Current mood:

disappointed

The fallacy of meritocracy
acidflask had a long and hard rant about the fallacy of meritocracy, particularly with regard to Singapore.

'there are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. and i am unsure about the universe.' - albert einstein

i am writing this in my biochemistry class because i realize that i would be really bored then. turns out that i was right. so let me rant (long and hard) about meritocracy, particularly as it is practiced in singapore. ranting is addictive, especially since it’s always about something one feels particularly passionate about. so let me present to you the thesis that meritocracy, especially the way it is practiced in singapore and much of the world, is an unsustainable proposition. if this is a sacred cow to you, go away, you’ve just demonstrated one of those inconceivable infinities.

the entire rant turned out to be horrendously long, so i've broken it up into more manageable subtopical pieces. hopefully you will find time to read it all. this piece is on the relationship between exams and meritocracy.

- part i -

let’s put it this way: meritocracy is a farce, and is an impossible ideal as it stands today. why? the basic premise is sound enough: reward the most meritorious, and promote them to leadership positions in a society/organization. in principle, it certainly seems superior to other means of leadership selection; such as aristocracy, where such taboo phenomena such as nepotism may occur; or democracy, where the tyranny of the majority prevails. the unwashed masses are stupid by definition, since by definition the massive populace are below average on average, as compared to the meritocrats who are by definition above average on average. (mull over it for a while, it will make sense). heaven forbid that idiots rule the country! that’s why we need to divide and conquer, to herd in the random hordes of blithering idiots lest they trip up and vote for unworthy opposition politicians!

the delicious irony of meritocracy - its achilles’ heel, if you will - is that the definition of a meritocracy conveniently sidesteps the issue of judging precisely who is meritorious. how does one define merit? in singapore’s context, the answer is clear: scores on standardized examinations. first psle and gce ‘o’ levels, then primary 4 streaming examinations (intermittently) and gce ‘a’ levels, and then most recently some experimentation with sats. why waste time thinking about such woolly things like merit when one can have a nice quantifiable measure? such is the engineer’s worldview, and a most dangerous one too. “engineers design by the numbers, and that’s the problem.” tackle a problem by defining metrics, work out some target number, and hit that number using any means possible. who cares how it works, as long as it does. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

the examinations process in singapore is an unforgiving system, because one’s performance on specific exams at specific points in time make or break one’s future, and for life. high scores open doors; low scores slam them wide shut. a spell of sickness can impair your ability to regurgitate and therefore doom your entire future; a lack of aptitude in a compulsory subject compels one to mediocrity for life; forgetting to bring a calculator to your maths ‘d’ examination spells instant failure because everyone else does so well on it. i am sure that many more such anecdotes abound. the ‘o’ level maths ‘d’ exam is my favorite example of an exam which utterly fails to discriminate between good and bad students, because the score tells you basically how many careless mistakes you’ve made on that one exam, and not how well you ‘know’ the material. so basically the signal-to-noise on a maths ‘d’ score is so low as to be practically useless.

most importantly, examinations are doing their jobs less and less efficiently nowadays. ‘a’s on gce exams used to be prized rarities in our parents’ generation; today’s top students count the number of ‘a’s on their (near-)perfect transcripts. how much of it can be attributed to a genuine increase in scholastic ability across the board? and how much to grade inflation, the specter of increased expectations of those who fund of examination authorities? how much can be attributed to the convergence of the ‘learning the exam’ strategy? if a student is able to do all the problems in the chemistry ten year series (extra credit if s/he used a copy without detailed solutions, unlike the infamous red-spot series), does that mean that s/he understands chemistry? and how about measurement uncertainty and resolution issues? is a student with 9 ‘a’s really that much worse that a student with 10 ‘a’s? how about a 9 ‘a’ student v. a 9 ‘a’ 1 ‘b’ student? how large an exam score difference does one need to attain statistically meaningful results? there is a whole panoply of issues pertaining to measurements using examinations, all of which have yet to be addressed in the public eye.

