Key to Singapore’s Success is Character Development of Our Youths

As National Day approaches, I started reading about how we Singaporeans are getting ready to celebrate this important day in our calendar of public holidays.

As I pondered past national day celebrations, I could not help but think back about the newspaper commentaries written by 2 prominent people. These commentators wrote about our Singaporean youths and how they fared in the globally competitive talent market which Singapore is.

First, we had Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, the former Head of the Civil Service, saying in a Straits Times op-ed, dated 27 March 2013, entitled, Let’s Get Our Young Talent Job Ready, in which he said that our young graduates have “acquired gourmet tastes but have no clue how to fry an egg”. He further lamented that “instead of punching above our weight, we performed below our knowledge potential. Today we have thousands of young graduates becoming property agents or relationship managers selling esoteric products.”

Then we have Mr Han Fook Kwang, Managing Editor of the Straits Times, the Singapore daily, who said in a commentary in The Sunday Times dated, 30 June 2013, Do Singaporean Workers Deserve Their Wages, that several foreign-born heads of companies in Singapore were lamenting the lack of  quality workers here. Specifically a head of a German MNC noted the lack of drive in the workers here compared to workers in other countries. In fact he said that Singapore workers were far down the hunger index chart compared to their German and Chinese counterparts.

In addition, Mr Kwang’s friends and colleagues also felt that Singaporean workers did not possess good communications skills and had poor reasoning and critical analytical skills. Mr Kwang further says that schools need “to make students less obsessed with doing well in exams and better at learning how to acquire skills and knowledge relevant in today’s fast changing world are so important.”.

I could not help but agree with these 2 gentlemen’s thoughts on the critical changes that our education system needs in ensuring that we continue to produce graduates who are job ready and possess the necessary skills that would justify every last penny that companies pay  to secure their services in the job market.

However it is not just a responsibility that should fall squarely on the shoulders of the educational institutions. Parents are just as responsible if not more, in ensuring that their children are learning the necessary values important to guide them into successful lives and careers and not just focusing on their children doing well in school.

Below is my original parenting tips piece that I wrote for the July 2013 issue of a bulletin produced by the polytechnic for parents which focuses on character development in our children.

Character development starts at home and should be reinforced in schools and is probably the key to producing the Singaporean core of graduates that we need to ensure Singapore continues to succeed in the foreseeable future.

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Character Development In Your Child

Character development is probably one of the most difficult and yet one of the most important responsibilities that parents shoulder in the overall development of our children.

Sometimes as parents we take it for granted that as long as our children stay out of trouble in school, they are on their way to developing good character.

But what is good character?

Good character (in the context of character development) refers to qualities that will enable children to grow up to be happy, well-adjusted and full-functioning members of our community.

Character is defined by values we as a community live by. Most of these values are universal irrespective of our race, religious background or nationality.

Here are 6Rs I believe are important for my children’s overall growth and development:

6 Rs

Respect – to love and respect yourself, your parents, peers, people in general

Rectitude – to have honesty & integrity and to be upright

Relationships – to build bonds with the community and to develop empathy

Resilience – ability to recover from disappointments

Resolute – to be undaunted, determined, steely work ethic

Resourcefulness – to develop the ability to think creatively to solve problems

Communicate With Your Child

It is important that as parents we communicate constantly about developing good character traits with our children.

Share with them your own life experiences and how they shaped your character and helped you to develop one or all of the 6 Rs.

Personally, I share with my children my experiences in school especially the times when I represented my school in the National School Track & Field Championships. The hard, punishing training, the camaraderie of my team-mates, the sense of being one whether in victory or in defeat – all these experiences helped shape my character and the person I am today.

Character Development Opportunities in Our Daily Lives

Be on a lookout for these opportunities everyday. It could be a community call for action to help distribute N95 masks to the elderly and needy.

It could be a run-for-a-cause event to help raise money for the under-privileged.

It could even be an instance when your child asks you to buy an expensive item. These are moments you can use to teach your child about building good character by being involved in the activity yourself.

For the record, I asked my son to start saving for the item by doing chores at home or setting aside some of his daily allowance.

 

Be A Good Role Model

Parents are the best role models for their children and in many cases, the only role models.

Role models are important because children often look up to grown-ups they are close to as extrapolations of themselves.

As parents, we should be mindful of that and strive to manifest the 6Rs in our daily lives if we want our children to develop good character effectively.

Life-Long Process

Character development is an on-going, life-long process. It does not end when someone reaches adulthood because life’s challenges will continue to shape our character.

As parents, it is our responsibility to provide our children with life experiences to help forge their character.

Like 19^th century German writer and poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “Character develops itself in the stream of life”.

The Universal Burden of Teachers

Being an educator myself, I am understandably drawn towards media reports on teachers and developments in the educational sector.

So I thought it would be great to share an article that I came across in the Today newspaper which I thought was very thought provoking and in many ways, struck a cord with me.

The article, written by a teacher, William Johnson, who teaches in a public high school in Brooklyn, speaks about the challenges he faces in teaching students with learning disabilities and while trying to meet the objectives of a less than sympathetic administrative framework with a management that seems to be out of touch with reality on the ground.

It brought home in a stark and sobering way, what teachers face on a day-to-day basis and how the classroom environment and the new generation of students have changed.

