Check back 10 years for now, I am right.
For fear of ridicule I will not post in Chinese even though I feel like it.
There's the recent hooha over the supposed reduction in Chinese weightage for PSLE, and in all the news reports I've read(and to be honest, I don't read a lot), it's about a growing population of English-speaking families going around trying to reduce Chinese's importance in PSLE as their kids don't know their mother tongue well, probably due to parents' negligence or something.
The point theses parents are trying to make is: Our children are better in English, so they would be more successful because English is like an international language and has more speakers compared to Chinese. Because of this advantage we're endowing our children with, we feel that the education system should be more forward-looking and reduce the weightage of Chinese because otherwise our children cannot shine in an unbiased system.
And because of this small group of people who are perceived to be elites, the government already has plans on Change in the education system:
黄永宏部长说，母语教学法、考试形式和评分的改革，将是5到15年后的事，不会影响目前就读小学的学生。
quoted from:
http://news.omy.sg/News/Local%2BNews/Story/OMYStory201005111611-150942.html
Politicians, being politicians, push the timeline back so that people of now will be more appeased. It's a psychological move, really. It's like asking for sex. If I have a girlfriend now, and I ask to have sex 2 months into the relationship and get my advance spurned, all I have to do is to lay-off the topic for a few months and then go back and say something like 'I respected your decision then, now you should respect ours and let's have the relationship going my way' or something similar.
The girlfriend would feel more obliged to give in because of the supposed patient wait, and to be honest I think the government is just biding its time, because the trend of English-speaking families is going up, and if there are more English-speaking families around than Chinese ones, there'd be less resistance to this change.
Then they can change it without much opposition. Singaporeans don't normally bother with things unless things bother them immediately. Like, if the government does something like demanding every computer to be installed with certain devices to, say, stop people from watching porn, all the porn-watchers would make noise because it's something close to heart.
And in this case, Singaporeans are worried about their own children because their children studied Chinese religiously, why should the system bend to the demands of a few English-speaking families who are too damned lazy to study their own mother tongue? This public ire was fueled largely because of this selfish reason I think.
When I have kids, I will make sure they learn their Chinese well. I will speak Chinese to my wives and husbands and make sure they reply in Chinese or else they get raped(which means they'd probably not speak Chinese at all since they like getting raped by me, so rape isn't rape as defined by the dicktionary). But yea the point is that I won't force my kids to learn Chinese as in the kind of sit-there-until-you-finish-your-comprehension kind, but the you-don't-get-food-if-you-don't-speak-Chinese kind.
Kids should be brought up with many rods in your hands.
Now, we wait for a few more years before they broach this topic and successfully changes it because Singapore isn't as much of an egalitarian society as we hoped for.
-- 5/11/2010 10:09:00 PM
