I reckon that most people who know me well enough would be surprised that I only left this issue until now. Truth be told, I was thinking of writing on social mobility in Singapore since a month ago, and have been spending time reading up on the issue. I tried to pen down my thoughts perhaps 3 weeks ago, and as I read through the articles I had, something just seemed to be amiss.

Then it struck me. I was right. It doesn't make sense at all.

As from the budget speech a while ago, Dr Ng stated that "About half of the students who are from the bottom one-third by socio-economic background score within the top two-thirds of their PSLE cohort. One in six from this group scores within the top one-third." Then continued to show the graph that's possibly engraved into everyone's minds, at least those who were interested in the topic.


Then I realized, I suppose that that's a good thing. More poor people are scoring well. Then 5 seconds later I thought. Wait, doesn't that mean that rich people are scoring like shit? Surely if half of the people from the bottom 1/3 are scoring at the 2/3 level, that means that there must be a number of students in the top 2/3 scoring below the 2/3 level!

Then came the contradiction, so for us to score well in terms of social mobility, that more poor people score well, that means that rich people have to suck?

No no no! That can't be the right indicator! That's a complete abuse of statistics to make a point!

We have to correct this mentality that is spreading around the nation. Having good social mobility does not depend on more movement amongst social classes, rather it depends on the EASE of movement.

Surely, rich people are free to spend more money on their children to score better in exams. Such is the inequalities of life. What social mobility should be doing is to allow those poor kids, who work hard enough to overcome and become better than these rich kids to be able to move ahead. Social mobility does not push kids up the ladder, rather, it creates the institutions and infrastructure for those who are willing to work to move up. It would be horrendous if we pushed poor kids up for simply the sake of "having good social mobility". Rich kids will become poorer despite having relatively more opportunities to improve compared to some of these poor kids!

If anything, perhaps a measure of real income would be a better sign of social mobility than percentages. Check out the income of the kids as they go out to work after their education. That would be the income that would bring them out of their income class anyways. Also, we note that a high increase in real income across the brackets is probably more important anyways. There might not be movement between social classes, but everyone gets to have more income to spend for a better standard of living.

But moving back to the issue of social mobility in Singapore. Now that we have identified social mobility as having the right institutions and infrastructure for movement between social classes, here is my stand.

Singapore obviously has done more than enough in this. Stop arguing over it, and move on.

Seriously.

Look around on what Singapore's Education system has to offer. Plenty of spaces in Tertiary Institutions, ITE, Polys, Universities. Bursary and funding for poor students who are unable to pay for their schooling. Individual schools having funding for students to study in their schools (RI etc). Its really absolutely ridiculous. Check out any developed countries, US, UK. We are really almost the best. I reckon we could learn more from Finland, HK and such. But is this somewhere we should be devoting this much time arguing about?

From a kid, my view of education has always been simple. To educate. We have an infrastructure that envied by many countries, of course by all means, someone should be innovating with them, thinking up of new ideas to improve the system. But what the government has been doing all along before this fiasco, should be the main push of the system at the moment.

Create capable kids.

We are no longer simply living in Singapore. We are living in the world. Our competition is not simply Singaporeans, but the world. We have to ensure that our students are capable enough to compete in the world, that they all have the abilities, in terms of IQ and EQ, to pick up important duties and posts worldwide.

With more teachers in the workforce, smaller classes, teachers minimum graduates, more teaching scholarships, all these recent changes are all heading in the right direction. We are facing a world where everything is getting better, at an exponential rate. To me, it is more imperative that as a nation, we can produce students that can keep up to the pace, and not be washed away by the world.

But that is simply my point of view. I think the argument around social mobility really has been a big waste of time. There has been no significant improvements but adding in more money. Just actions to pacify people who are complaining. I do understand that there are certain structures that hamper mobility, like a lot of streaming, but since we are moving into diversification and pouring money to the elites, that is something that really cannot be avoided.