out there bright in everything except English and they too suffer due to the equal weightage. Is any thought spared for them? Has anyone come out to suggest that the English weightage ought to drop? If someone did, would those fighting to cut Mother Tongue weightage support such an endeavour?

Mother tongue – and in particular, Chinese language – has been a bane, not a boon, to many children.

Every subject at PSLE level has been and will continue to be a bane to many children. Answer: work your ass off at it, life isn’t a bed of roses. Life isn’t about getting what you want all the time and being successful in everything you do.

I would just like to reflect again on a personal level that this lobby to cut the PSLE weightage of Mother Tongue is truly fulfilling the description of 得寸进尺. Give them an inch and they will want a mile. Mother Tongue education has already gone under many more reforms than any other subject. MOE has responded to concerns to try to tailor the syllabus for students of differing abilities, such that already at the O Levels there are three levels of Mandarin – HCL, O Level Chinese and Chinese B. Tell me, does any other subject except the various mother tongues at the O Level have 3 levels of assessment to cater to weaker students? Do we have an English B? A Chemistry B? A Physics B? Even for Maths there is only Advanced and Elementary Mathematics, and – like Mother Tongue – students must at least pass the latter.

Yet still these people are not satisfied. They insist on pushing this selfish agenda to put their children on top of the pile, regardless of the well-being of so many others to whom any cut in weightage would represent an enormous injustice. This is, to put it directly, quite disgusting.

At least this has an apt title.

I think the Forum editor has finally run out of ideas for creative letter titles. I mean this particular one can be used for about 99.9% of letters calling for the weightage. The 0.1% consists of people vengefully reminscing about their own inadequacies in learning the language.

My children’s woes (6 May 2010)

AS A retired English teacher and the mother of two young professionals, both managers, I wish Dr Ng Eng Hen had been Education Minister in their school years. Coming from an English-speaking home, their mother tongue was and remains English. Period.

Because of the bilingual policy and a hefty weighting of mother tongue, we enrolled them in PCF kindergartens hoping to expose them to a Mandarin-speaking environment. At the same time, at dinner time, we watched a Mandarin serial called Coffee Shop together, again to give them more exposure.

Both attended mission schools. Both struggled with Chinese, although my daughter was slightly better. As they ploughed through the subject, they spent more time on it than on reading books they loved. I discovered how my son hated the subject only when I picked up a handwritten note on the floor of his room one day. It read: ‘I hate Chinese tuition because it makes me feel so stupid.’

Because of the mother tongue requirement for university entry, my daughter focused on her Chinese paper, sacrificing her time for other subjects. As a result, she scored poorly for her pet subject. Instead of obtaining a distinction she got an E.

Although invited to apply for joint admission to the universities, she was eventually rejected. We had to send her overseas where she excelled in her studies. She consistently scored distinctions and higher distinctions. Her professor even arranged a work attachment for her and a permanent job after that. Singapore would have lost a young professional had my husband not persuaded her to return.

My son learnt from his sister’s experience. After scoring the bare minimum for entry requirements, he focused on his other subjects and made it to the university.

Why do we still insist our children need to be proficient in both languages? After all, how many will really have to do business with China?

This letter is fantastic, because it has it all. To start we have some undisguised loathing for Mandarin:

Coming from an English-speaking home, their mother tongue was and remains English. Period.

I’m glad she got that out of her system, no matter how dubious the assertion. Good on you that you have been allowed to vent your spleen on the pages of Singapore’s premier broadsheet. Shows just how high the quality of that national broadsheet is, too.

After that explosion of vehement hatred, we get the usual exposition on how her children struggled and the fallacious implication that therefore the weightage ought be cut. We already know the reply to that one, so let me skip right to a bit that amused me:

Because of the mother tongue requirement for university entry, my daughter focused on her Chinese paper, sacrificing her time for other subjects. As a result, she scored poorly for her pet subject. Instead of obtaining a distinction she got an E.

Let’s consider the typical definition of a “pet subject”. It is commonly acknowledged that in one’s pet subject, one does very well all the time, particularly well when compared to the other subjects. A pet subject is one which the student has a flair for and a talent and interest in. However, in this case, allegedly because of the fearsome Mother Tongue policy, our author’s daughter got a particularly poor grade for her pet subject.

