TOTD: The Failure of PAP's Scholar-System

Thought of the Day

No matter how smart, intelligent or brilliant you were in your teens, scoring As and A stars in your exams, once you are being "anointed" with the label "scholars", you may just find yourself entrenched and kept in a environment which will not be conducive to your proper development of mental and social faculties.

That label of "scholars" along with the mindset of "Natural Aristocracy" will destroy your common sense and empathy towards the people you were supposed to lead.

It has proven in history, the best leaders come not from the group of "elites" but rather the intelligent people from the streets.

In our Singapore's system, the PAP government tries very hard to "monopolize" all the talents we have in our system by installing the elitist streaming in our education system. They will give scholarships to those identified "early talents" and bond them to civil service or statutory boards. It is one way to monopolize talents and keep them for PAP's selection so to prolong its monopolistic rule over Singapore.

However, just look at the numerous scholar-Generals, or rather, what we call "Paper Generals" we have today.

These scholars were holed up in SAF and lack the exposure of the "REAL WORLD" out there. They have wasted their time in SAF without exposures to the REAL world outside their war gaming computers. Their administration of the SAF is based on simple top-down military command hierarchy without the need of more sophisticated management skills.

Thus, it is no wonder that when they were treated like some Elitist Gods and sent to the various GLCs or statutory boards, they screwed up badly. No matter how intelligent or smart you are, as long as you are not groomed in a proper way, in the most appropriate way but only the SAF way, you will be made redundant and useless outside of SAF in the end, regardless of your rank. This is the sad state of affairs for Singapore. We have wasted so much money and most importantly, these "once potential talents" by keeping them in the worse place for development, so much so that they are causing harm to our whole country as a whole.

These Paper General cannot survive beyond SAF. Even when they were posted to the GLCs and private entities, they expected to be in top management positions, even though they have no REAL WORLD Corporate experience whatsoever, and know NUTs about running the companies, worse, the country! However, they have this "Scholar-Entitlement" mindset. They were "helicopter" into such positions and eventually, they would find that they cannot manage such corporate unless they get their own KAKIs from SAF who knows the exact "military style" of management! This is exactly what happened in SMRT and PAP leadership!

I would not mind if these "retired" Paper Generals were willing to start from middle management to learn the corporate way and work their way up but no, they were expected to be able to "plug and play" which is quite ridiculous! It can only happen in Singapore because PAP government has created a web of GLCs to allocate these paper generals nice management positions to stroke their ego of "natural aristocracy"!

Singapore will definitely decline in the coming decades basically because SAF or the civil service is not exactly the best or right place to nurture our talents for running corporations and the country.

And all these, are the wrong doings and mismanagement by PAP.

Goh Meng Seng