"power must not only refer to the capacity to realize one's ends in a conflict situation against the will of others; it must also include the capacity to prevent opposition arising in the first place [...] in one sense power is most powerful if the actor can, by manipulation, prevent issues from coming to the point of decision at all." by David Lockwood.
(cited in J.Urry and J.Wakeford (eds.) Power in Britain, 1973)
Lukes Three Dimensions of Power (1974)
According to Lukes there are three different levels at which power can operate on.
Direct Conflict
This is also known as the ‘liberal’ view of power.(Dahl and Polsby)
One part has more power because they have been able to prevail in the face of other’s opposition. That an elite can impose their wishes against a majority opposition. Dahl and Polsby argued that in order to ascertain who has the power in American society you must also prove that they can impose their will.
Whether the oppostion parties in Singapore represent a majority of suppressed individuals would be an argument which would be difficult to provide empirical evidence in support of it, I do feel that the Lee family is, or at least the Lee's themsleves think they are, an elite group. The Lee family does seem to impose their will on a very receptive society. Why is the Singaporean public so receptive and agreeable with such an un-meritocratic, nepotistic political system?
This leads nicely to the next level...
Behind the Scenes
The two-dimensional view or the 'reformist' view (Bachrach and Baratz). Power is exercised by preventing certain conflicts of interest from coming into public play in the first place. This ability to ignore legitimate issues or areas of conflict is seen to require reform in order to over come this illegitimate situation.
In Singapore public demonstrations are a thing of myth and legend, the press is owned or controlled by the PAP. Legitimate questions, such as 'what happened to contributions made to the Suharto regime in Indonesia?' will be ignored by the press. Claims made by international NGO's are largely ignored or at least not followed up. To name but two, last year the Trafficking in Persons Report listed Singapore as being complacent, Reporters Without Borders slammed the lack of press freedom in Singapore. These are only two of the many issues that have been side stepped or simply ignored by the PAP.
So the PAP have power over these two levels but Lukes believes that this discussion on power needs to go further...
People’s Thoughts and Desires
"Is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have - that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?" (Lukes , 1974:23)
The radical view
The processes of socialisation including education are part of the exercise of power in any society. This will result in a situation whereby those who are being harmed by this process will remain unaware.
As with many Education systems around the world, the government in Singapore shapes education policy from primary school to higher education. My article about Queenie was intended to highlight the level of success the PAP education policies have had over the last 45 years.
Primary school exercise books used to, or still do have the 5 values that the government holds dear. I believe that there are as follows:
The Five Shared Values:
Nation before community and society before self
Family as the basic unit of society
Community support and respect for the individual
Consensus, not conflict
Racial and religious harmony
Values One and Three seem to be contradictory, even if it is a shift from the word 'self' to 'individual'. It is a value system of consensus building and denial of conflict or criticism.
Pejorative is a word used to criticise Lukes three dimensions of power, but Queenie probably couldn't be bothered to look the word up in a dictionary, she would rather make her teacher tell her what it means.
First conceived by PM Goh Chok Tong, then the First Deputy Prime Minister, in 1988, the Shared Values ideology was nationally adopted in 1993. Spelled out in the first epigraph of this section, the ideology officially proclaims a set of beliefs as part of Singapore’s cultural heritage. The ideology thus proclaimed, as Gunther Kress and Bob Hodge might put it in a different context, has the modality of being real, natural, transparent, inevitable, factual, unquestionable, and doubtlessly true.[85]
With a propaganda machine supported by the mass media publicizing its launch and its ongoing regurgitation in public discourse, the ideology has a widespread, even hegemonic reach. When we did a Yahoo.com search on the phrase, “Shared Values Singapore,” we found e-domains that encompass target audiences ranging from “Singapore Kids”[86] to educators and students[87] to “Expat Singapore.”[88] The last website is meant for expatriates or foreign talents, living and working in the nation-state, including those who plan to do so. 12
Storeys' Secret World
14 comments:
Aha, yet another opportunity to pimp my writings ;-)
I contend that we are not un-meritocratic. In fact, we are quite possibly the world's most meritocratic society. But meritocracy is a fundamentally flawed system, and our leaders certainly don't seem to realize its dangers. Then again, nobody paid attention to Lord Young when he published his seminal book coining the word itself. He lamented as recently as 2000 how his satire was taken as face value, and even his neologism was twisted into precisely the opposite of what he intended.