Is it not the case that if one has a flair for, and a talent in, a certain subject, one can usually score well in it with less studying than other subjects? In this case what I am understanding is that our author’s daughter focused too much on Chinese to work hard for her supposed pet subject and thus did very poorly in it. But if you have to work hard to do well in it then it can hardly be called a “pet subject” can it?

What I suspect has occurred here is that Mandarin has been scapegoated for the author’s daughter’s own failings. I mean, it is understandable for students not to get the grades they would like in exams. I don’t think there is a student on this planet who has not suffered disappointment of this nature before. We are all human, all fallible and during exam time there are so many variables. Maybe she wasn’t feeling too good physically on the day of the exam. Maybe she crumbled under the pressure to do well. Maybe she didn’t have a good night’s rest the day before. Hell, maybe they added her marks wrongly in the final collation of grades. Who knows? But ultimately that was the result she got and no doubt she had to find a reason. If I want to sound unkind, an excuse. What more convenient scapegoat than Mother Tongue, which her entire family already detests?

It is simplistic, at best, for the author to draw such a clear correlation between a poor performance in her daughter’s so-called pet subject and having to study harder for Mother Tongue. To put it even more bluntly, I assume by pet subject that her daughter had been scoring As all the while. One does not simply collapse from A standard to E standard in a single examination without extenuating factors. So either her daughter was not very good at the subject in question in the first place, or Mother Tongue has been turned into a convenient scapegoat. I suspect the latter.

As for her son complaining that Mandarin made him feel stupid, so what? You trying to tell me that being poor in a subject makes children feel stupid? What a shock, a truly stunning revelation. Maybe you can play your role as a parent and work to raise your child’s self-esteem, even while teaching him the valuable lesson that life isn’t always about doing only what you like and are good at?

So after all this comes the customary veiled threat:

Singapore would have lost a young professional had my husband not persuaded her to return.

My response is, so what? Plenty of young Singaporean professionals out there who can not just speak and write good English, but are conversant in Mandarin as well. Your daughter is not carrying the burden of Singapore’s existence on her shoulders. I don’t think she’s the best or even the youngest professional around here. Don’t think you’ve got some precious snowflake here on which rests the fate of the entire country.

Last of all is something that truly exposes what kind of people Singaporeans can be:

Why do we still insist our children need to be proficient in both languages? After all, how many will really have to do business with China?

I’m going to just step away and reflect my personal views on this, and start with a very simple question: do we always have to learn with a practical goal in mind?

With views like these being expressed and supported significantly, we have to ask ourselves what kind of country, what kind of people we have become. What are the values we are imparting if a parent, and a retired teacher at that, is expressing this sort of narrow-minded opinion in a national newspaper? Are teachers not supposed to promote the joy of learning and the acquisition of knowledge? Why is there absolutely no consideration of the value and scope of a language beyond its use as a tool to make money?

Chinese culture is ancient, rich and interesting. Learning Mandarin provides a way into the fascinating world of Chinese culture. But somehow, Singaporeans are not interested at all. All they seem to want is to drill our children’s heads with numbers and the minimal level of language required to make money off other countries. No wonder we are easily derided as a cultural desert. Singaporeans just do not think that although learning a language is difficult, new worlds will be opened up to them if they perservere and manage. All they think about is getting into good schools to get government scholarships to English-speaking countries and then make lots and lots of money there or back here. This is terrible, and it is a societal malaise.

That more abstract point aside, our author and those of her ilk utterly fail to appreciate the additional practical value of being conversant in Mandarin. One will be able to speak and interact with Chinese Singaporeans from all walks of life, and thus gain a degree of acceptance into common Singaporean society. Our author’s view of Mandarin implies that she and her family are snobs who would enjoy living in an ivory tower, well away from a huge slice of Singapore society, and only interact with them when they deign to come down and meet the peasants. No, of course, this is not an unfamiliar view to take.

Of course, those are my personal views. I like to think of myself as a realist, and realistically few people here would want to learn Mandarin if they were not convinced of its practical value in the business sense. As has already been covered, that practical value is quite real as well. In this case, if people don’t think they need it, it’s really their loss. But ultimately, the bigger loss comes from they being close-minded and completely lacking a sense of culture and any cognition that it is important to have one.

It’ll be the death of us all. Literally.

Examine why many families felt forced to migrate (5 May 2010)

MOTHER tongue is an emotive subject for my family.

We contemplated migrating because my two older sons found it extremely stressful and unfairly time-consuming.

