we dont teach values
at all.
The answer lies in
a historical division in Singapore's Chinese
community between the babas and the sinkeh.
The sinkeh, comprising the majority
of the city-state's population, were the recent immigrants from
China, or whose parents were born in China.
They spoke Chinese, lived like Chinese and
considered themselves overseas Chinese. In Indonesia, such Chinese
were called the totok.
The babas, on the other
hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were Chinese more in name than
practice. They were the descendants of the very early Chinese
immigrants (Hokkiens from the Fujian province) to the straits
settlements of Malaya (Penang, Singapore and Malacca). They
assimilated with both the local Malays and
the colonising British, whom they especially
admired. The
babas developed their own culture, cuisine and language - Malay
liberally sprinkled with Hokkien.
The sinkeh were the
traders, the coolies and the shophouse owners. The babas became the
lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians;
they attended the local English-language schools
run in the tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and
Cambridge. If
the sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it was in Nanking
or another university in China. Although the sinkeh dominated
Singapore's population, it was the babas
who dominated public decision-making.
In effect, a baba minority captured
sinkeh Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of Victorian
England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore's
rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese
have had baba backgrounds. Lee Kuan Yew, who became prime minister
of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious example. He claims a
Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at
home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his
grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected
with my life," Lee said of his childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a
political necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a
focus on China, but as a baba who looked to
England.
He followed the conventional career path of a baba and
went to London to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore
became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father had
given him and two of his brothers English, as well as Chinese,
names.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
