Major discontent

I had lunch yesterday with an old friend and fellow Dartmouth alum who graduated this year and is now working for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It may surprise some of you that he didn't major in Economics or Engineering or even Political Science, but Russian and Linguistics. Instead of writing a thesis, he spent his entire senior year attempting to reconstruct the Khitan language and didn't have to take any classes in the process.

Russian and Linguistics!

For whatever reason, the MAS is unique (I think) among nearly all GLCs, statutory boards, and government agencies in allowing its US-bound scholars to freely choose their major(s) and not forcing them to make up their minds beforehand. As I've mentioned on several occasions to the powers-that-be, this is a great policy. With perhaps a few exceptions, you do not need to possess specialised knowledge in a particular academic discipline in order to do well in the civil service or in a GLC. What you do need are good work habits, a reasonable amount of intelligence, and the ability to write well; a decent American liberal education ought to help cultivate all three. At the same time, I don't think you can deny that an organisation benefits when its members are able to bring diverse intellectual viewpoints to bear on its work.
Posted by kungfuzi at 2:01 pm | 0 comments

  Why isn't there a Circle of the Stupid in Dante's hell?

My worst class at NIE features an English Literature instructor who can't speak proper English ("Please stapler [sic] your papers."), comes late to class, spends all the time talking about herself rather than teaching pedagogy, and doesn't appear to know anything about literature.

I had the occasion to ask her once why she had assigned Chekhov to her secondary school English Literature students. The question was straightforward enough, and I would have been quite satisfied if she had, say, acknowledged the problems inherent in translating Russian to English and explained that her classes on Chekhov had been focused not on Chekhov's diction, but on his characterisation. Instead, she replied, "What's wrong with Chekhov?" I was too stunned to muster a polite reply, and she quickly moved on to something else. No one in class to my knowledge has yet to obtain from her a concise, coherent answer on anything but the most elementary of queries.

Several lessons later, we read an English translation of a Chinese poem and completed a vocabulary worksheet based on that translation. Never mind that Chinese and English are radically different languages. Never mind that there exist innumerable English poems that could have served her needs much better. (Had she spoken the previous sentence, she would have said "poetry" instead of "poems" -- she does this all the time.)

The scary thing is that she has an MA in English from NUS and an MA in Theatre Studies from New Zealand, serves on the executive committee of the English Language and Literature Teacher's Association of Singapore, and has spent the last couple of years as an English Subject Head in a number of secondary schools. I pity her former students. At least all of us know that we're being taken for a ride.
Posted by kungfuzi at 11:15 pm | 0 comments

  Thought for the Day

Sound familiar?

A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music-a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.

And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,-I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."

From William James, What Makes a Life Significant.
Posted by kungfuzi at 2:49 pm | 0 comments

  Freedom from FEER

The Far Eastern Economic Review is in trouble with the Lees for a piece it ran on Chee Soon Juan a while back. Incidentally, the author of the article, Hugo Restall (who's also the editor of FEER) is a Dartmouth graduate (class of 1992); in college, he ran The Dartmouth Review -- a publication which often got itself into, ahem, trouble with the administration. (I've written about the Review quite a bit on Dartobserver -- just search the archives.)

I always wonder just how effective these libel suits are in helping to preserve the ruling party's favourable reputation. Their logic goes something like this: if we don't act quickly to do something about the offensive piece, its premises and conclusions will entrench themselves as facts and cause irreparable harm to our prestige. But you don't have to be a lawyer to realise that this argument is flawed: repeatedly suing people and publications for criticising you is going to give you a bad reputation among a lot of people (myself included), who will question your rationale for adopting such heavy-handed methods of dealing with dissent and perhaps even infer that you have something to hide from the public at large. Look, if Singapore is as in good shape as you say that it is, a little glasnost isn't going to bring the country down. Try ignoring what your critics have to say for once (most governments do) -- your reputation may even improve!
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:49 pm | 0 comments

  Going it alone

Running multiple blogs is bound to get tricky at times, but I figure that the distinction between A Pedagogue's Progress and The Dartmouth Observer is pretty clear (see sidebar). The former will serve as a place for personal (though never that personal) thoughts and commentary on Singaporean issues, while the latter is more impersonal and international in outlook.

Cross-posting and cross-referencing will, however, take place. I started blogging when I was in the US; my exemplars were the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens (who, although not a blogger, is more prolific than most bloggers), and the gentlemen at Oxblog: writers whose interests span politics, current affairs, history, religion, literature, and philosophy, and transcend the confines of time and place. By contrast, the Singaporean blogosphere comes across as rather provincial; even its most perceptive writers tend to limit themselves, for the most part, to local affairs. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But we have the ability to go beyond talking about the PAP and the vicissitudes of life in Singapore, and it's my considered opinion that we should move in that direction.
Posted by kungfuzi at 11:57 am | 0 comments

  Please don't

The Straight Times's article today (it's on p. H8) referring to former Harvard President Larry Summers as a don has me rankled, because I've always thought that the appellation, as used within the English-speaking academic world, referred to a British professor whose demesne was a college at Cambridge or Oxford (don is actually a Spanish word which derives from the Latin dominus, or master):

First come I, my name is Jowett;
There's no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this college:
What I don't know isn't knowledge.

Harvard, of course, like most American universities, doesn't have a residential college system (Yale does though). You won't find American newspapers calling American university professors dons, and I doubt that even the British broadsheets do so either.

On a related note, I'm equally upset when the ST speaks of students going to Harvard, Yale, or wherever to read Political Science, Women's Studies, or whatever. I majored in History and English at Dartmouth. LKY read Law at Cambridge, etc.
Posted by kungfuzi at 10:52 am | 0 comments

  Coming soon.
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:39 am | 0 comments