most worryingly, the phenomenon of examination-based testing cultivates the mentality that the knowledge that a subject represents should be neatly delineated into ‘need-to-know’ and not. how many times have you as a student heard the refrain ‘this is not in your syllabus?’ course syllabi are by definition a canon of standard facts and knowledge in a specific field, i.e. things that have been researched to death, and are as dry as bitter winter snow. all the interesting stuff, the frontiers of research, theses that ignite passions, takes place outside students’ syllabi by definition. what surer way to kill interest in a subject than to sigh wearily: ‘aiyah, outside your syllabus lah, donch worry!’? why teachers do this is, of course, would make an interesting exposé into the harried lives of our educators, but at any rate outside the scope of this rant.

what does all this translate into for our current students, our citizens of tomorrow? kiasuism, general apathy for all pre-university subjects, chow mugging, regurgitation without understanding, learning the exam not the subject… do any of these sound familiar? are these really the kind of values that we want to instill in our future generations, that a gauche mix of machiavellian goal-oriented tactics and chinese water-torture-like method of storing information is the way to succeed in life? that collecting awards is more important than the process or accomplishments for which that award was given? can we really blame the twisted products of the system for what it has done to them?

the notion that a person’s merit can be boiled down to a single number, a composite score from specific tests at specific points in one’s life, that such is the only worthy measure of intelligence - as it manifests itself in academic performance - is ludicrous at best. i am not sure about universities elsewhere, but american universities have definitely long acknowledged the limitations of standardized testing. not that american universities are faultless, but it’s one thing that they are doing right. the recent brouhaha over the entire university of california deciding to drop sat scores as an admissions requirement is an illuminating point in case. that’s the reason behind the essay questions; and for graduate school, research track record, and letters of recommendations. the more diverse sources of information, the better: many sources of information reduce the dependency on any one single measure and therefore the inherent flaws of each measure give a smaller distortion to the picture of the student that it is trying to portray.

- end of part i - - link

this part is a subrant on the psychosocial effects of examinations and the pressure it exerts on students.

- part ii -

in singapore, where social engineering has long been an important feature of our society, the effects of engineers’ fixations on metrics, manifests itself in many social settings. let’s just focus on the effect of the paramount importance of examination scores has on students. keep in mind, again, that today’s students are tomorrow’s citizen. most visible and most obvious is the relatively high proportion of student suicides over failure to achieve desired examination scores. (japan is another country that comes to mind.) and the many documented cases of examination anxiety precipitating mental breakdowns. (not widely publicized, but ask around. some teachers in particular love to gossip about these things.) and how many untold students work themselves up into a frenzy during examination season, falling sick, experiencing weight fluctuations, snapping at their unwary family members?

there is of course, a more light-hearted side to all this. many of the fluxes that occur in social traffic can be traced back to the examination culture. attendance at golden villages drops significantly in september, and resurge in december. walking along orchard road in june is an exercise in squeezing your way through a human sea like a piece of flotsam. and you can forget about finding a seat at starbucks or mcdonald’s in may without having to fight your way through a sea of textbooks, worksheets, pencil cases and bookbag decorations, punctuated by the obligatory drink that ‘rents’ the table for the next few donkey hours and preventing paying, high-turnover yuppies from frequenting their stores. no wonder frustrated store managers downtown chase students away, like unwanted crows.

only recently has the ministry of education finally realized that academic achievement is not everything, and has set up experimental schools focusing on mathematics/science and sports, respectively. well, at least it’s a step in the right direction. however, the splicing of such ‘radical’ thought with the entire system leads to ridiculous things such as forcing the sports school students to be at least of express stream standard. on one hand, they want to cultivate sports talents, but yet they can’t quite bear to decouple sports aptitude from academic achievement, their sacred cow which they love to milk for results. *sigh* well, at least they seem to be trying.

the survival tactics of mugging and kiasuism to cope with the selection pressure of academic examinations have opened up new epochs in the annals of idiocy and rudeness. mugging for an education, or what my ex-chinese teacher fondly calls 填鸭式的教育, places paramount value on factual recall, and on precious little emphasis on conceptual understanding. this is completely against the grain of both sciences and humanities, where critical thinking is the key that unlocks the world to the mind. and although a good memory is a valuable asset, critical thinking that is the real skill that should be imparted on students, because it is one that becomes applicable to every aspect of life. of course, it could be argued (darkly) that in the current conformist climate, an unthinking populace that plays follow-the-leader 24/7 is the ideal state for a meritocracy, in which case that explains the massive hemorrhage of intelligentsia in the last two decades whom must have felt that ‘their intelligence was insulted’. (what a nice singlish-ism!)

