Educating other people’s children

When Deng Xiaoping opened up China, what he found wanting was the lack of talents in the latest technology, science and engineering. He embarked on a massive education programme by sending hundreds of thousands of young Chinese to the West to learn everything they could. The number by now could be in the millions. And when asked what happened if they refused to return to China? Deng was confident to say that if some returned, that would be good enough. He was confident that many would return, knowing China’s history and being the home for the Chinese. Sure many would stay put in Europe and the US, by there would be some to come home where the families and roots were.

Confidentially he might be saying to himself, if he could build a rich and prosperous China, the graduated students would come home when the opportunities were there. China is now a land of opportunities, and not only Chinese students are returning home, the Americans and Europeans are marching to China for their pot of gold. The fear of an exodus of talented Chinese did not materialise. The Chinese are coming home. Communist, capitalist or whatever, when life is good, when opportunities abound, it would attract talents all over the world to China.

China was investing in their children and counting on them to return home to build their country and to prosper their country.

What have we been doing in the education of our children? We rather educate the children of other countries and hoping that they stayed to work here, or if not, they would be good to us and say a few good words for us when they returned home. Is this what we hoped to achieve by spending hundreds of millions or billions to educate other countries’ children? What about our own children? How much are we investing on our own children other than the 250 PSC scholars?

Think how many of our children would have benefited from the hundreds of millions or billions invested in other people’s children? And think how many of our children will be home contributing to our economy and our growth? We have wasted a lot of money on foreign students with returns that are barely a fraction of our investments. And we have sacrificed the interests to our own children by depriving them of a good education as many could not do so.

And we are wasting more money to employ foreigners as lecturers in our universities, to fatten them, to make them more valuable, while our own lecturers were let go and left in the lurch. Is this a wise policy, a pro Singaporean policy?

We are losing a whole generation of our children by these flawed policies of educating other people’s children and fattening other people’s talents at the expense of our very own people and children. The long term ill effect would be worst as our people started to lose out and opt out of the talent pool and economic system.

What is happening? What kind of silly policies are these? Good? We need more foreign talents, we don’t need our own talents, our own talents are no good? Fakes and cheats are better? If we cannot get a fundamental policy like this right, everything down stream will be tearing our society and country apart. What is the point of a Singapore filled by foreigners and all the good jobs taken over by foreigners?

This is home? Really, surely? Or this is home to the foreigners? What would happen to the true blue Singaporeans if these silly policies are not killed immediately?