Their reaction when they started studying it in school was that they detested having to learn Chinese. They barely manage today with supplementary help: tuition and external classes.

I understand their feelings perfectly.

While Chinese is important, the weighting and intensity with which pupils are forced to focus on it have made it a subject that derails their overall academic performance.

If pupils must spend so much time on Chinese, they will obviously have less time for other subjects and to cultivate other important pursuits in school.

I applaud Education Minister Ng Eng Hen for his bold move, which is long overdue from the Government.

Currently, we worry over a depleting population and discuss the urgent need to arrest the low birth rate and attract foreign talent.

However, have we seriously studied the acute role of learning of Chinese in forcing Singaporean families to take the painful but logical educational decision for their children by migrating?

Yesterday’s reports (‘Press gets flood of letters against change’ and ‘Chinese clans to petition Govt on language weighting’) gave the impression that the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) move to review mother tongue weighting was a wrong one.

But shouldn’t we also consider how much subjects like English and other vital character-moulding activities like sports, social etiquette, kindness and respect have suffered because pupils have had to sacrifice the time for them in order to study Chinese?

While the argument that fluency in Mandarin is important given the rise of China, we need not have to be better than the Chinese from China to reap economic advantages.

We only need to work with them and equip ourselves with other abilities the Chinese lack.

In business, knowing Mandarin alone is not enough.

By the same token, we need more than Hindi and English to be successful with the next Asian giant, India.

I was heartened to find out from the newspapers yesterday that most of the letters sent into the Forum about the Mother Tongue issue have in fact been supportive about retaining its current weightage. Unfortunately, I’m just not seeing them appear on the Forum page. Instead we get more whiny rubbish like the above.

To start, I can provide some answer to our author’s opening query. As I earlier covered, one family decided to migrate because their nine-year-old child felt that he would forevermore be hopeless at learning Chinese. So why do people migrate? Because they would rather take the easy way out than do some decent parenting and teach their young children that willpower and hard work are necessary for success. They would rather their children learn from a young age that it is more desirable to run away from your problems rather than face up to and work through them. All the better in that case if they migrate, I don’t think Singapore needs parents, or people, like these.

The rest is the same old drill. Oh, your kids detested having to learn Chinese in school? Poor dears. What about the hundreds of thousands of other students who detested or continue to detest having to learn English, Maths or Science? Do they not require tuition and supplementary classes as well? Are they not forced to focus on the subjects they cannot do well in, with the same intensity as your children were forced to focus on Mandarin? Did (or does) their poor academic performance in this subject not also derail their overall economic performance?

On one point I am similar to the author. This is also an emotive topic for me. I know the feeling of having to endure years and years doing a subject one has completely no interest, no aptitude – no desire to learn about at all. I came through it, I accepted the importance of having to learn maths at least until O-Level standard. I worked really, really hard at it and I recognised the fact that lowering the maths weightage at PSLE or O-Level would unfairly disadvantage my many peers who were excellent at numbers. Were this debate about lowering the mathematics weightage, I would be tearing into bad letters with the same alacrity as I am now. It just is not fair at all to have one group of students advantaged over another in this way.

Ultimately, at the primary level it is vital to have foundational knowledge of a handful of subjects. Mandarin must be one of these because of reasons I have already covered previously, and its weightage ought to remain the same because it is grossly unfair to the thousands of students out there good at it but weaker in other subjects. Writers calling for Mother Tongue weightage to be lowered like to fling around words like “injustice” and such, but surely they cannot be blind to the fact that lowering the Mother Tongue weightage will itself create a huge injustice? Probably they are though, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

That last point is probably proven by the rest of our author’s letter. I was quite incredulous at this:

But shouldn’t we also consider how much subjects like English and other vital character-moulding activities like sports, social etiquette, kindness and respect have suffered because pupils have had to sacrifice the time for them in order to study Chinese?

Hello, slippery slope. Incredibly, our author chooses to blame the Mother Tongue policy for perceived societal moral decay. Because they spend too much time on learning Chinese, children are now ruder, more callous and do not hold their elders in high regard. This Mother Tongue policy, it is a powerful force indeed. One day it will cause a rain of fire and scorpions to come down upon all our heads. And toads. And warts. And all the firstborn sons will die, and the Singapore river will run red with blood. Truly in its influence it is of biblical proportions.