let me discuss science in particular, and the abysmal way lab sessions are run in singapore. while both emerged from a philosophy of understanding based on factual discourse, science also defines clearly the supreme role of arbiter: to let the natural world decide which hypotheses are correct and which are wrong is the fundamental philosophy of science. that’s why laboratory sessions are an important part of a proper education in the sciences. but the way we teach labs are pitiful – they are presented as things that people have to do, fixed protocols to memorize and swallow, no need to think in lab, just do. lab time is valuable – professionals and trainees alike both suffer from not having time to think in lab. when wilheim röntgen was asked to comment on what he thought of x-rays when he discovered them, he reportedly retorted: “i didn’t think. i experimented.” while this illustrates neatly the application of empiricism, this does not mean that thought is not needed to the process of scientific discovery and criticism.

- part ii - - link

this part is a giant parenthetical retelling of anecdotes of an ex-classmate, who neatly illustrates the asocial aspects of selection pressure due to the examination culture.

- part iii -

thoughtlessness is the primogenitor of many an accident, as one of my ex-classmates has happily demonstrated time and time again to us long-suffering classmates. this guy, a fellow chemistry major, goes into lab each time and acts as though he had absolutely no clue what he should be going, even though he has the pre-lab already done. he would do every single lab by watching what other people did, then do his monkey-see-monkey-do routine.

if he decided to monkey me for one particular lab session, he would do one thing, walk over to me, then ask, “i did this. then how ah?” then if i was in a good mood i would humor him, whence he would return to his bench space and do the next step and repeat the cycle until the end of lab. if not, he would just hang around watching me do the lab until a teaching assistant (ta) would come around and ask what he was doing, and shoo him back to his bench space.

of course, he got into all sorts of hilarious trouble. a memorable incident was when he did his whole monkeying routine on me on a titration (yes, he acts as if he has no idea how to do one!) and he copied what i was doing step by step until the part where i added phenolphthalein to the acidic aliquot to be titrated. he missed that step completely and happily started titrating, and then wondered why he could not get the endpoint despite using up all the titrant! (for those of you who are rusty in chemistry, phenolphthalein is an indicator which is colorless in acidic solutions and bright pink in basic solutions.)

my favorite episode was when he borrowed a plastic ruler (the acrylamide kind that is half transparent and half white) from a fellow singaporean in organic chemistry lab to draw some pencil lines. he later found out that the ruler was stained with some chemical and happily rinsed it with acetone to wash it off. imagine the stunned look on his face when the ruler started dissolving in his hands! panicking, he chucked the melting ruler back into the owner’s pencil box, in which a melted mess was discovered by the irate owner half an hour later.

a simpler episode but just as funny was when he inverted a separatory funnel to shake up the mixture but didn’t cap the funnel before inverting it. and all he did was to stare at the growing mess on the bench as the liquid kept flowing out of the funnel that he was still holding in one hand! a bemused teaching assistant who saw the whole thing then said wryly, “looks like i’ll need to teach you the technique of bench-top extraction”, which basically involved wiping up the entire mess with paper towels and subsequent washings with solvent of said towels.

it’s pretty clear that this guy hasn’t the faintest clue what chemistry is about. yet he manages to score pretty well on tests since he happens to be one of the most kiasu people that i have ever met. he is the kind that will call me up every single time a homework assignment or test was returned, to ask “how many marks did you get ar?” like seriously, does it matter? and “ha, ha, i got half a mark more than you” or “how come you got one mark more than me? how ar, how ar?” is simply childish. like that is going to be statistically significant at all.

km has the most annoying habit of looking over my shoulder every time i note down something in lecture, and trying to figure out what exactly i wrote down, and even bugging me in the middle of lecture as to what some of my symbols mean! of course, he wouldn’t even dream of reciprocating if i asked to borrow his notes.

but by far the most disgusting episode that involves him was this one time in organic lab when he threw away his product in the second week of our final experiment, which was a three-week-long synthesis experiment. (he was doing a solvent extraction and poured away the wrong layer, something the tas drum into us never ever to do.) the course has a policy that if you ask for more starting material, you get 25% off, so he being ultra-kiasu would do anything to avoid that penalty. so he went around begging for material from the rest of the students. most of us just ignored him, but a sympathetic classmate (call her B) donated half of her sample to him to let him continue the lab.

