it started of with my ever-insecure friend who wonders if going overseas for further study is truly better than being in a local university, and mind you, he secured a place in a prestigious faculty which many hanker for but few make the cut.
and so, he's been sharing with me, he has been trawling the world wide web for opinions regarding this tacky issue. and showed me the following links:
oh, elitists! read their blogs if you like, to find out how how self-centered they are.
honestly, my grasp of english isn't on par with either lady melissa or the intellectual snob (ok, so she admits to it). i mean i can understand what they're writing, just that there's the occasional hard but common word which i never can be bothered to check its meaning, and i don't have the writing flair.
i'm not keen to launch an offensive - waste of my time. just a glimmer of my thoughts, because it kind of swished away too fast for me to type it all out haha! (oh man, i suck.)
elites need to stop overlooking the fact that it's not that easy to climb up the social ladder (yes, i do know what social mobility is). it's like long-term karma - you work damn hard as a noodle seller with only lower secondary education and save up enough money to fund your child's education (hopefully your child is hardworking enough). assuming your child does make the best out of your finances, he gets a decent degree or a certificate, decent meaning 'alright' and not 'wow' like 'hpvsm' (harvard princeton yale stanford mit. who created this acronym?), he can have a hopefully better working environment and a better job. then, his kids - third generation, i think many of us are in this generation? - have access to better things like tuition and enrichment classes.
that's all fine and dandy to me. but what happens when issues complicate matters? a working parent in a poor family passes away, poor parenting creating delinquents, or someone in the family has kidney failure?
where to get the money? how to discipline and rein in the child? how to save your family member who's dying of cancer? no money, no talk. and money comes from intellectual capital which can be gained if you have money. life's not that easy for most.
we cannot forget, of course, the change in mindsets of the people! the rather educated second generation have different values pertaining to how the kids should be brought up etc. than the first generation. which brings up another point, that those values can be translated into money. a disciplined person, for example, will be far more likely to succeed in life than one who is not, all else being equal.
the wealthy and the educated must have very different values which they hold dear to as compared with the non-folks. explained simply.
and regarding the brain drain, what do you think will happen if singapore had a university for the elite? i'm sure the government could create that if it tried, given its track record.
you're going to have under-enrollment because we only have a population of 4-plus million. and that's unprofitable and hard to sustain. you could try to increase enrollment of international students, and following which you'll get dissent from your citizens who will cry unfair. we only have so many people and so many universities, you know. you want singapore to become a mere education transit hub?
i suppose it's not a crime to comment, but given their high status in society they could try making singapore a better place for everyone and not be selfish and keep all their intellectual capital to themselves (protectionism to preserve their elite status?). it's like having money and not using it!
hello? return to planet earth, live in the real world with real people and real happenings. it's the sad case, many 'elitists' intermingle, so their social circles are very different from the real demography. the wealthiest live in landed property, take private transport and work at the top levels of a company, with a nice office to themselves. not to say that they don't interact with people from other classes, they do. when they went to school (even then, that's quite skewed) or public areas like restaurants and shopping centres.
haha! maybe they perceive the average pedestrian as another 'object' in the cityscape. you know what i mean, like, each person is just a chink in orchard road and you just don't care and mind your own business.
and that's the same for anyone else who's walking behind you - we're all little specks of carbon and water in this vast world. unless one is the president of some organisation/country/anything to that effect, we're all pretty 'dispensable' and 'indispensable' at the same time, in some way :)
2 comments:
omg YUCK those blogs are the exact kind of people that i HATE to no end. The typical Rafflesian GEPPER. UGHHHHHHHHH PUKES & DIES.
lolol...
ya, there was once i saw the post abt geps on, i think, student sketchpad at blogspot, waa. all the emotionally charged + elitist comments from geppers like 'gep pwns mainstream' or sth to that effect urgh
please tell me i'm an exception haha!
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