But what is meritocracy, really? The best rise to the top, but what defines 'best'? In Singapore, academic performance is king, but of course we know what kind of selection pressures that ensures, and what kind of idiots it creates. But of course, examinations were not created to judge sociopolitical success of individuals, yet once a meritocractic society chooses to use exams as a metric for goodness, the educational system rapidly converges to teaching the exam (v. teaching the subject) to optimize their rankings and statistics. Once such convergence is achieved, inertia mounts and resistance to the system becomes increasingly difficult over time.That's why I am unsurprised that nepotism can be generated in a meritocracy; in fact, I'd be surprised if such situations did not occur at all. The reason is simple: if the best lead, those who lead must be the best. Those who spend the most time with the leader should know best what the leader considers to be meritorious. These would of course be family members and close friends. Therefore, if they choose to exhibit such qualities regarded as 'good' by the leader, they are by definition meritorious. No doubt the logic does not lead to the inevitability of nepotism, but it seems to be a plausible route of development.
In relation to Luke's thesis on power, it seems clear to me that in a meritocracy, academic credentials offer ways to exercise all three dimensions of power. As argued above, academic credentials provide the basis of power in a meritocracy, exactly analogous to popular opinion does in a representative democracy or the 'Mandate of Heaven' in dynastic monarchies. The preceding argument can be interpreted as a mechanism for successful social engineering, but that is not all.
If one wants to talk about power behind the scenes, the entire public sector is one giant look-at-your-credentials-first machine. This manifests itself in the civil service with glass ceilings for diploma holders and different career tracks for scholars and non-scholars, just to name two cases. And it indeed lends credence to the entire scholarship system and explains why the system feels justified to promote junior scholars over senior non-scholars. Society is effectively stratified not by class, race, or caste, but by credentials. It's a vicious cycle, since in Singapore's education system one must attain credentials to unlock the educational opportunity that provides the next credential. And once one is senior enough, credentials are agglomerative. (Think honorary degrees and self-styled awards.)
An indeed, such a pecking order allows for direct exercise of power. How many times have rank been pulled to impose a manager's will over his subordinates? It is a system that we, as Asians, are well acclimatized to. Rank has always been part and parcel of Asian civilizations; and with regard to the Chinese civil examination system, the basis for that rank hasn't even changed that much, really.
But of course the execise of power is most obvious at the societal apex. The leader with the most credentials is king. Just look at the whole Senior Minister/Minister Mentor hierarchy, nominally subjugate to the Prime Minister but in reality form an overarching control structure. (The farcical presidency is not worth discussing.) With incidents such as the Minister Mentor (then Senior Minister) hauling up journalists for closed-door tekan sessions, let's have no illusions on who wields ultimate power in Singapore, still.
Do you still believe that the PAP only believes in 'pragmatism'? Power, thy name is merit.
KnightofPentacles:
In my experience, it is precisely only a small number of highly educated people who are willing to critcise the government. Although vocal, they are far outnumbered by sheep, and often slammed by the authorities as being too "Westernised", thus precluding any discussion of the merits of their opinions. The existence of critics does not indicate that indoctrination has failed, but the impotence of such critics against an unsympathetic, or at most apathetic, majority does.
To answer your last question, it appears that a disproportionate number of these people have gone through what I would think of as more liberal subsystems within the education system, such as GEP, the Raffles schools, or JC humanities programmes. Before I get flamed, please note that I'm not saying you must have gone through those programmes to escape indoctrination, but just that it seems statistically more likely that those who have been through those programmes are more independent thinkers.
KnightOfPentacles:
How do you define success? If success means having the highest CAT points, the lowest L1R5 or the most points on standardized tests, then by definition creative and critical thinking escapes the radar almost completely. These two arenas are not mutually excusive, after all.