the next week B messed up her experiment, and wanted to get some material back from km to continue the experiment, but he refused to part with any of his precious sample because he had 'lost too many marks already' so he 'can't afford to give you back any (sic)'. so poor B had to ask for more starting material to restart, so she suffered the restart penalty. on top of that, she had to stay overtime to complete the experiment (imagine trying to cram a three-session practical into two-thirds of a session's worth of time) and hence also suffered a penalty for overstaying. (yes the teacher is anal!)

ok, so the morals and ethics of the preceding situation were ambiguous. but get this: he got all depressed over messing up the lab and fretted so much over his potentially 'ruined' grade. B, despite being the weaker student, ended up comforting him over the missed opportunity and told him that 'it's not important. grades aren't everything' and not to let it get to him too much. she also confided that she wasn't confident of doing well because she had already messed up too many other experiments. turned out that she got a 'c' for the class, which she was kinda upset about but thought it was still liveable. then she ran in to km one day and she asked him how he did overall. and the cheeky bastard just said 'oh, it's not important. grades aren't everything!' later on i wormed it out of him that he got an a. bloody hell. guess why everyone shunned him after that semester.

based on what i’ve argued above, i don’t really blame him for being socially dysfunctional. it’s more a sad reflection of what intense kiasuism can do to a person and have one's moral framework totally derailed in mindless pursuit of an optimal examination score.

- end of part iii - - link



this part expounds on the various uses (and abuses) of examinations, and what they are trying to measure.

- part iv -

organizations have long given their own examinations as a means for differentiating the large numbers of candidates for open spots, and to aid their selection of successful candidates. this began with the chinese civil service examination system way back when, and was an institution that survived the dynastic cycle intact and kicking. i remember reading in some history textbook that some historians even claim that even in times of inter-dynastic anarchy, people still faithfully registered and took the entrance examinations! astounding!

of course, our dear mm claimed that he decided that gee, since this worked so well for imperial china, it must therefore work well for singapore as well and therefore instituted mass examinations and (by induction) created the entire scholarship system as well, to have the best and brightest steer the future of the country. (on a side note, this claim is not quite complete since reliable historical evidence exists that the british colonial system also did place emphasis on examinations, and did administer examinations, such as the qualifier for the venerable rhodes scholarship. and what do you think the ‘c’ in gce ‘o’/’a’ levels means? it certainly doesn’t refer to some synonymous city in massachusetts, usa.)

it is arguable that in the years before and immediately after singapore’s independence, such a system was need for lubricating the engine of modernization that supposedly propelled singapore from its third world, ok-so-i’m-independent-now-what state to the ultra-modern economic miracle it is today. whether it has indeed attained its targets is of course an entirely different story, since quantifiable metrics, i.e. economic indicators, paint a picture that jars with the anecdotal experiences of the lay singaporean. and consider this: merely a generation ago, the concept of mass literacy of one that was just sinking in to the populace. our grandparents’ generation was one huge collection of hardworking illiterates, punctuated by the occasional person who stayed in school long enough to pick up an alphabet, a handwriting style and perhaps some knowledge of the world. i bet if you administered any gce examination to them, the vast majority of our grandparents would have ended up being labeled as blithering idiots. maybe someone should travel back in time and sell them ten-year-series first.

let’s make it painfully obvious why the preceding situation is ludicrous. any examination system, by definition, differentiates good candidates from bad candidates, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ being defined as the score obtained on some examination script taken by the candidate, as graded by some rubric. the examination therefore picks out a select group of ‘good’ students, which are a subset of the entire candidate body and are therefore a set with restricted diversity in characteristics. this discrimination is based solely on some imperfect measure of the candidates’ knowledge of some specific canon of facts and/or skills deemed to be important. that is why it makes no sense to administer a written test to illiterates. many other examples abound in the educational psychology literature, particularly with regard to cultural settings. an example in point: a tribesman from the depths of the borneo jungle would fail a popular culture test miserably, and we would fail to survive in the borneo jungle just as miserably. what is considered ‘important’ is a highly culture-specific thing.

