web.singnet.com.sg/~kohfamey/on_Raffles%20htm.htm
The article which caused the controversy is featured below Gateway to the Ivy League --- Prestigious Singapore School Sends Droves to Top Colleges; To get there, the young Singaporean beefed up her grades to win admi ssion to a feeder school for Singapore's Raffles Junior College, the government school that landed her older brother in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other graduates in a host of top universities abroad. Then she went down to Raffles and gave her teachers flowe rs and bottles of wine. Over 40% of the 820 student s who graduated in December have been accepted by top US universities. About half of that group will attend elite, Ivy League schools. Cornell Univers ity alone accepted 90 of Ms Teh's classmates; Dozens of others this year have been accepted by Britain's Oxford and Cambridge. Raffles charges students just $15 a month in fees, but it's no ordinary institution. A product of Singapore's highly competitive approach to education, designed to fuel the national economy, Raffles is the peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pus hes the cream to the top. Starting with a "primary-school leaving exam" that helps determine what secondary school a child gets into, Singapore's system includes four year s of basic secondary school followed by an exam that determines what junior college one attends for two years of preuniversity schooling. By the time they graduate, Raffles students have an extra year of schooling compared with US teens. Another key to Raffles' extraordinary college-placement success: Money is no object. To groom leaders for its agencies and the companies under i ts control, the government underwrites the college education of hundreds of top Singaporean junior-college graduates. Students seeking such aid must sign a contract, or a bond, to come back and work for a government agency or corporation for six years. More than half of the Raffles grads who are heading to the US . "It makes it a little easier for us to accept them," acknowledges Mike Goldberger, director of admission at Brown University, which has a limite d financial-aid budget for international students. Raffles Junior College, established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamf ord Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raf fles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Ye w, the patriarch of modern Singapore. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of high schools that feed elite US colleges focused on US schools and thus didn't include Raffles. "It's very satisfying," says Winston James Hodge, the school's principal and a Singaporean like most of the faculty. To attract top talent to its island economy, Singapore also offers scholarships to bright teens from across Asia. Anand Bhaskar, 18 years old, is one of 100 foreign students at the school. Most are from China, Malaysia and Ind ia and attended Raffles on full scholarship. Cornell not only offered Mr Bhaskar, the only child of a financial consultant and a bank officer in Pune, India, a spot this year, but a partial scholarship, too. "What most of us want is a diverse community, a broad base of international students," says Wendy Schaerer, senior associate director, undergraduate admissions, at Cornell. The students we enroll from Raffles have done very well." Mr Bhaskar, for example, offers much more than the 1550 he scored (out of a possible 1600) on his SATs, or the straight A's he earned on his final exams. An active member of the math and computer club s, he also danced in shows put on by the Indian cultural club at Raffles and tutored children at a day-care center in his free time. Likewise, Ms Teh edited a school magazine, played softball for the Raffl es team, and performed street music for charity during school holidays. At Raffles, as at most schools in Singapore, math and science are stressed. Just 8% of Raffles students major in humanities, and almost all of them still take advanced math courses as one of their four subjects. To make sure students are more than just math machines, the school encourages them to join at least three clubs or teams, ranging from water polo to the economic and current affairs society, and do charity work. Last year, a group of students raised money and went to Cambodia to help refurbish a drop-in center for street kids. There are five teacher s who serve as applications advisers, two for US universities, two for school s in the United Kingdom and one for Australian schools. Between July and Octob er, there is at least one talk each week by Ivy League alumni or an admission s officer from a US school. Those talks motivated Ervin Yeo, 20, now a freshman at Yale studying ethi cs, politics and economics. "When you hear all these success stories and hear about the students before you who go on to Princeton and Harvard, you feel you can be part of this," says Mr Yeo, who is the first in his immediate family to go to college. The government is backing Mr Yeo, whose mother works in a supermarket an d father in an electronics shop. He was given a scholarship by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which also allowed him to defer mandatory two-year army service until he finishes college. Mr Yeo, who played rugby at Raffles and now does so at Yale, says the transition has been easy. "You're used to being the cream of the crop in Singapore," he says, "and it's just the same thing at the Ivies."
com Well now, it's just a simple case of reaping what you sow, isn't it? RJC and Mr Daniel Lim, the shoe-in for Harvard, are examples of what our system of education is geared to produce: reliable factories of local t alent, and their product: the CV that others would die for. And seriously, we can't really object if we ourselves believe in "meritoc racy", the rule of the best people, giving to each what they deserve etc . In terms of any quantifiable standard of personal achievement, RJC and Daniel Lim are pretty much going to get top marks. The system made it t hat way, by setting up targets in the various areas for the schools and their students to aim for. Every target is like a red flag being waved i n front of a bull, telling people to go for the kill and "overfulfill" t he plan in the most grossly excessive manner possible. It's sort of like the Stakhanovite movement under Stalin - the whole of s ociety (almost) is geared towards the production of these "special" indi viduals who seem to have superhuman abilities to score As, clock up comm unity service hours and rack up massive testimonials and CVs. Supporting them are a whole cast of Indonesian or Filipino maids, tution teachers, assessment book writers, piano/ballet/swimming teachers, "education spe cialists" from MOE or independent schools, sporting institutions, Young PAP clubs, orphanages and a ton of government funding. It seems to be qu ite impressive, when you look at it in terms of "fulfilling the Plan". However, if the historical performance of the Soviet system is anything t o go by, perhaps we might be justified in raising a number of concerns: 1 The Stakhanovite movement bred faction and conflict within the factori es, as jealousy amonst the other workers for the celebrated individuals mounted. It just didn't seem fair that everyone was slaving but only the Stakhanovite reaped the rewards. The result: accusations and purges, of ten targeting the managers who were accused of "wrecking" or "sabotage" that led to the Stakhanovite being unable to fulfill his productive pote ntial. In our own case: growing discontent from those excluded by the various se lection processes at the workings of the system? Growing distance betwee n the top-school elite and mutual antipathy between the two social "clas ses"? Evidence: things like the RGS-neighbourhood school dating controve rsy, or the recent debate on the list over a letter by a certain girl as serting her "right" to a scholarship. Those of us who come ...
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