Seriously guys...is anyone here going to say being good in study
is a bad thing now?
There is two different type of elitism in the world. One is due
to you born in a rich family, the second type of elite, is the
elite because of one education.
Elite as in a person who has better education , and is able to
use that education well enough.
Do you want your country to be a nation where stupidity is
celebrated?
Please, first of all, no one is equal in this world. And if we
become a society who believe that having good education isn't
important, we might as well say bye to our society
Take science for example, if a student dare to challenge a
teacher with his scientific belief, that student should be shouted
down simply when that student did not even finish his secondary
school education.
Hell, then there is the issue with neighbour schools and etc.
Please, first of all, it is possible for you to climb up the social
ladder if you bother to study hard enough and get a degree...and
all the way till a Ph.D
Sure, you can whin about the fact that you come from a harsher
background, being unable to afford tuition and etc.
Guess what? The world isn't fair! Stop using the world being
unfair as an excuse to say why can't I be better than the RI
people.
And if you work hard enough in primary school, you will not be
margainsed easily.
While I disagree with those elitist in certain top schools, who
believe that a person intellect or social status can be judged at a
secondary school level, I believe that everyone should strive for a
good education.
Then mindset of most neighbour school students don't help
either. Hell, when was the last time where you can see a majority
of neighbourhood students being even concerned about politics and
economy?
The mindset of the majority of the people in neighbourhood
secondary schools NEEDS to be changed.
And this is from a person studying in a neighbourhood
school.
Most of those people who is concerned about those issues belong
to those elite schools.
When the majority of people in secondary schools don't even
bother about political issues, do you want them to vote and decide
how singapore is ran?
If a person is good in maths and science, what does that mean?
It means his logical reasoning is stronger.
And let me ask you this question. Do you want a person with more
logical reasoning or less logical reasoning running the
country?
Gosh...I can believe what tons of you is saying on this
forum. It is a nice thing to be dumb now? Allow people who is less
educated to make judgement?
People who only care about how they only about everything in the
short term? People without proper education can only see things in
the short term and can't see anything bad in the long term.
In a democratic society, it is even MORE important to
have a well educated and learned society. After all, this is
how democracy should be.
A nation of people able to make SMART choice when they are
voting for a government.
Knowledge should be the key to sucess, not simply hardwork.
Please, if simple hardwork is the viewed as success, then those
construction workers should be managing the company or
country...
When you guys starts to say how bad it is to be an
elitist, and being good in academic results should not be
celebrated, the difference between what you guys want, and what the
chinese during the cultural revolution want in no different.
So stop complaining about being treated as inferior in regards
to academic standing.
If you guys are not good enough, don't expect to be treated
equally as a person with good result. Or else, meritocracy might as
well be ignored in singapore.
A person from a wealither family usually can study better
because he has better access to help, either from his family, or
through a good tution teacher. However, determination is up to you
personally. A person born rich might not be in RI or those top
schools, if he lacks the motivation to study.
After all, everyone should be treated equally
right? Even though nothing can be equal in the real
world.
Anyway, this is an article that address the issue of
elitism in the US...and say why we should tolerate elitism,
academic elitisim.
Best Is the New Worst
By SUSAN JACOBY
Published: May 30, 2008
PITY the poor word “elite,” which simply means “the best” as an
adjective and “the best of a group” as a noun. What was once an
accolade has turned poisonous in American public life over the past
40 years, as both the left and the right have twisted it into a
code word meaning “not one of us.” But the newest and most ominous
wrinkle in the denigration of all things elite is that the slur is
being applied to knowledge itself.
Senator Hillary Clinton’s use of the phrase “elite opinion” to
dismiss the near unanimous opposition of economists to her proposal
for a gas tax holiday was a landmark in the use of elite to attack
expertise supposedly beyond the comprehension of average Americans.
One might as well say that there is no point in consulting
musicians about music or ichthyologists about fish.
The assault on “elite” did not begin with politicians, although it
does have political antecedents in sneers directed at “eggheads”
during the anti-Communist crusades of the 1950s. The broader
cultural perversion of its meaning dates from the late 1960s, when
the academic left pinned the label on faculty members who resisted
the establishment of separate departments for what were then called
“minority studies.” In this case, two distinct faculty groups were
tarred with elitism —
those who wanted to incorporate black and women’s studies into the
core curriculum, and those who thought that blacks and women had
produced nothing worthy of study. Instead of elitist, the former
group should have been described as “inclusionary” and the latter
as “bigoted.”
The second stage of elite-bashing was conceived by the cultural and
political right. Conservative intellectuals who rose to prominence
during the Reagan administration managed the neat trick of
reversing the ’60s usage of “elite” by applying it as a slur to the
left alone. “Elite,” often rendered in the plural, became
synonymous with “limousine liberals” who opposed supposedly
normative American values. That the right-wing intellectual
establishment also constituted a powerful elite was somehow
obscured.
“Elite” and “elitist” do not, in a dictionary sense, mean the same
thing. An elitist is someone who does believe in government by an
elite few — an anti-democratic philosophy that has nothing to do
with elite achievement. But the terms have become so conflated that
Americans have come to consider both elite and elitist synonyms for
snobbish.
All the older forms of elite-bashing have now devolved into a kind
of aggressive denial of the threat to American democracy posed by
public ignorance.
During the past few months, I have received hundreds of e-mail
messages calling me an elitist for drawing attention to America’s
knowledge deficit. One of the most memorable came from a man who
objected to my citation of a statistic, from a 2006 National
Geographic-Roper survey, indicating that nearly two-thirds of
Americans age 18 to 24 cannot find Iraq on a map. “Why should I
care whether my mechanic knows where Iraq is, as long as he knows
how to fix my car?” the man asked.
But what could be more elitist than the idea that a mechanic cannot
be expected to know the location of a country where thousands of
Americans of his own generation are fighting and dying?
Another peculiar new use of “elitist” (often coupled with
“Luddite”) is its application to any caveats about the Internet as
a source of knowledge. After listening to one of my lectures, a
college student told me that it was elitist to express alarm that
one in four Americans, according to the National Constitution
Center, cannot name any First Amendment rights or that 62 percent
cannot name the three branches of government. “You don’t need to
have that in your head,” the student said, “because you can just
look it up on the Web.”
True, but how can an information-seeker know what to look for if he
or she does not know that the Bill of Rights exists? There is no
point-and-click formula for accumulating a body of knowledge needed
to make sense of isolated facts.
It is past time to retire the sliming of elite knowledge and
education from public discourse. Do we want mediocre schools or the
best education for our children? If we need an operation, do we
want an ordinary surgeon or the best, most elite surgeon
available?
America was never imagined as a democracy of dumbness. The
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by an
elite group of leaders, and although their dream was limited to
white men, it held the seeds of a future in which anyone might
aspire to the highest — let us say it out loud, elite — level of
achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/opinion/30jacoby.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
