News snippets

The cover page of yesterday’s TNP read thus: “PRIMARY SCHOOL KIDS EXPOSED TO SMUT”. Turns out that a contract teacher with the student’s school had uploaded R21 material onto his Facebook profile and a female student was caught watching it.

Firstly, nude videos aside, some have always wondered about the validity of using teachers who have just graduated from junior college (high school) and are waiting for their ‘A’ Levels results. Granted, they have obtained good grades for their prelims, and probably have good conduct, but are they really good at their craft? Some parents recoil in horror when they discover that their JC1 kids are being taught by fresh JC graduates. I don’t think that is an issue. I have been taught by one such tutor in my first few Economics lessons, and nearly two years later, I vividly remember our first lesson, when we learnt about scarcity, opportunity cost and moral hazard.

Secondly, nude videos still aside, teaching is a difficult career. With an increasing number of people becoming empowered with 21^st Century Skills, more are inclined to upload and share their social lives - to remain connected with pals even when they are physically separated by the Atlantic Ocean. But are teachers included when it comes to being empowered, while enjoying freedom of expression on the Internet? Do they have a social life that they can share with friends without being labeled “vile”, or making parents feel “shocked and appalled”? We may have lowered our expectations of the next generation, but our expectations of teachers are still unusually high. To be sure, we all have our private lives and opinions that we don’t upload to MySpace or Blogger. Moreover, teachers are considered to be “public officers”. We would surely be scandalized if we see another Wee Shu Min/Wee Siew Kim incident. Please, we couldn’t even tolerate Ris Low’s antics. However, what is the line between private and social lives, and who draws it?

Thirdly, I am as “shocked and appalled” when I read that it was a primary school student (actually, I assume this, as the article didn’t explicitly state it) who was watching the offensive videos. (Sadly, I got my first family computer in Primary Six, and without Internet too.) I am even more so when an unnamed parent stated that “more should be done to bring ‘unhealthy’ websites to the authorities’ attention so something can be done about them”. How many dirty websites are there? Allan Weis didn’t predict that the Internet would be filled to the brim with pornography when he created its backbone. And why push everything to the authorities? The authorities, like MDA, have enough on their plate trying to encourage the use of new media and push for innovation at the same time. MOE has enough on their plate to answer to anxious parents who complain that the latest PSLE Math paper was too tough to handle, while lowering the standards of Chinese textbooks so more people could benefit from sub-standard Chinese. My spirits were lifted when I read the comments from Madam Josephine Ng and Ms Irene Tan.

“ ‘Teachers should not be doing things like that. As parents, it is our constant fear that (students will be led astray) but we just have to teach our children to be responsible.’ ”
– Madam Josephine Ng

“ ‘It is important to control the Internet use of children because you never know what they could be looking at.’ ”
– Ms Irene Tan

Yes, teach our future leaders to be responsible netizens, and use your parental authority to control what your kids watch. Things like putting the computer in the living room are ways that may help to do the former, and they are not extreme methods, unlike using web cameras to spy on your kids, or keyloggers that record what they do on the computer. Also, have a good relationship with them! They would feel guilty when they do things they are not supposed to.

Lastly, I recall reading an online article (can’t remember where is it though) that people have been fired when their bosses see their social life on Facebook, so you might also want to consider who is in your network of ‘friends’, and set limitations on what to show on your profile!

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Next up, MM Lee “cited the teaching of bilingualism…as the most difficult policy to implement.” Whose fault is this?

If China didn’t decide to rise as the next economic engine, I presume that Singapore’s future generations will never know how to speak Mandarin, or write their names in Chinese, or even have Chinese names to start with.

To be fair, there is still a rather large Mandarin-speaking community here. Notice I didn’t use “Chinese community”, because that would probably include a larger population, and some of this larger population probably doesn’t quite speak Mandarin. We often tell our foreign brethren proudly that we have four official languages and we have good inter-racial relationships, which is true. The 1964 racial riots have been brought up so often to remind ourselves of the important of racial harmony that it has become a cliché. But I digress. Singaporeans are also often regarded as “effectively bilingual”. But when visitors come, they are sorely disappointed. True, we have our role model, MM Lee, whom I believe can speak Japanese as well as the official languages. So what? One multilingual minister does not make up the rest of Singapore.

Are languages important? What kind of importance do they have? Economic significance? Check. Communication? Check. Heritage? Huh? What horitagee? Can eat?

P.S. Do dialects count as languages too? Technically they don’t, so, not important huh?