so the chinese civil service examination made sense in its time. simply by requiring that candidates be able to read and write, a vast majority of the unwashed populate was thus excluded from a system where record-keeping is of paramount importance. academic examinations, of course, work well in their academic settings: assessments for coursework play an integral part in modern education; the french and chinese universities still give their own proprietary entrance examinations to this day to select promising undergraduates to groom. but since the advent of the industrialized age, the need for mass education to promote mass literacy had precipitated the need of standardized testing, in the form of gce/gcse certificates and sat/act/gre scores. a recent development in the field of educational testing, standardized testing is seen by relieved bureaucrats as a convenient measure for deciding who to admit to college and who to condemn to working as roadsweepers for life. (the occasional drop-out-turned-billionaire is to be forgetton as merely ‘one of those flukes’).

examining agencies, however, readily admit to the limitations of standardized examinations. the educational testing service, administrator of the infamous scholastic aptitude test (sat), used to have this disclaimer on its website that its examinations should never be used as the sole judge of a students’ worth, and stressed the importance of the considering entire application package. (i have been unable to find this disclaimer again when i checked just now, so this could be just a figment of my imagination.) independent research studies by many educational psychologists have concluded that the sat scores are a reasonably good predictor for scholastic success in college, but is useless for predicting anything else outside its intended scope, such as future salaries. a telling foreshadowing for the abuse of examinations

now turn our attention back to our little red dot (or in modern political parlace, our little piece of snot). the idea of using standardized examinations has been carried to an overly rational, and hence illogical, extreme: instead of using such examinations for what it was intended for (for which it is by no means perfect), it has become a determinant for one’s social status and hence place an explicit (albeit well camouflaged) cap on the net value of one’s worth. while maternal pride at studious progeny is undoubtedly a chinese tradition dating back to mencius (or before?), presumably a predication of future riches and/or social status and a rich source of proud maternal stories and dreams of eternally bright futures, studiousness no longer has any intrinsic meaning in determining one’s future success (or lack thereof) in society.

this misguided assumption is reflected in our education system: we have the slow ‘normal stream’ track, the intermediate ‘express stream’ track, and the various highfalutin’ ‘special’ tracks like the gifted education program (recently scrapped in favor of integration into the curricula of top schools), special assistance program schools (a relic of the bribe made to the chinese intelligentsia to shut up while lky anglicized singapore), and now the special schools. no i don’t mean special education for the mentally retarded, bless their souls. i meant the nus science school and the singapore sports school. and tellingly, few people remember the mentally slow, a significant fraction of our population rapidly being left behind by the accelerating pace of change in our modern globalized society. but back to the other special tracks, the impression that the civil service gives us is that if you’re not one of their scholars, you’ll forever be second-class to them, and forever suffer less experienced (and possibly less competent) scholars promoted over your heads while you continue to slog away toward that glass ceiling? (ok, enough scholar rants here. i suppose i’ve made my point already.)

a particularly interesting aspect of our education system pertains to scholars-to-be: the gce ‘a’ level papers 0, the so-called ‘s’ papers. presumably meaning ‘special’ papers, but more accurately termed ‘scholarship’ papers, the anecdotal history of papers 0 indicate its creation by the ucles to as to fulfill the need of a scholarship agency to refine its pick of candidates, who have been picked up more and more perfect-looking grades from institutions that used to be schools, but had degenerated at some point in its history into diploma mills. now ‘s’ papers were meant for the exceptionally bright to strut their worth by pitting their intellects against problems of higher difficulty as compared to the typical ‘a’ level question. now we have the usual trappings and paraphernalia that surround every other subject: lectures on “ ‘s’ paper topics”, ten-year-series for ‘s’ papers, and horror-of-horrors, model answers for ‘s’ paper questions!

drawing from local scholarship history, this scholarship agency must be none other than the public service commission, at one time the only such agency based in singapore, and still the issuer of the most prestigious scholarships today. but consider this, my dear civil servants: what the hell does a background in electrical engineering have to do with the civil service? if you claim that such backgrounds promote the development of skills such as critical thinking, why not just test that outright? why insist that scholars maintain their ‘standards of excellence’ by consistently scoring high grades, groom them to become useful engineers/scientists (and precious few humanists), then grab them back home and mire them in administrative trivia for the rest of their lives? is this not the clearest example yet of a complete mismatch between what academic scores say and what these people will eventually end up doing? are the best students necessarily the best leaders? and are lousy students necessarily lousy leaders?