The educational system exerts its own selection pressure, but individuals going through the system have the choice to resist assimilation. It is precisely this kind of stubbornness that gets hones into business wiles and academic skills.
My contention is not that such rebels do not exist, it is that we need more of them in order to sustain a true democracy. However, repressive tactics
As to your last question, you can opt for Wowbagger's choices (the GEP, unfortunately, is no more). Or you could just send them overseas, even at a tender young age. ;-)
But seriously though, what makes a good education? To me, critical thought is definitely the most powerful weapon against indoctrination, as you have alluded to. Healthy skepticism and willingness to conduct independent research are excellent values to cultivate. Being streetwise and moral are also essential qualities for survival. (I mean moral not in holier-than-thou perjorative sense, of course, but in the context of having a basic tenet of right v. wrong and a decent ethical calculus to resolve dilemmas.)
I deliberately omit creativity because it is quite impossible to teach (although admittedly Singapore doctrine thinks otherwise). If I were infinitely patient, I would instead approach it from the contrapositive sense, by imposing as little constraints as possible on children as they grow up. Instead of berating them for making a mess, make them clean it up. Teach them how to, if necessary. Instead of complaining about noise, show them how quiet pastimes are enjoyed. Wide exposure and a lack of overbearing constraints will allow creativity to flourish without further imposition.
But above all, please don't deprive your children of carefree childhood days. No forced tirade of ballet lessons, piano lessons, swimming lessons, abacus lessons, mental sums lessons, enrichment lessons, and tuition. Unless they really want to, of course.
"Repressive tactics" apparently also include not completing sentences containing those words. That should have read "However, repressive tactics such as legal intimidation or public ridicule cow the opposition into an ineffective shadow of its former self."
And kindly excuse the bad grammar in the post above. It's too much hassle to correct now.
Meritocracy is the worst way to allocate positions of power except for all those others that have been tried. (with apologies to Churchill).
If not meritocracy, how do we ensure that the capable use their capabilities optimally? The important thing is to try to level the playing field, and bear in mind that meritocracy is not the be all and end all, a magic word which, when chanted, will solve all problems (as seems to be the mentality sometimes).
Most of the top Scientists spent their formative years outside the Communist system (http://www.realuofc.org/libed/adler/wle.html)
Greetings, GK, and welcome to blogosphere.
Now that I (hopefully) have your sense of skepticism armed and ready, let's get down to it. Since you take issue with 'airy-faires', I've tried to flesh out my arguments with more concrete details.
First, your skepticism of doctrines such as Shared Values and the Pledge is undoubtedly shared by many other Singaporeans. Such song and dance routines are indeed irrelevant, but the presence or absence of such propaganda ultimately does not detract one whit from the validity of the "3rd level Luke" argument. Much more subtle forms of thought control are still very much a fact of life in Singapore, with censorship (both external and internal) in the mass media; police repression of individual liberties; national service; consolidation of judicial, legislative and executive powers; and teachers spoonfeeding their students model answers. Although some rhetorical steps have been made in each direction, these situations are unlikely to change much under current conditions.
Second, I speak from experience that experience is essential to scientific and mathematical problem-solving. Practice is a necessary, albeit insufficient, prerequisite. Unrestrained creativity is a recipe for unmitigated disaster: science is ultimately BS-intolerant; math, immediately so. The key to success, paradoxically, is confined innovation, restrained to logical underpinnings. And personal experience would guide the way.
While it is silly to try to explain a lack of creativity in the context of propaganda, it is not hard to explain it when considering that a great many teachers teach the exam, not the subject. Students are led to believe their sufficient practice will guarantee an 'A': witness the thousands sitting at McDonalds' and Starbucks' all over the island come exam season, poring over ten-year-series. When a question is recycled on an exam, students' efforts pay off handsomely. But change some trifling detail and you may jolly well see students in tears after the exam. Being forced to make novel logical deductions on an exam is foreign to students weaned on practice. This is exactly analogous to a phenomenon called 'overtraining' by neuroscientists and computer scientists, where computer programs designed to adapt to new information can become to well adapted to their training data that they completely fail to recognize something that is not in their training set, even if the difference is infinitesimal.
