I have been inactive on my blog, very inactive. The first reason is that the past one and a half month or so of my life is devoted to Basic Military Training, where we were warned against blogging our experience (which may be critical of the military and possibly surface stuff that puts SAF in negative light). Anyways it’s over and I would say I learnt very much from the experience – my life in the military ahead may be more demanding but I must say that BMT has prepared me for military life.
Then comes the A Level Results together with all the implications it carries. I wouldn’t say I did badly though it was inferior to Kwang Guan’s grades. There’s college applications, scholarship applications and so on. All these nonsense are pretty nerve-wrecking but it’s the first hand experience of many game theory stuff at play: screening and signaling, coordination (in terms of the placement of open house dates and faculty talks) and so on. For teachers, they will have quite a hard time thinking about good things to say, or ways of saying the same old good things for their top students. Students are either spoil for choices or desperate for somewhere to go.
I am trying my best to head overseas but I realised the need to reserve places in universities at home lest my hopes of going overseas are dashed by the lack of a scholarship. At the open house of some particular local university, I came to realise that Singaporeans who stay behind in Singapore remains very much the same as the students who has been in our system for 15 years before entering tertiary education. They are happy with just doing well with whatever is thrown at them. Sure, they are intelligent kids who excel at almost anything – they have a great social life, they mix well with people, they got excellent communication skills and they may even have the best fashion sense – but alas, they don’t really have an idea what they want out of life.
After pondering about how wonderfully aimless most Singaporeans are, I became frightened by the prospects of having classmates who score exceedingly well in the subjects they do, the research paper they write and in the speeches they make; and yet when I ask them about what lies ahead in their life, they have little or almost no idea. More shockingly, they aren’t sure if they are doing something they really want. Perhaps these people merely want to excel, in anything they are doing, any field they are thrown into. This is a by-product of a dynamically engineered society, where needs of the society is quickly translated to roles to play for citizens at individual levels and government suggestions quickly heeded to prevent social catastrophes.
True enough, Singaporeans are able, receptive and adaptive, but they seem void of what I would term ‘true aspiration’, in contrast with ‘social aspiration’, which is more collective and in many sense, prescribed by a higher authority of the society. That is not to say I am not guilty of such a ‘mistake’, if foreigners choose to think this way. There’s a real need to encourage Singaporeans to think extensively about what lies ahead for themselves (not only the world, just because in the classroom, you have to discuss that). We have to help more people get out there and see the world and come in contact with overseas counterparts who actually knows where they are heading to, and immerse into a culture of greater independence, greater sense of ‘true aspiration’, less reliant on ‘prescribed aspirations’.