ok, i have to stop now, or i’ll never be done picking on scholarship agencies. it is a sad reflection of the times when even the best and brightest among us have to stoop to rote memorization to keep ahead in an ever-changing rat race, and have to jump through higher and higher hoops just to succeed. and sadder still, when those in charge insist that academic merit is a critical feature of a promising leader of tomorrow’s society.

- end of part iv - - link



this part talks about the relationship between a meritocratic society and metrics, and the sociopolitical inertia that eventually develops in such a society.

- part v -

the bulk of social inertia in a meritocracy is due to the critical link between meritocracy and measures of merit, which translates into a deep and fundamental connection between a meritocratic society and its education system. the latter is charged with the responsibility of molding wild, unruly children into future citizens well-adapted to their role in the former; the former dictates the social norms and requirements of its citizens. resistance to change therefore arises because measures of merit are assumed (at least in singapore) to be eternal, unchanging truths. this explains why the ministry of education is arguably the most important government body in singapore, perhaps even more so than the ministry of defence. however, the ministry of education has a massive social responsible: to separate the wheat from the chaff, to predict who will do well in an ever-changing world, and who won’t. sadly, the popular tools that are used on every student – streaming and examinations – are fast being obsolete that a world that doesn’t cares much for marks and points anymore.

this fixation on metrics in a meritocratic society illustrates a fallacy which i call the engineer’s paradox: if some property can’t be quantified, than it is irrelevant in describing a system. because the most precise description of a system is when it can reduced to numbers, and we don’t have the numbers to describe woolly things like political freedom, emotional health, familial ties, etc., so we just proceed, assuming that it doesn’t matter. the logical trap here, of course, is that that a society is simply much more complex than anything else science and engineering have tackled.

let's run some numbers (the math-averse can just skip these two paragraphs): a liter of air contains 2.6×1022 molecules. each of these molecules which can be quantified in terms of its positions and momenta in each direction in space, plus accountings of internal vibrational and rotational degrees of freedom. in short, each molecule needs nine numbers to describe what precisely it is doing (let’s pretend quantum effects don’t matter here). therefore one would need 2.3×1023 quantities for a full and complete description of that small wisp of air. now we might despair as to how we would ever characterize it, but then comes along thermodynamics, which states that at equilibrium, that puff of life can be described completely by just three quantities: its pressure, its volume, and its temperature. a triumph of science and logic; and indeed, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics work well in their intended scopes, and have become valuable tools in many scientists’ and engineers’ arsenal.

naturally, when such a powerful tool exists, one may be tempted to use it outside its context. the notion of social engineering is a case where engineering concepts have been applied beyond its useful contexts. but let’s ask the analogous question: how many degrees of freedom does the population of singapore represent? take an average singaporean to weigh 60 kilograms and have a density of 0.95 times that of water. (let’s not make them too dense to begin with.) take for an incredibly coarse approximation that an average biomolecule (in the residue sense) has a molecular weight of 100. this means a singaporean is composed of 3.4×1028 molecules, and therefore has 3.0×1029 degrees of freedom. so a population of 3.5 million can only be fully described by a staggering 1.0×1036 numbers! (note that this calculation ignores land and water.)

the notion that such an incredibly complex system could ever be reduced to a few quantities of interest, such as gdp, literacy, and school rankings is just foolhardy, at best. and consider that living systems are never truly in equilibrium, since the only living systems in equilibrium with their environment are dead and fully decomposed organisms. the whole premise that any form of engineering can ever been attempted on a system that is literally ten trillion times more complicated than a liter of gas starts to look shaky based on the numbers. and besides, the more extreme results of social engineering, such as the central planned economy, have already proven themselves to be woefully inadequate institutions. resistance to change is arguable the prime reason for failure. (like duh, a planned economy shouldn’t change unexpectedly right? only if it’s an isolated system, like the soviet union before glasnost.)

