BillyBong,
1) Thanks for the encouragement.
2 & 3) apt observation.
4) the petition and the proposal for students are two different
things. The petition is sth aimed at giving SGForums some kind of
coherent voice in the political arena, so that ppl here are not
just dismissed as unproductive coffee-shop grumblers. And yes, I
agree with the idea of a student committee.
However, a key problem with the idea of a student committee is that
- for historical environmental reasons probably, or Divide-and-rule
policy, if ur more cynical - the student body, as students, are
divided evenly into 3 streams: at secondary level, Special,
Express, Normal; at post-secondary JC,Poly,ITEC; at uni SMU,NUS +
NTU and the foreign scholars. So first we need a common ground to
bond them together.
I propose creating some sort of online community where members of
the three groups can freely associate with one another. In fact, I
already started it with Eiki; of coruse it's still in planning i.e.
we haven't started promoting it to ppl yet. But generally it's
there. DO you want to help in the settign up/ promoting/ managing?
haha
. PM me if ur
interested. And that goes for anyone else too. Click here to visit the
forum.
5) Like I said previously, the student body here is still to
immature to fucntion as a tripartite students' council or anything.
And aside from that, the student council model you're suggesting
might be (mis)construed as a form of subversion by MOE, and that
won't be safe, especially since infant organizations aren't usually
strong enough to take on the establishment. But what we could have
is that out of the forum I'm suggesting above, we find some
particularly good contributors, amke them mods and stuff, and
organize them into rudimentary committees which SLOWLY expand in
number and scope of activities. Eventually, form one committee to
gatehr feedback on a regular basis and submit it to the govt.
6) I don't know about STU, but yahh, tt's it. Nope, of course I
won't want it to be subservient, and I think it won't be, because
MOE seems to want to gvie schools and students more autonomy, and
exert less control over them. Inf act, this allows us to utilize
the countervailing power argument agaisnt school administrations
who can be rather arbitrary in their policies. But I do think the
MOE is loosenign up a little, probably more than MICA at any
rate.
the pikamaster