The Golden Rule To Live By On The Internet

Can we live in a world without any rules or laws? Perhaps this question is more rhetorical than anything else. I’m sure the most ardent freedom rights supporter will readily agree that no society can function without some rules or else there will be chaos.

So why have the recent debate on the net regarding the need for rules or guidelines to govern social media raised some concerns among netizens?

Is it because with the advent of the Internet many academics, technologists and sociologists have spoken vociferously about how this new technological platform is a “game changer” in terms of how business will be conducted, how society will be managed and, indeed, how all of us will live our lives.

For some time, these same people have also predicted that Internet could NOT be controlled or regulated and as such this spelled trouble for businesses, organisations and governments who were still tied to the old paradigms and top-down systems which concentrated powers in the hands of the elite few. Thomas L Friedman said so as much in his commentary in the Today paper, “The democratisation of expectations”, pg 12, 19 Dec 2011.

Friedman quoted Mr Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, “The old system of ‘command and control’ – carrots and sticks – to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ – to generate power through people…you have to have two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.”

(You may want to watch this video for an interesting take on this argument, taking a slightly contrarian view)

RSA Animate – The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?
– Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod.

While by and large this argument still holds sway in today’s world, there is an increasing recognition of the need to bring some order to the frenetic pace of how information is formed and distributed in the Internet, particularly in social media platforms because of the confusion and potential disharmony that it may generate later.

Take recent examples of what happened in Singapore. Racists comments made by a blogger, Donaldson Tan, on Facebook against Muslims and particularly his post which had a picture of a “haram” animal superimposed on the Ka’ba – Islam’s most sacred site.

Then we had the much publicised incident of Jason Neo, a Young PAP member who had posted online a photo of a school bus with Malay children from Huda Kindergarten in Woodlands dressed in their uniform which includes traditional Malay headwear. Neo had posted an offensive caption for the photo saying, “Bus filled with young terrorist trainees?”. Neo has since resigned from the PAP and has drawn stern criticisms from PAP members themselves.

Even celebrities were not spared the consternation and criticism where the content is less controversial and may even be described as helpful to the public. For example, Radio DJ Hossan Leong was criticised for announcing a breakdown in the SMRT Circle Line based on information from tweets and for not waiting for the official confirmation from SMRT. But MediaCorp Radio clarified that it relies on both formal and informal channels, i.e. information from its listeners when reporting on traffic and public transport disruptions. Nevertheless, Leong admitted that he should have announced that the information was unverified and that he was still awaiting official word from SMRT

I suspect Leong’s reliance on social media to offer a public service drew such an uproar (largely from the transport operator) because of the recent furore over the train disruptions which saw SMRT being at the receiving end of commuters’ ire.

But it also raises concerns on how governments, corporations, employees, customers, teachers/educators, students and in fact people from all sectors of society should conduct themselves when using social media.

It is a concern that has been expressed from the very top. Last month, Minister for Information Communication and the Arts, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim called for some guidelines on a code of conduct for online behaviour. He felt that the guidelines will allow for more moderation in the views people and allow for discussions to be more “rational and sensible”.

In Singapore, the chorus for some guidelines for online conduct and the use of social media is gaining more traction. Of course, there are detractors who lament that once again the government appears to be solving an issue by introducing more rules or restrictions on what people can or should do.

But I support the formation of some form of guidelines as long as these guidelines are drafted with input from the grassroots or from academic institutions, civic bodies and/or voluntary groups with the same bodies acting as watchdogs to be on the look-out for offenders.

Just last week, Professor Ang Peng Hwa, Director of the Singapore Internet Research Centre, NTU, announced his proposed framework for such a code of conduct. For more information on his proposals, you can click on the link below:

http://newasiarepublic.com/?p=35105

Among the things that his proposal seeks to clarify are how you define “hate speech” or “offensive content” who is a “whistle-blower”, how to distinguish between those who advocate and those who report offensive content and how to specify punishment.

Aside from these guidelines, what I hope to see develop in Singapore are clear policy statements by the various government and civic organisations, academic institutions and companies on the use of social media. This has already taken place in corporations and institutions overseas.

Taking my own example as a lecturer in a polytechnic, there have already been much discourse on whether lecturers should “friend” their students on Facebook or whether lecturers should use Facebook as a teaching and learning tool. And the views have been divided.

Some students have been caught for flaming certain lecturers with their online rants thinking that their posts are private and cannot be traced and they were dead wrong.

Some lecturers feel that social media should be embraced rather than avoided as it is the platform of choice among our youth. Classes these days rarely run without the use of laptops and with the ubiquitous access to Internet in campus, it is almost impossible to prevent students from logging on to social media sites.

But fundamental to all these discussions have been the need for control and privacy and the need to distinguish between the professional self from the private individual. This is where a well thought out social media policy would be of great help to all parties and the national initiative to draft a code of conduct for internet content could serve as a larger umbrella framework for such policy statements.

One thing is for sure. The wheels have been set in motion and it is only a matter of time when the guidelines for code of conduct for online content will be formulated.

And as far as rules go, perhaps people’s online behaviour should be governed by what is widely known and accepted as The Golden Rule in many cultures around the world – “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.”