the notion that all living systems are not in equlibirium is extremely important, since we know from personal experience that society and culture are constantly in flux. skills considered important for survival pass rapidly from novelty to something you can get bragging rights for to mass popularity to something the younger generation takes for granted. typing is a good example. twenty years ago, few people knew what a computer was, and had precious little reason to use a typewriter; today, ah sohs who can’t figure how to sms on their shiny nokia phones are looked down as being so out-of-sync with modern society. therefore, it is only natural to expect that the definition of ‘good’ and ‘successful’ will also be in flux, yet the measure for success in our society has remained essentially constant. Arguably, changes in syllabus do account for a few things, but many dinosaurs still lurk in our required canon for graduation. Like seriously now, how many people use french curves, flexible rulers and graph papers once they graduate? How many people, when told to plot a graph, would happily print out a perfectly drawn spreadsheet result?

the problem is that meritocracy is a system that is resistant to change. why? because it is an inherently conformist system. those who are most successful in its selection criteria tend to do the best in it and are unlikely to find anything wrong about the system. or if they do find something that jars with them, they just have to swallow it if they want to climb to the top. by the time they reach the upper echelons, the tendencies to forget their original gripes are overwhelming. some set out to change the system, in the light that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. but the system exerts its selection pressure of them, and in time they are molded to become conformists.

- end of part v -
ok, i guess this part isn’t so coherent. let me know what you think. it's hard to sustain a coherent rant over thousand-word installments. but i'm almost done. - link



this last part of the rant goes back to the united kingdom, whose culture was imported into singapore and never quite left when the british withdrew in 1963. it speaks of michael young, the man who coined the term ‘meritocracy’, its mutation through failure to recognize satire, and its use by tony blair, soliciting a few tired words from lord young.

p.s. upon reading some comments on the first installments, i stumbled upon an article on the dysfunctional aspects of singapore by thomas freeman. all good no bad gives an outsider’s refreshing point of view and raises some interesting questions with respect to what i have to say here.

- part vi -

singapore is not entirely to blame for its screwed-up implementation of meritocracy, simply because the latter is an impossible concept, even in principle. in fact, the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined in a satirical vein, a nuance apparently not picked up on ever since the word was first published and had been bothering its inventor until his death in 2002.

i assume that most of you have yet to become familiar with the venerable lord michael young of dartington, the very man who coined the word ‘meritocracy’. for those of you loyal readers who have yet to read sir michael young’s book the rise of the meritocracy, written in 1958, i highly recommend that you do. last i checked, the national library had a single copy in reserve, which you may borrow for a mere s$0.50. oh, the irony, that a concept fundamentally enshrined in our very existence be so poorly documented!

but the dystopian picture that it paints is a society where iq tests become the sole arbiter of a person’s worth, and replace the british class structure as the new way to differentiate society. social benefits become dependent on one’s intelligence (the new social class). the elite nouveau, i.e. the meritocrats, develop a snootiness that they deserve all the trapping that society heaps upon them – the same society that they govern. simultaneously, the stupid are led to believe that they deserve to fail and deserve less than the smart. Eventually, iq testing becomes more and more refined, resulting in testing and differentiation at earlier and earlier ages until it reaches its logical extreme of pre-natal testing and labeling. in 2033, the underclasses become sufficiently pissed off to incite a massive revolt against the meritocrats and britain slips into anarchy.

the parallel with contemporary singapore is chilling, even just in its synopsis. and consider that it was written almost fifty years ago! if you found this spookily accurate, i guarantee that the full prophecy will keep you up for nights on end.

this was a big issue in the uk in 2000, with a big debate over tony blair’s use of the word ‘meritocracy’. notice the conspicuous absence of similar debate in singapore, where the concept of meritocracy as espoused by the ruling elite coincides neatly with the context of blair’s usage, and is arguably much more pervasive than in britain.

even if you do not read any other article that i reference, you absolutely must read lord young’s letter to the guardian, lamenting the misuse of his then neologism. it is so important that you hear it from the horse's mouth that i will feign ignorance of copyright laws and reproduce most of that article wholesale here:

I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation...

The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033.

Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating.

Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society [... since ...] schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.

Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people's birth, status has gradually become more achievable.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.

They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.

It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.

They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.

Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.

With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.

[...]

In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.

Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.

As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.

[...]

