When the Educators are Uneducated?

 One of the most cringeworthy things going around my social media feed concerns a headline run in the Straits Times (Singapore’s leading daily) about the Beijing Winter Olympics, which are going on at the moment:

 

As two of the people circulating this have pointed out, the headline is not true. There are a number of countries who have hosted both the Summer and Winter versions of the Olympics. Beijing is the “first” city to have hosted both the Summer (Back in 2008) and Winter versions of the Olympics. There is, as they say, a difference between China the country and Beijing, the city.

The editors have been rightly lambasted for this oversight. This is, as they say, the type of factual error you expect from a primary school kid and not a national newspaper. The layers of editors and subeditors that bring a newspaper to print should have seen this. Then, there’s the fact that the newspaper in question has now become part of a non-profit that is funded by the government. Why is the tax payer being forced to fund an editorial team that can’t get its facts right?

For me, the major issue with this simple error is the fact that it reflects a troubling ignorance about the world outside Singapore. Although I’ve been living in Singapore for the last 22-years, I still get stunned by the level of ignorance of basic geography. I think someone from Saudi Aramco telling me that people had asked him “Which part of Dubai are you from” when he told them he was Saudi Arabia (Saudi Arabia being significantly larger than Dubai). Many Singaporeans still think that Punjabis (specifically the Sikhs) are from Bengal (there’s a huge distance between Punjab and Bengal) and I’m brought back to the dinner where one of the guests proudly asked, “Where is Bahrain?” There are people who talk about “Hindis” and “Indians” as if they were two different things. Contrary to what most Singaporeans might think, the national language of India is actually Hindi and you cannot gain national pride in being ignorant.

In a way, the only other place where I’ve been to where this type of ignorance about the world exists, is in America. As a Singaporean, one might find oneself explaining to people that Singapore is not part of China.

However, our ignorance about the world is worse than the ignorance found elsewhere. Let’s face it, America is a huge place where most people spend their lives in their home town. When my stepdad lived in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, he found that the locals had no concept of where New York was. In a way, you can’t blame them because they live in a world where everything they need is right at home. Why does a Hill Billy in the Appalachian Mountains need to know about New York when everything he needs is right at home?

That’s not the case for us. We are a small island with no resources of our own. Our very existence is based on trading with the outside world. Unlike my stepdad’s former neighbours, you cannot grow your food and live in your own bubble in Singapore. At any given point in your life, you will need to deal with someone from somewhere else in order to exists.

Singapore, as we’ve reminded ourselves on so many occasions, is a “Red Dot.” The outside world doesn’t need to know about us but we need to know about the word outside. If anything, we need to be smarter about the world than the world is about itself.

Like with many things in Singapore, the government actually has responsibility for this state of affairs. We are, if you listen to propaganda, an exceedingly well-educated place. We reached the 100 literacy rate mark ages ago. Apparently, we build “world class” educational institutions and we are constantly building “world-class” research facilities and getting “world-class” researchers to set up shop in Singapore. Our often-repeated mantra is that “We have no resources other than our human resources,” and so we need to invest in our people.

The obsession with “education” reaches out to the press. Whilst the government reminds the press that Singapore does not need a “Fourth Estate,” that it has a social responsibility to “educate” people.

However, as the confusion between China the country and Beijing the city shows, we need to ask if our “educators” are themselves educated. If you go through any of our top institutions (mostly government ones), you’ll find that there are lots of people who have graduated with good degrees from “world-class” universities. Yet they remain ignorant of the world outside their own and you have to ask if they are really educated at all. 

One of the most worrying examples came from my stints of working with the Saudi Government, where I learnt to drop certain Arabic phrases when speaking with Arabs because it helped break the ice. However, at one Saudi function, I realized that the three phrases of Arabic I knew where three phrases more than the average person working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) knew. I remember a girl from MFA gushing about my command of Arabic after witnessing me drop my three phrases with the Saudis, a community that she was paid to build a relationship with.

I’m a guy who was told by a senior civil servant at MFA that I would never get hired because MFA did not consider my “honours” from a British University to be honours at all. However, when dealing with people from elsewhere, I do try to talk to them in their context so that they can understand mine. I’ve found out that I am a weird person for doing this.

Sure, I understand that you can’t know everything about everywhere but at least the curious enough to find out about the places you have to deal with. Like it or not, China, India, the Middle East and Africa are markets that we need in order to grow. We have to be interested enough to do a Google search about certain places when meeting people from different parts of the world. Ignorance about the rest of the world is not bliss when you are a small trading nation. The government needs to be put “curious” people in charge to “educate” the masses rather than robots to train more robots.