The Sermon on the Mount

Who does the Son of God bless?



The poor in spirit;
The mourners;
The meek;
Those who hunger for righteousness;
The merciful;
The pure in heart;
The peacemakers;
The prosecuted righteous.

Come my friends, and be blessed.

The cost of labour

Many people have argued for fair-trade coffee, clothing and computers but I'm just thinking that it’s not a good idea having an air con drainage pipe facing the sunshine. Fresh water and sunlight make for algal blooms during summer. So much so that it choked the pipe and my bedroom was flooded for three consecutive nights. Anyway, we had the maintenance guy come over to clear all that for 40 RMB. Wifey and the kids are sleeping fine now despite the 35 degrees heat outside. The bliss that comes with technology and cheap labour.


Labour is dirt cheap in Shanghai and, by extension, the rest of China. 40 RMB is less than nine Singapore dollars. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it, except for the fact that to clear the drainage the guy had to crawl out the bathroom window and along a 4-inch foothold to reach the compressor unit hanging from the side of the building. With no safety attachment. I should also mention that the entire estate has the same air con brand and installation design, which means this guy and his colleagues have to do this continuously at the height of summer.

Tonight my family’s getting a good night’s sleep under climate-controlled conditions while I think about fair-trade coffee, clothing, computers and compressors. It’s definitely not a good idea having the air con drainage facing the sunshine.

Thoughts about Singapore education

On this 45th National Day, the thing that's on many people's minds isn't finding the best place for watching the fireworks. The national obsession of Singaporeans isn't food. Nobody likes to face it but all, and I do mean all, Singaporeans are obsessed about education. Talk to any parent with children of school-going age and you'll get the feeling that you've spoken to a war-weary veteran.



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There are as many points of view as there are Singaporeans, yours truly included. My beef is with too many mandarins fiddling with the system. We started down the slippery road with P3 streaming. Guess who was among the first batch of students subjected to streaming?

Grade school education is very simple - get kids to love learning. Never mind the technical skills, just teach them to fish. If any, only two things need to be done:

1. Get rid of P3 streaming.

2. Reduce class size to 20 or less.

The reason behind streaming was so students of similar cognitive ability would feel more comfortable learning with their peers at a similar pace. But take a moment to think about this. Isn't it unrealistic to expect a teacher to handle 40 EM3 students who *all* need close attention?

Experienced teachers will agree with me that in any class there will probably be 4 or 5 students out of 40 who need attention. That works out to about 10% of any cohort. Now if we reduced class size to 20, a teacher will have 2 students of such learning ability. Plus, having 18 other students of quicker thinking will exert a positive influence on these 2. That's way better than having all slower students lumped together.

Class sizes of 20 is realistic. Think of the millions spent on an "elite" few. That's more than enough to pay the salaries of extra staff and building more schools. Not enough land? I don't think so. If we can have 20 golf courses and God-knows how many shopping malls, we can build more schools. If we can have 50-storey HDB flats, we can have schools going vertical. A classroom on the 40th floor with plenty of sunlight lifts the moods of kids anytime.

Remember this, education is not about the fancy whiz-bangs, the facilities, the first places in academic olympiads. Heck, it's not even about fancy notions of teachers making dinosaurs leap out of textbooks. Just get every child interested in learning and stop destroying their self-worth with streaming.

Give the war-weary veterans some rest.

Hong Kong vs 1984-ville

I'm still thinking about the recent trip to Hong Kong. The abundance of cheerful locals in service-related jobs compared to Singapore was glaringly obvious.


Admit it, Singaporeans shun and look down on service jobs, like waiting at tables and attending to customers in a retail store. Not so the folks in HK. And attitudes have changed so much that there were smiles in abundance. Wifey and kids were fussed over at a street-side eatery at the height of lunch hour.

I'm still trying to put a finger on this difference in mentality. A wise friend of mine put it down to the HK-er's internal sense of self-worth. He feels that people in Hong Kong derived their worth not by the jobs they hold, unlike Singaporeans. He's probably right. Some years back the Singapore government announced that more jobs would be created when the casinos open for business, a friend of mine remarked sarcastically that these would all be service jobs like cleaning, waiting at tables etc. His comment revealed a lot about how Singaporeans look at such jobs.

Hong Kong is a dynamic place, owed largely in part to the dynamism of its people. At a time when LKY is fading, his son not filling his shoes too well and the average Beng/Mat/Thambi complaining away, Singapore has a lot to do to catch up with Hong Kong and other rising economies.