So why do so many teachers teach only the subject? I contend that it is relentless selection pressure exerted by MOE on its teachers. Each year, teachers are evaluated on statistics such as the average improvement in exam scores for their students. Schools are judged by their mean L1R5 scores, and in turn. More than one top school has discourage or barred outright its students from taking English Literature, that being the one subject that teachers find impossible to teach the exam. And what is ultimately responsible for such pressure from MOE? Methinks it is an unshakeable belief in the validity of its assessment criteria at the very top. After all, this system produced the leader, didn't it?
And in fact, 'hard-science-&-numbers' subjects are not immune to political indoctrination. Teachers are currently require to incorporate such themes as 'National Education' into every topic that they teach. One day, some too-intelligent teacher may somehow make the inconceivable occur.
Third, the parallels drawn with the Soviet regime are misleading. More often than not, these singular geniuses thrived despite Soviet leadership, not because of it. The fine arts are an interesting case in point, because the Soviet government actively encouraged musicians and artists to promote the image of Soviet superiority and infallibility to the proletariats, but always within party-prescribed limits. Constructivists such as Tatlin have always had to wage war with the Soviet censorship office. Shostakovich is an exception that proves the rule, for he was not only a composer, but also a prominent figure in the Soviet government. His creativity in musical expression was therefore relatively unfettered. It is perhaps not so much an issue as why Soviet art flourished, but why Singapore art is so stagnant. Maybe the presence of 'facilitating' bureaucracy paradoxically hinders the growth of the very thing it wants.
Soviet science was a totally different kettle of fish. The Cold War was a technological stalemate where both sides innovated furiously just to keep up with the enemy. Soviet scientists suffered from the constant threat of annihilation (the US already had a suffient nuclear stockpile since WWII) and were thus spurred to greater heights of innovation. Immense military R&D budgets, coupled with threats to their (and their family members') lives undoubtely lubricated the wheels of the Soviet R&D system. Since we in contemporary Singapore have no archetypical enemy, we are therefore much more complacent relative to the Cold War-era Soviet Union.
The Soviet R&D system was not without its flaws, however: the civilian R&D sphere was practically nonexistent. It also had no checks and balances, particularly lacking the peer review system that seems to be working well in the comtemporary scientific world. In a world where top political leaders dictacted misguided avenues of research, crackpots such as Lysenko were allowed to pursue their megalomania as long as they were in line with their leaders' visions. It is not unfair to say that with his errorneous theories and support from political heavyweights such as Stalin himself, Lysenko singlehandedly drove research in the biological sciences to a complete standstill in the USSR.
Fourth, it is easy to fault to PAP for choosing the wrong criteria for selecting future civil servants, but what criteria should be used instead? How can one tell who is going to make a 'successful' civil servant, and who isn't? I can't think of a good answer, short of having all candidates try it out first. But of course such a system is impractical, to understate the obvious.
In fact, your singling out of the 'Singapore brand' of meritocracy is incorrect, because academic criteria (and IQ tests) were precisely those used in Michael Young's seminal novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, painting the resulting dystopia that sounds chillingly like contemporary Singapore. This flawed criterion is a fundamental issue with meritocracy as currently formulated and practice.
I've spent the last 2.5 years thinking, this seems to be the critical flaw, now what? I'd be happy to hear what you think about it.
And what does this all ultimately have to do with Queenie? Everything, because she is a product (victim?) of the system, and bears the flaws of the system that produces her. And nothing, because she is an individual who is free to choose to accept or reject the brandings of said system.
Dear Steve,
I find your description of the Lukes theory of power to be rather opaque. I did a quick google search which turned up this page. The relevant bit is reproduced here.
Stephen Lukes (1974) has proposed a three level perspective of power which he refers to as the three dimensions of power.
At the first dimension:
* issues are identified
* power actions are overt
* there may be political participation and
* there may be overt conflict.
At the level of the second dimension:
* the scope for decision making is confined
* there is no 'alternative' so no grievance and no conflict.
