How meritocracy can breed intellectual elitism

By Chua Mui Hoong

Deputy Political Editor

I grew up in, variously, a kampung attap house, a one-room rental flat,

and then a three-room Housing Board Flat, where my two siblings, our
parents and I spent many happy, sometimes tumultuous, years.
I never had my own room till I went to university overseas. In England, I
had my own princely suite of bed-and-sitting-room with aged but sturdy
furniture.
An old classmate from Singapore visited me in my room, oohed and ahed
at my new surroundings and proclaimed I had arrived.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow, never setting much store by sentiments like
these.
It was only in my adult years that I learnt the many gradations of elitism
and snobbery.
There is car snobbery. In my condominium carpark, every other car is a
sedate Establishment BMW or a Mercedes. My Japanese sedan sits among
them like an upstart.
I recall tales of erstwhile Cambridge students whose mothers warned
them against gold-digger girlfriends and finally understood that the
warnings were against people precisely like myself: from no illustrious
family, but whose drive and small talents propel them from their rightful
obscurity into places where they rub shoulders with the elite.
There is residential snobbery, where every Singaporean is able to peg
every other Singaporean into his social pecking order by the place he lives
in.
When I lived in an HDB flat, I learnt the divide between HDB and private
housing. Then I moved to private housing and learnt the intricate
calibrations between landed, apartment and condo living.

And then I learnt that there are condos and condos, and Bukit Timah is a
good place for one. And then a Bukit Timah veteran told me I didnt know
anything; that some stretches of Bukit Timah are more prestigious than
others.
And I havent even got round to fathoming the relative rack of Tanglin and
Orchard addresses, the Ardmore Park and the like.
I have long wondered why, for such a meritocratic society, Singapore is so
elitist.
And then I finally understood that the two are inextricably linked:
Singapore is such an elitist society precisely because of meritocracy.

For meritocracy tells us that anyone can achieve, if they have the
gumption, that wherewithal, the drive, the talent, the ability. In a
meritocracy, success depends on your own efforts on merit.
And so we are led into the seduction of believing the reverse: that if you
dont do well, if you drop out, theres something, well, unmeritorious
about you, and so you deserve your mediocrity.
In a meritocracy you can blame your parents only once. After that, the
rest is really up to you.
If you were born into a humble family and still didnt do well in your own
adult lifetime, you cant blame your social class, your wrong accent, your
lousy sartorial instrincts, your lack of educational opportunities.
You cant pin the blame on others, because there is no shortage of poor
kids made good in Singapore to prove you wrong: They become
millionaires; they become prime minister; they become materially
successful.
If you are not among them, you take a good hard look and realise you can
blame only yourself.

This is the uncomfortable subtext of meritocracy, which isnt much

remarked upon, but which runs like a subterranean thread in our social
conversations.
Singaporeans ostensibly frown on car and condo snobbery even as many
aspire to those shallow symbols of success.
But our ethos of meritocracy condones, indeed encourages, another form
of snobbery: intellectual elitism.
Singapores merit-based system hinges almost entirely on the meritocracy
of academic achievements. Do well in school, and theres a good chance
the kid from a poverty-stricken background can break out of the poverty
cycle.
When education becomes such an important social leveller and vehicle for
social mobility, is it any wonder that intellectual ability becomes imbued
with such positive attributes that it nearly becomes associated with a
moral virtue?
Subliminally, we imbibe the message that intellectual achievement is not
only a mark of mental acuity, but it is also a reflection of character,
strength of purpose, dedication, of moral virtue.
This is not to say that we are so naive as to assume that those who get As
are more saintly than those who fail their examinations. But I think many
of us do assume that the A-getters are more disciplined, more
hardworking, more driven to excel, more deserving of reward, than those
who get Cs.
And so academic achievement becomes conflated with character and
moral attributes.
All this is by way of explaining how bright young things in the countrys
elite schools may turn out to be both staunch believers of meritocracy and
staunchly elitist in their perspective.
Is it any wonder they turn out so, when the ethos of Singapore society is
based on the idea that academic merit helps sort people into their
respective social classes? That might sound like an extremely meritocratic

argument to make, but implicit in it is the idea that if you are sorted into
the lower classes, it is because you lack academic merit and are
somehow inferior.
And so the emphasis on meritocracy and academic achievement becomes
the flip side of elitism: One justifies the other.
So when talking about elitism in Singapore today, we should not run away
from the uncomfortable truth that our merit-based system can breed a
smarter-than-thou attitude of intellectual snobbery, evident in the
recent blog of the 18-year-old student which attracted such attention.
What is the solution to this creeping merit-based elitism?
Clearly empathy is one response, and there is no shortage of very
successful people who devote time and money to helping others.
But there is another aspect of the issue we should never forget: which is
to police our meritocratic system and fix its failings.
Former senior civil servant Ngiam Tong Dow, speaking to the Oxbridge
Society recently, emphasised how Singapore can refine its system of
selecting the elite. I thought the entire premise of his argument extremely
elitist. For surely the more pertinent issue is how to entrench fair
competition in a meritocratic system, not how to improve selection among
the elite?
We should ask ourselves: Are there structural impediments to poor kids
making good in todays system? What can we do to remove those
obstacles?
United States studies have consistently
wealthy, middle-class parents have a better
and going to college. Some nascent studies
the effects of parental background on
considerable.

shown that the children of

chance of doing well in school
in Singapore have shown that
a childs achievement are

Rather than assume the elitist position that Singapores meritocratic

system is so well oiled that those who dont succeed deserve to fail, we

should be taking a more rigorous look at how our much-vaunted

meritocratic system may be failing those who deserve to succeed.