Singapore Election Watch

starry11 writes:

Do you know to whom Singaporeans have to be thankful for today's Singapore ?. No , not to any PAP leaders but to this Dutchman economist by the name of Dr Winsemius who was the economic adviser of Singapore for over 25 years . In 1960 , he led the UN Development team to Singapore and said to the PAP cabinet then to quickly industrialise Jurong . If you read his memiors/interviews given by him and this was published in the local papers then ( ST & New nation) the following are facts from his mouth when he was alive :

1) He told LKY merger with Malaysia would not work but LKY went ahead . So when Singapore was ejected from Malaysia , Winseimius said this did not surprised him and he had actually expected this to happen sooner or later unlike LKY or Goh Keng Swee.

2) Back to pre-merger days, he then had told LKY and Goh keng swee that Singapore would have full employment within a few years but both men disbelievingly laughed at him !.

So one could see here the today's success of Singapore was already predicted by this wise economic prophet as fore-ordained by the heavens. (Pls note fore -ordained is different from pre-destined just like the Mormon Christian's belief that one's life on Earth here is fore-ordained and not pre-destined which meant one needs to make the effort to get results , so it's not fated , And the situation of one's life on this Earth depended on what had transpired in one's pre-mortal existence in the same way the 12 disciples had asked Christ why was a man born blind - did he sin before - in his pre-mortal state ?)

Winseimius was from a working class family and never went to any great school and in fact was no university graduate. He got his bacherlor degree in economics while working through distance learning . Yet you can find off-campus or external degrees holders being discrimateds to this very day and Singapore is the first & only country y that forbid external degree gradautes from practising - and this policy backfired resulted in today's shortage of lawyers and the same people who had paased the laws in parlimament had to eat the humble pie recently to lower the bar from 2nd class upper honours to 2nd class lower honours now to get more law graduates to practise - a result of the Cabinet's lack of foresight of the consequences of their earlier actions on tampering with the market rather than to leave it to natural forces of supply and demand .

While benefitting from this man , the PAP of the 60s to 90s have always been fearful of intellects and kept a tight lid on the number of people who could be admitted into full time university education . Only after mid 90s when the the PAP cabinet realised that this was a double edged sword having a negative impact on the economic development of Singapore that they started to let go and finally allowed the open university to be set up after frequent appeals in the 60s to 90s even by PAP backbencher (such as JF Conceicao) and the increasing frustration by increasingly number of citizens of the working class who had passed the A levels or Poly dips still could not proceed to overseas universities due to ordinary family limited finances since the local unis were severely restricted to be run as Ivory towers.

The attrition rate / drop-out rate of the English stream schools were extremely wasteful from the 60s to the 80s resulting in " half-cooked cookies", end-result of a school system compelling everyone to go thru 4 years of half-day schooling in all secondary schools with automatic promotion policy , never mind if they had failed in any of the schooling year as compared to the British who invented the same GCE system & syllabuses required a minimum of 5 years (Form 1 to 5) of secondary education from their students even though they were a mono-lingual society compared to our more difficult learning environement where students from dialect speaking homes had to cope with learning the 2 foreign tongues of english and mandarin .

So this was a deliberately savage system imposed by the PAP which resulted in today's citizens in their 40s to 50s being irrelevant to the economic growth of their very own country against landed foreigners with the critical skills needed (so called Foreign talents ?) benefiting instead ( eg from Malaysia where their secondary school system had along been 5 years duration since colonial times in order to nuture the full potential of the educational growth of their teenagers/citizens rather than Singapore's forcefeeding conveyor belt system) .

Every one knows the negative impacts of the well publicised Cultural revolution of Mainland China of the 1960s - 1970s not realising there was in fact a similar "cultural revolution" albeit on a smaller negative scale that happened right here on our soil in Singapore. Anyone care to research this as a thesis for the Open universtiy degree ? You should do so before the still alive generation & backbenchers of the PAP of the 1960s to 80s are passed away because these are your invalauble references and resources...