Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 27 January 2008, with some editing (if you’ve seen the published version, amuse yourself by spotting the differences!): 

Sunday Times 27 Jan 2008
In Defence of Our ‘Dumb’ Kids
by Colin Goh

Two weeks ago, this august newspaper polled 60 Singaporean students about the US elections, and discovered that - shock! horror! – most couldn’t care less, and that some didn’t even know who Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were.  Naturally, a lot of hand wringing ensued over the apathy and ignorance of our chewren.

Upon reading the report, my immediate thought was: how many American students would know who Lee Hsien Loong or Sylvia Lim is?

Okay, so maybe that’s not entirely fair.  After all, the fate of the USA doesn’t really depend on the Singaporean government to any great extent, unlike the other way round.  (At least not until we finish buying up all their banks – and then it will be too late! TOO LATE! Bwah-ha-ha!) But I’m betting that most American kids also have no idea who Wen Jiabao is either, and China really, really matters.

My next thought was: how many ordinary Singaporean adults, neh’mine our chewren, would actually know who Barack Obama is, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or John McCain? (Why did the pollsters seem to assume a Democratic victory? Also, Clinton and Obama aren’t that far apart policy-wise, but there will be stark differences with a Romney presidency.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the grownups’ responses didn’t differ too much from the kids’. 

I must also confess that I find it difficult to ridicule youngsters for their putative ignorance – because I was a pretty dopey teen myself.  When I was 17, I couldn’t have named a single member of the Reagan Cabinet, but I could rattle off every single member of the X-Men.  I don’t think I was alone in this, whether here or in the US.

In the end, I’m skeptical what these polls really prove. I’ve seen them crop up every now and again, in different forms and in different countries, with different questions. Scaremongering “look-how-stupid-American-kids-are” surveys also pop up in US newspapers regularly.  I recall a similar brouhaha some years ago, where prospective NUS undergrads were pilloried because some couldn’t name the country located between Thailand and Singapore.

But I’ll bet that if you go now and call up a bunch of youngsters and ask them the same questions, you’d probably get similar results, despite years of intervening education reform.  Heck, I’m even willing to bet that it’ll be the same twenty years from now, and that we’ll be gnashing our teeth over how come our kids still can’t name all the MPs in their Mega-GRC, or that they have no idea who Goh Chok Tong is, never mind Goh Keng Swee, or why so few schoolchildren know who invaded who and sparked off the Asean Haze War. Again, I’m confident that adults will yield similar responses to such polls too.

Why? Because often, these polls are not designed to fulfil a genuine research objective, they’re cooked up to fit in with a particular agenda and provoke a certain response, usually outrage, at how inferior the masses are to the poll-commissioners.  I’m not in any way suggesting it happened with this particular poll, nor am I excusing apathy or ignorance. I just think we should always question our questioners.

Further, such polls run the risk of giving a very incomplete, even distorted picture of the participants’ actual intelligence or ability, and also of privileging certain kinds of knowledge.  This is unfair.  Girl-Girl may know more about handbag design than she does about the geopolitics of oil. But so what? So long as when the price of oil begins to affect her handbag business, she knows how to research and analyse the issues and deal with them. Knowing who the President of OPEC is at any given moment is just trivia.

And in many ways, it irks me that kids are invariably the target of these polls, because they can rarely answer back.  Why not poll, oh, a bunch of civil servants which countries comprise NATO, or quiz a group of actuaries on what APEC stands for?

Yes, a greater interest in world affairs should be encouraged, but in the age of information overload and Wikipedia, we really need to value higher order skills like curiosity, skepticism, research and empathy.

Lastly, I’m not surprised that so many students told the pollsters they didn’t care about US politics.  When confronted by strangers trying to put you on the spot and judge you about how smart you are on a specific topic, it’s a perfectly understandable kiasu response to pretend you don’t care, rather than don’t know.

That’s not being apathetic. That’s being Singaporean. Duh!

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