Continuation of Socratic Seminar
Hello again.
Today I will be discussing (with myself) about whether the Singapore government had been successful in establishing a national identity. Firstly, we know that Singapore has not been very successful in pushing Singaporeans to be more responsible for the cleanliness of Singapore. Compare us to Japan for example. For them, cleanliness has become a habit and this has also turned into part of their identity as Japanese which is globally recognised (or at least I recognise it). For us, however, we continue letting the cleaners to do their job and has thrown this responsible quality for the cleaners to uphold. Therefore we cannot say that a clean garden city is our identity.
Another issue is the Speak Good English and Huayu Cool campaigns, which seek to increase the standard of our speaking. This seems to be an act suppressing the Singlish of Singaporeans, which many take pride in and perceive as our national identity. However, these are some of the government's efforts to raise us to a world-class standard. This is what I recognise as the underlying problem. By trying too hard to gain the acceptance of the world as a well-developed model nation, Singapore has put too much importance on being a world-class nation. This has led to our country lacking a unique quality which we can see as our national identity. We have emulated many other great countries worthy of our appreciation and shaped ourselves like them. We have exchanged our individuality for a globalised nation. We have left ourselves orchids, merlions and language to base our national identity upon. This, as I believe, is a reason for the difficulty we have encountered in trying to seek a national identity for ourselves.
Lastly, I would like to comment on whether Singaporeans can ever have a national identity. The answer is quite obvious and it is a yes. Any country who puts effort in creating an individualised image for herself and with her citizens working hand-in-hand will always achieve what they aim for. Given some period of time, i believe we will be able to create a national identity which will further outshine any Singlish or Merlion.
Regards, Yi Pin.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
a New Year for new posts or the other way round.
a New Year for new posts or the other way round.
This is my very first post in this year and it will signal a new revolutionary change for the style of my blog-writing. I will turn from the so-called childish typer into the seasoned matured thinker who will analyse so critically that even I will be astounded by my acridness. I will...
Enough of all the New Year aspirations. Today I will blog about our successful (or should we say impromptu) Socratic Seminar which only blossomed into delightful food for thought after 40 minutes into the Socratic circle. This will be revolving around questions concerning national identity, which will form the basis of my discussion.
Firstly, I will need to define national identity. As it is named, national identity is what us as a nation can identify upon and thus unite upon this common belief or rallying point. For Singapore, as a "young" republic of 40 years, we are still hovering around the question of whether we actually have a national identity. Some argue that Singapore is too young to have one, while others retaliate that our language (Singlish) is a valid. Thus my question is whether Singapore has already established one?
Many of us will say yes, stating our multiracialism as part of our national identity. This is true to some extent but if you look at it critically, this may just be a side effect of our government's campaigning for a multiracial Singapore. It has caused us to take our multi-racialism for granted and treat it as one of our unique qualities. The fact is, Singapore's Chinese take up about 75%, Malays 13%, and Indians 8%, with other ethnic groups 4% (statistics provided by http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/reference/yos09/yos2009.pdf). We can see that there is no way a racial riot could break out because it would be a completely unfair battle. Contrary to America(before USA) or Malaysia, the ethnic groups often have a smaller difference and this leads to more than small scuffles. In TKAM, the racial discrimination is also evident with the growing number of blacks. During the merger, Malaysia had also been apprehensive about Singapore merging with her because that would result in having more Chinese than Malays and this was a bone of contention which finally led to our split and hard-fought independence. Anyway, we can conclude that our racial tolerance may not be so significant after all because the Chinese was the main majority after all.
The next question is whether Singlish could be counted as our national identity. Yes, it is a unique language which only Singaporeans that have been living in Singapore for a period of five or more years could make sense of the extra colloquial tags. However, languages which are mish-mashed have been around for a long time in countries with more than one language spoken. Singlish is our language made of English, Chinese, Hokkien, Malay and peppered with other dialects. It may be something that Singaporeans can find themselves using to identify whether one was a Singaporean or not, but it is merely a distinct characteristic found outwardly in Singaporeans. We have to go deeper than that.
Another question which popped out was the issue of whether the government had played a part in establishing our national identity. The government had been rolling out many programmes/campaigns such as the clean and green campaign or the speak good English campaign. These are some of the efforts the government had put in to improve our quality of life and it has also in the process shaped our thoughts about national identity. The fines imposed are one good example but this leads to the question whether Singapore has been successful in creating this unique identity for Singaporeans.
I will cover that in the next post.
Regards,
Ng Yi Pin
This is my very first post in this year and it will signal a new revolutionary change for the style of my blog-writing. I will turn from the so-called childish typer into the seasoned matured thinker who will analyse so critically that even I will be astounded by my acridness. I will...
Enough of all the New Year aspirations. Today I will blog about our successful (or should we say impromptu) Socratic Seminar which only blossomed into delightful food for thought after 40 minutes into the Socratic circle. This will be revolving around questions concerning national identity, which will form the basis of my discussion.
Firstly, I will need to define national identity. As it is named, national identity is what us as a nation can identify upon and thus unite upon this common belief or rallying point. For Singapore, as a "young" republic of 40 years, we are still hovering around the question of whether we actually have a national identity. Some argue that Singapore is too young to have one, while others retaliate that our language (Singlish) is a valid. Thus my question is whether Singapore has already established one?
Many of us will say yes, stating our multiracialism as part of our national identity. This is true to some extent but if you look at it critically, this may just be a side effect of our government's campaigning for a multiracial Singapore. It has caused us to take our multi-racialism for granted and treat it as one of our unique qualities. The fact is, Singapore's Chinese take up about 75%, Malays 13%, and Indians 8%, with other ethnic groups 4% (statistics provided by http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/reference/yos09/yos2009.pdf). We can see that there is no way a racial riot could break out because it would be a completely unfair battle. Contrary to America(before USA) or Malaysia, the ethnic groups often have a smaller difference and this leads to more than small scuffles. In TKAM, the racial discrimination is also evident with the growing number of blacks. During the merger, Malaysia had also been apprehensive about Singapore merging with her because that would result in having more Chinese than Malays and this was a bone of contention which finally led to our split and hard-fought independence. Anyway, we can conclude that our racial tolerance may not be so significant after all because the Chinese was the main majority after all.
The next question is whether Singlish could be counted as our national identity. Yes, it is a unique language which only Singaporeans that have been living in Singapore for a period of five or more years could make sense of the extra colloquial tags. However, languages which are mish-mashed have been around for a long time in countries with more than one language spoken. Singlish is our language made of English, Chinese, Hokkien, Malay and peppered with other dialects. It may be something that Singaporeans can find themselves using to identify whether one was a Singaporean or not, but it is merely a distinct characteristic found outwardly in Singaporeans. We have to go deeper than that.
Another question which popped out was the issue of whether the government had played a part in establishing our national identity. The government had been rolling out many programmes/campaigns such as the clean and green campaign or the speak good English campaign. These are some of the efforts the government had put in to improve our quality of life and it has also in the process shaped our thoughts about national identity. The fines imposed are one good example but this leads to the question whether Singapore has been successful in creating this unique identity for Singaporeans.
I will cover that in the next post.
Regards,
Ng Yi Pin
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