There was also a prediction in the book that wholesale educational selection would be reintroduced, going further even than what we have already. My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that "No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes".

At least the fullness of that can still be avoided. I hope.

and in the context of contemporary singapore, it is painfully ironic that on some english website carrying a discussion of the word meritocracy, the author states:

“the problem with it, of course, was that mr young used the wrong word as the basis of his creation. merit, as usually understood, has little to do with educational achievement as such.”

obviously the author has no inkling how false his statement is to us.

i had a thought a few years ago, when i was still in jc, about how singapore might just be passing its best and brightest over. how? because some of them are not academically inclined, but may be incredibly talented at other things, skills that are not measured by standard examinations. the one i decided to voice out turned out to be juggling, which juggleress has turned into a pretty profitable (and immensely enjoyable, i would imagine) freelance act. i asked myself (and a bunch of unsuspecting friends): how should we go about discovering such hidden talents? should we go around and test for absolutely everything? how do we quantify an ability to cook? or comfort lost souls? or juggle? (i suppose you could do this pe-style, and add more and more items to juggle until people just lost control...)

then i came across another michael young document: a transcript of a speech entitled "equality and public service" delivered to the sociology section of the british association for the advancement of science on september 11, 2000. again, i will let the horse speak for itself:

Ethics [... comes] from how people report their feelings about themselves. Ethics are about other people and how well or ill you behave towards them and they to you and to each other. Your unease can be added to if you think of other people, especially towards the bottom of the heap...

So neglect at the bottom is combined with indulgence at the top – but with the suggestion that the indulgent may also be discontented, or at best no better off in the way they feel about themselves. At a deep level, something has gone awry, no doubt for many reasons. Perhaps one is that wealthier people in wealthy countries like ours are beginning to question whether wealth has much value apart from monetary. Perhaps some satiation is setting in; perhaps enough will be enough. If it happens, there could be less resistance to higher taxes and a surplus left over for the poor at home, and even more for the poor overseas who are still in grim and absolute poverty. In the century ahead, we may get near the point where advanced society turns in a new direction. If it happened it would be the biggest watershed since the first Industrial Revolution: people would no longer be cursed by being unequal but prized for their differences from one another.

Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupations and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there would be no overall inequalities of the sort we have got used to. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant to the lorry-driver with unusual skills at growing roses? A pluralistic society would also be a tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure pervading the whole society but to develop his or her own special capacities for leading a full life which is also a noble life led for the benefit of others as well as the self.

michael young espouses an ideal that we would all do well to work toward. the only question, is how.

so now that my rant is finally done, you may ask: why pick on singapore?

because singapore has taken the principle of meritocracy to the extreme of a social more, one that is enshrined as one of the country’s core values.

because examinations have long been the means of judging one’s worth in this ex-british colony.

because the concept meritocracy is supposedly steeped in a thousand-year-old tradition supposedly carried down by the immigrant chinese majority from the imperial service examinations of mainland china.

because clinging to this false ideal explains many dysfunctional aspects of singaporean society without even trying.

because practically all of us have been burnt by the unforgiving system that is the manifestation of the horrible concept at some point in time.

because many of us then turn against our society for some superficial reason but are oblivious to the undercurrents that we are struggling so hard against.

because i care, and if you are reading this, you probably do, too.

because i don’t know what can we do about it, and it worries me greatly.

- end of part vi -

ok, that’s all i had in mind during yesterday’s biochemistry class. all 6,324 words’ worth, for your singular reading pleasure. (if you include lord young's words, 7,542 words.) and to my peers in singapore, think, and think hard, together, if she is to have any future at all worth talking about. - link

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It's a little sad to read about the third part - while meritocracy in the ideal sense promotes fair play and rewards the best for their abilities; it is quite different in the real world.

Is it all about the survival of the fittest at the expense of the weak and the naive? Has our meritocratic system bred a generation who looks at nothing but grades (while in school) and money (after graduation)?

My own personal experience from JC bears that out. You could gladly share homework solutions/tips with others and sometimes you wouldn't get reciprocal treatment. And there are "friends" who would withold useful revision material from you so that they could get better grades than others.

After the As, there are others who would tell you they are not applying to certain organizations for scholarships; yet you would bump into them in the interview waiting room.