There were two courses I used to be very fond of teaching at the polytechnic where I’ve long been in service. One of them involved raising awareness among our first-year students about community issues, and another concerned the discussion and debate of matters involving ethical dilemmas.
In the former we had an exercise in which we were supposed to discuss how various agents of socialization, such as the family, schools and teachers, the media, the government and the like impacted everyone’s life in one way or another. The purpose, of course, was to get young students to see how very much they were influenced by these various agents, and how like most everyone else, they were “products” of their environment. Not satisfied with that, I enjoyed turning the question around, asking not only how they were influenced by these agents of socialization, but how they themselves could influence these agents of socialization. While they saw the point, they often drew a blank, especially when it came to the government.
‘So how can you influence the government?’ I would ask, in a cheerful, upbeat manner.
Silence. Nobody seemed to have a clue.
‘Oh, come on now, surely you can think of something?’
A great deafening silence once again.
‘You mean you can’t think of something you do once every 4 or 5 years, that is, when you’re old enough to do so?’
And then a tentative voice or two: ‘We can vote’.
‘Right!’ I would exclaim. ‘Now you’re getting the idea. But is that the only way you can exercise influence on your government? Do you have to wait till an election to do so?’
Silence again.
Due to our usual relentless time constraints, I would then have to suggest some of the usual avenues Singaporeans have through which they can make themselves heard: any of the several feedback forums, letters to the press, e-mails to one’s elected representatives in government (including the Prime Minister, a fact which greatly surprised many of them!).
In the ethical issues class, I would often from the start expose them to the different academic approaches to ethics, entailing the pure virtue approach, the utilitarian approach, the fairness & justice approach, the rights & responsibilities approach and so forth. I would especially enjoy contextualizing the rights and responsibilities approach, using Singapore as an example.
‘What rights do we enjoy in Singapore? Do we enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of the press?’
My purpose in raising these questions was, of course, to get students to think along the lines that yes, they enjoyed these rights within a framework which advocated the exercise of responsibility, and were therefore obliged to avoid making statements that could enflame, for example, racial or religious sensitivities, thus falling within the commonly accepted ‘OB markers’.
On more than one occasion, however, a student would blurt out a rather different answer that would go something like this: ‘No, we don’t enjoy freedom of speech’.
‘And how is that so?’ I would ask, full of curiosity.
‘Because if we say what we want, we’ll go to jail!’
It saddened me to think that I could encounter such a degree of cynicism among such bright young people who, if anything, were supposed to be filled with idealism and hope and aspirations. It would then be my role to ‘correct’ this point of view.
And then, of course, there was the off-level accusation, equally cynical, pointed at one’s elected officials: ‘We only see our MP once every four years, at election time. Where are they the rest of the time?’
After experiencing such encounters on too many occasions, it occurred to me that simply discussing these matters within the four walls of the classroom was a non-starter. I decided instead to take advantage of a proposal the MP I serve had recently put forth to me, and so made an offer to take any interested students along to Meet-the-People Sessions, so they could see for themselves exactly what kind of work their MP’s actually do, week after week, year after year.
I have now been doing that for the past couple of months, and never cease to delight in the reaction of the surprised young students who observe the proceedings at an MPS. They find their eyes suddenly opened, never having realized before then that an MP was so closely involved in helping so many needy members of the com-munity in solving real bread-and-butter problems. Indeed, one of the students I brought along exclaimed that he hadn’t even realised there was any such thing as an MPS! Their perspectives change entirely after even just one session.
Maybe such students will eventually get involved in MPS or similar voluntary work themselves at some point. And maybe they won’t – or maybe just a handful will do so. But in the process one hopes that some of that ingrained cynicism or just plain apathy will be, if not entirely eradicated, then at least tempered by the realization that something really is happening out there and that they will approach matters of civic involvement far more positively in future.
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