A good example of Lukes' second dimension is the media.
As Chomsky puts it: 'The people don't know, and the people don't know they don't know'!
The third dimension is an important and insidious progression from the second level. It incorporates into the analysis of power the question of control over the agenda and the ways in which potential issues are kept out of the political/decision making process. That is, public exposure of the power is avoided.
Lukes says that at this level:
* issues are not observable, they are latent only
* the dimension is characterised by harmony ... there is no conflict
* those subject to the consequences of power being exercised are simply not aware that power is being exerted.
Thanks for the spotting of illicit, and I will forward your reply on Lukes power to my original source Anthony Giddens. It was written with undergraduates in mind, so he summarised it for reasons of simplification.
Steve: from a pedagogical point of view, it would make more sense to describe Lukes theory first, then apply it to the Singapore context. Otherwise it takes several readings to separate the two.
GK: Thanks for sharing. Alas, these stories sound only too familiar. I have read on Sammyboy that even Shell abandoned their CEP quite some time ago as they
realized that it was a bunch of unreliable BS. If you care to read what I've linked to, you'll find that I am not disagreeing with you on what you have just written.
You may be interested to know that the systemic preservation of the pecking order exists even within the scholarship system. Non-President's scholars are expect not to outshine their precious President's scholars. That is why I no longer belong.
Curious:
My guess is that SAF has a similar system to Shell CEP system.
I have several friends who sign on with SAF.
We all know there are different "classes" of SAF scholarships.
I know people who get SAFOS, SMS, ATA, and LSA.
Coincidentally, the friends i know who are under ATA and LSA happen to be more capable than the friends under SMS. Capable in the sense of military leadership. Of course, LSA have no S papers. ATA has 2 S papers, but did badly for GP. SMS has excellent a Level grades. Don't know the person in SAFOS really well so i wouldn't comment.
ATA friend is suffering in Australlia, having to go thru a 4 years navy officers course training with the australlian trainees. This course includes his univeristy education too. His allowance is only 1.8K per month.
Whereas SMS friend didn't even complete the whole of OCS. He was commissioned mid way with the SAFOS, and is now studying in US with a full monthly SALARY, while ATA friend is training in Aust with an allowance.
How Ironic?
sorry acid flask if I required more of your attention span. the point was application not mere regurgitation of Lukes.
And as for GK and me undermining the students future careers in the civil service. Yes an aspect of education in to equip the student with skills or qualification to enable them to do well in their careers, but it is not the only reason for undertaking education.
I'd think it would be nice not to assume too much of your readers. Not everyone here who is capable of "a more academic discussion" is a sociologist or a sociology student.
A minor digression - have you ever wondered why the (academically) top schools in Singapore are also overwhelmingly the best-performing schools, in sports, music etc? Do you REALLY think that there is a natural correlation between sporting prowess & academic performance? Heh.There is probably no genetic correlation, but obviously individuals who perform better academically are more likely than average to have had better nutrition or to have come from wealthier families, which would mean, respectively, better physical qualities and better access to sports training. But you are right, of course, that as a result of extra funding as a reward for producing academically outstanding students, the top schools are generally richer and more able to sponsor good extra-curricular programmes.
A more tenuous explanation that I suspect has some truth to it is that the top schools are just that little bit more obsessed with winning medals and other quantifiable awards, and hence more willing to pour money intensively into medal-winning activities instead of clubs that cater to casual leisure-seekers. I've experienced situations at two different top schools where CCAs that did not perform well medal-wise either had their funds cut or were asked to disband. This kind of intra-school competitiveness in turn leads to students being obsessed with winning medals, and on it goes in a positive feedback loop, with ugly results.
Sorry GK, I must not have made it clear enough, but I thought that in both article I was blaming the system or culture that has dominated the last 45 years of Singaporean society. Queenie is an effect of the system not the cause of the system. However, she does possess free-will wnd can change her own context, and the context of those around her. WE do not simply reproduce the system that we are born into, we can change it. Would you agree that changing the system from below is possible?
Post a Comment