Of course, the essential point is one we have already covered. Mother Tongue is far from the only subject that keeps Singaporean students busy and sullen. Aside from that, do consider how many Singaporean students have not just tuition but also useless “enrichment” classes like piano, art or whatever other rubbish that eats enormous proportions of their time. Would our author agree that learning piano is actually more important than learning Mandarin, an important global language? It would be, if you were a music prodigy, but I think it is quite self-evident that for the overwhelming majority of us with two left hands in front of the ivory keys, Mandarin is greater by several magnitudes in importance.

Lastly, it is obviously true that knowing Mandarin alone is insufficient for success in business, but it’s a good start, is it not? Nor does our writer know or recollect that being a former British colony where the official language is English, India is quite a different case from China.

Ultimately so many of these letters simply boil down to the principle that “my kids are suffering because of this thing so it should not exist”. We can just put two of that sentence in every forum page, every day, and it would represent almost the entire spectrum of opinion calling for the Mother Tongue weightage to drop.

Cut it to focus on other subjects? Precisely. (5 May 2010)

MANDATING the learning of any language is not the answer to successful bilingual education. Those who argue for retaining the weighting of the mother tongue need to take a hard look at our young adults today.

Many, having just managed passes in English and mother tongue, are proficient in neither language. Even effectively bilingual speakers often do not understand the finer points and nuances of the languages they speak.

We must acknowledge the problem and I am glad that the Ministry of Education (MOE) is finally doing something about it.

Several Forum contributors worry that reducing mother tongue weighting will lead to a shift in emphasis to the other subjects. That is precisely the point.

Our education system must be fine-tuned for the right emphasis, without which we will continue to produce incomplete all-rounders while stifling the interest of those with genuine talent in certain subjects.

Why should a young child who is weak in his mother tongue be forced to spend 80 per cent of his efforts on that subject when he could spend more time on, and become so much better, in others for which he has a natural flair?

Is this why after 45 years of nationhood and much investment in education, Singapore has not produced a single Nobel laureate, while the tiny island of St Lucia with a population of fewer than 200,000 has two?

There is something to be said for nurturing passion and allowing it to flourish, instead of an indiscriminate policy of requiring all-round competence.

The ministry should also fine-tune the curriculum to create the conditions for effective learning of the second language.

The focus of instruction in the mother tongue should shift from assessment to appreciating the language and its heritage. Learning should be made enjoyable and less a drudgery.

The aim should be to lay the foundations so that when the need arises, and with the intrinsic motivation that necessity brings, these future adults can still level up to be effective in using their second language.

I have no doubt that they can do it, there are already many examples among the second language dropouts from my generation.

I’m going to just ignore most of this letter because this post would get repetitive, and zoom in on yet another laughable slippery slope argument.

Why should a young child who is weak in his mother tongue be forced to spend 80 per cent of his efforts on that subject when he could spend more time on, and become so much better, in others for which he has a natural flair?

Is this why after 45 years of nationhood and much investment in education, Singapore has not produced a single Nobel laureate, while the tiny island of St Lucia with a population of fewer than 200,000 has two?

Fire and scorpions, people. Fire and scorpions. Truly it is incredible what lengths people will go to to try to take down an implacable foe. Not only is the Mother Tongue policy responsible for widespread moral decay, it is also responsible for stunting Singapore’s intellectual development. Who knew MOE had that much power? This is some serious illuminati or Masonry shit right here. A cabal of bureaucrats, secretly working for years presumably cackling over a bubbling cauldron of eye of newt, to sabotage Singapore in ways the ordinary citizen cannot even begin to credit. Truly our two writers today have seen the light.

Seriously though:

1) Why should a young child who is weak in Mathematics be forced to spend 80 per cent of his efforts on that subject when he could spend more time on, and become so much better, in others for which he has a natural flair?

2) There is a Nobel Prize for literature, and yes, it can be awarded to authors of Mandarin works. It is a gross insult to imply that Mandarin is of no value in terms of Nobel Prizes. Why can’t it be that we nurture through the continuation of the Mother Tongue policy, a Nobel laureate in literature with a Mandarin work?

3) it is also a gross generalization to imply that Singapore’s intellectual development ought to be measured in terms of Nobel prizes won.

There is something to be said for nurturing passion and allowing it to flourish, instead of an indiscriminate policy of requiring all-round competence.

Yes. I agree. But why only apply it with respect to Mother Tongue?

I think that says just about all for the hypocrisy and sheer selfishness of this vocal minority calling for their children to be given an unfair advantage over others.