The people come out from NanTah are all chinese trained.
They won't agree to the anglophile baba Harry Lee's project of
anglicising Singapore society.
They will oppose.
NanTah is an irritant and a threat that must be destroyed.
And Mr Low readily confesses that he got an F9 for
English in both his A-Levels and O-Levels.
As the last batch of students from the
former Nanyang University (Nantah), he belongs to a
dying community of Singaporeans educated in the Chinese medium at a
time when the country was switching to English as its medium of
instruction in schools.
Then Prime Minister Lee had made a speech at Nantah where he
labelled it a third-class university as compared to Cambridge,
Oxford and then University of Singapore (SU), Mr Low recalls. This
was why in 1980, during Mr Low’s final examinations, it was
announced that the National University of Singapore would form by
merging Nantah with SU.
“They call it a merger, but to me it’s a closing
down of Nantah,” he is quick to correct.
The young Mr Low
was outraged with the decision, and so were many of the other
students. Together with some friends, they
put up protest posters around the Nantah campus, wrote letters to
the press and even snagged an interview with a journalist from a
Chinese paper.
“I asked myself as a citizen of Singapore, if there is
something which I feel that is unjust, something that is not right,
probably people will not know because if press don’t report, who
knows?”“Amazingly, nothing came out… the whole public
opinion was so one-sided,” he boomed. For the
first time, Mr Low saw how public opinion in Singapore could be
engineered to favour those in
power, “I asked myself as a citizen of Singapore, if there is
something which I feel that is unjust, something that is not right,
probably people will not know because if press don’t report, who
knows?”
Mr Low grew up in a family of five and his sisters brought him up
after their parents passed away when he was only in secondary
school. As a student in Chung Cheng (Main) he almost got expelled
for disciplinary problems.
Fortunately, his principal was merciful and Mr Low eventually
enrolled in Nantah, majoring in both Chinese Language and
Literature and Government and Political Administration.
It was his interest in the latter and the desire to read Western
political thinkers like Plato and Max Weber that spurred Mr Low to
brush up his English in university. But by the time he was to
pursue honours in the newly opened NUS, he was still not confident
enough in his English.
Thus, the political science department’s warning that theses would
be marked down for poor English coupled with the
discrimination he felt from the department
towards the Chinese-educated pushed him to do his honours in
Chinese Studies instead.
After graduation, he became a Chinese-language teacher at Pei Dao
Secondary where he encountered the final straw that led him into
politics. “To face a student everyday, knowing they are not slow
learners but they will not make it because of the system, I can’t
tell the student that,” he said.
Seeing his normal stream students demoralised by
the system frustrated the young teacher. “Are they slow
learners? Today, after so many years, I am
proven right because many of them are very successful.” he
said.
http://enquirer.sg/2009/01/19/overcoming-the-deafening-silence/
After his graduation, though, Tang
began to be active in the Chinese community. He taught at a Chinese
village school for five years. By the end of that time, though, he
had decided that he wanted to do something more. "I was very
influenced by Confucian thinking," he says. "I wanted to pursue my
education."
The University of Singapore did not accept
graduates from Chinese schools, but Nanyang University had recently
opened and so, in 1962, Tang joined there.
The following year, though, things
were different. Singapore University became open to him in a sort
of pilot project Lee Kuan Yew had initiated in order to "let a few
piranhas (man-eating fish) in the goldfish tank" to climatise and
season the English educated. Tang graduated in 1967 and joined the
bar the following year at the age of 38.
Tang became more active in the
Chinese community. He was the chairman of the Nanyang Academy of
Fine Arts for many years, and sat on the board of management of
Singapore Chinese High School, Hwa Chong Junior College, and a few
other schools.
In the 1990’s, at an age when many
people might have been considering their retirement options, Tang
became concerned about an emerging problem: Too few Chinese had any
mastery of Mandarin. "Many younger generation Chinese can’t even
read the menu in a Chinese restaurant, let alone Chinese
newspapers," Tang says. "Many Chinese students loathe learning
Chinese language. Isn’t there something wrong?
"Singapore is 77 percent Chinese, and you need a
‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’ to remind Singaporean Chinese to use the
language. How pitiful! In addition, the
campaign is in fact a deliberate attempt to arouse fear among the
non-Chinese and in turn the PAP use that fear to club the Chinese
community in the name of maintaining racial
harmony. Do you need a
Speak English Campaign in England or America to maintain the
continual use of English? LKY has succeeded, which the British
colonialists failed, to make many Singapore students hate learning
their own language and culture."
He was not alone in his concern. Together with a
group of Chinese intellectuals, he drew up a memo on the problem
and suggested several new policies.
As a result, Tang was profiled in the
Straits Times and, says Tang, misquoted. His friends, outraged,
drafted letters in response, but Tang told them it wasn’t worth
bothering with. "It did not occur to me that I would one day
participate in politics," he says. "Never!"
http://singaporeelection.blogspot.com/2006/05/feature-on-tang-liang-hong.html
I don't like these chinese educated intellectuals, they like to
oppose me, I want Singapore chinese to be like me a banana.
NanTah must go. It cannot stay.
