Intervene early in bid for diversity

Intervene early in bid for diversity

SINGAPORE - When we worry that too many Public Service Commission scholarship holders are from top schools, what exactly are we worrying about?

For PSC chairman Eddie Teo, who wrote an open letter last week on diversity in the organisation's selection of future leaders, the fear seems to be ending up with "a Public Service comprising only the privileged and upper classes."

In the letter on Tuesday last week, Mr Teo stressed the value of diversity to the public service.

Diversity in terms of what schools scholars come from is important as "a good proxy indicator of social-economic class," he said.

This is borne out anecdotally. Top schools do seem to have a disproportionate number of well-off students.

When you get down to it, many top scorers - who come from, or end up in, these top schools - tend to hail from better-off homes.

But rather than just accept this as fact, we should instead work towards improving socio-economic diversity in our junior colleges.

After all, top junior college Raffles Institution was once seen as a school for anyone, regardless of background, as long as they had the smarts.

My older colleagues tell me that Raffles used to have far more students from varied backgrounds, and had yet to gain a reputation of socio-economic elitism. One could speculate as to why things have changed. Having fewer students of higher socio-economic class was probably easier decades ago, when that class was smaller to begin with. As the middle and upper-middle classes have grown, so has the number of top students from them.

Less benignly, the rise of tuition may have made excellence easier to achieve for those with the resources.

But the response should not be to accept this status quo. It should be to restore the ideal of top schools as places for the brightest, not the richest.

When we fear having too many scholars from top JCs, what we truly fear is socio-economic elitism.

We should thus tackle this fear at its source: by making the top JCs more diverse to begin with.

To do this, more support should be given to less-privileged students long before they enter JC, so they can reach their full potential.

In a sense, recent efforts to strengthen the pre-school sector, so that bright youngsters are not deprived of a quality education before they enter primary school, are noteworthy.

There are also comprehensive levelling-up programmes to ensure that students develop good foundations in English and mathematics.

But can more be done by the Government? One might even go as far as free enrichment classes for those who show aptitude at a young age, to help them flourish.

The best teachers could be spread across the island, so that a bright child, a far as possible, has the same chance of success whether he starts in a brand-name primary school or a neighbourhood one.

Students from top schools also get extra coaching or advice from teachers in how to ace scholarship interviews and prepare job resumes - an advantage that their peers in lesser-known schools usually do not enjoy.

More resources can be put into giving selected students from such schools the opportunity for such classes.

All this is a more targeted solution of intervening upstream to enhance the diversity of JCs, compared to just focusing on getting more students from lower-ranked schools for the sake of diversity.

As Mr Teo himself noted in his letter, the PSC's standards will not be compromised in the name of diversity:

"We continue to subscribe to meritocracy and do not practise affirmative action or positive discrimination."

 


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