Their actions speak for itself and they shld let the people
decide whether or not they are trustworthy. The effects of this
"stifling" style is already showing - in this competitive
environment where creativity and innovation wins the bread, we find
ourselves sorely lacking to compete amongst others - our education
and training all along is to execute perfectly not to create. Now,
the education minstry is trying to turn the direction but sadly its
slow and probably take longer than this generation.
Eh let's be reasonable here. We're a country that's just 43
years old, this "stifling" style was valid in a country of diverse
cultures and languages with a rather high illteracy rate. It
did help produce the workforce to sustain Singapore up to this
point.
I work in the creative industry so i'm kinda annoyed when people
assume that creativity and innovation can just be conjured out in a
system. By its very nature, a system cannot produce creativity and
innovation it can only produce a higher average and people to
maintain and to slightly improve the system. That's why
mavericks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs drop out of school.
We like to go on about these rag to riches stories. But let's be
realistic, how many unknown failures were there? How
many people failed to produce 1 Bill Gates? By the rules of
probability America had a 100 times better chance compared to us.
They say Singaporeans aren't creative enough to create
successful entrepreneurs, maybe we did had a lot who tried,
but simply failed
Schools take up 8 hours of our day 5 days of the week (With
CCA and such maybe more). The rest of the time is spent with
friends and families. Why is it we feel that an education
system would play a bigger part in who we are?
People say the Japanese are creative and innovative, but it's
because they have a culture of striving for perfection and strong
personal discipline. Culture is simply not something you can build
in even 5 decades, even with the immense access of information from
the internet. Because how we interpret and deal with that
information is already formed when we were children. The same with
our parents and their parents.
To be fair, LKY has done an incredible job with the
educational system thus far. It has create a strong middle class
who can make better choices. Given history, there was so much
things that could go wrong along the way. So give the old man his
due and stop raving about his mistakes.
Who can truthfully claim he has not done more good than bad?
