MOE 'long standing practice' must be good, sacred, cannot anyhow change

When this issues was first surfaced by Gilbert Goh, MOE held on to its “long standing practice” reasoning. To any layman, such an action by MOE was unkind and indefensible with no sense of empathy for the poor PSLE girl whose original result slip was withheld because her parents owed a fee of $156.

Why didn’t Minister Ong Ye Kung immediately step in to save his ministry the embarrassment?
Instead, MOE issued a strong statement later, saying that “MOE’s consideration stems from the underlying principle that notwithstanding the fact that the cost of education is almost entirely publicly funded, we should still play our part in paying a small fee, and it is not right to ignore that obligation, however small it is.”

 Now that Minister Ong is going to review this issue, can we conclude that the “long standing practice” is wrong in principle in the first place?

Similarly, when Minister defended the granting of $238 million for scholarships and tuition grants to foreign students, I have argued that such decade-old practice of providing taxpayers’ money to educate foreign students is wrong in principle and should be terminated immediately. It seems clear that he didn’t agree when he ordered the issue of a POFMA Correction Directive to Lim Tean to correct his posting to reflect that MOE is spending more than the $167m for grants and bursaries to Singapore students....

Kok Ming Cheang

The above article of Kok Ming Cheang posted in TRE takes the position that things that are not right or good must be changed. And the outdated victimising of 12 year olds is now being exposed and aired very negatively and no one I know so far has anything good to say about it. But from the officialdom, the first reaction was not to do the thinking but to defend fiercely this policy like any unthinking civil servant would do. How can they accept the criticism in the first place? All govt policies are carefully thought out by the most brilliant civil servants and must be good, especially when it has been in practice for decades. So defend they did and got to look more silly and evil by the days.

Ong Ye Kung must have many earfuls and finds it unbearable and unreasonable under any circumstances to explain this away.  So decades old policies can be bad and should be reviewed and then scrapped. Sorry for the unthinking civil servants that stood up to defend the undefendable and now would have to swallow their arrogance and non thinking mindset, defend first at all cost.

Actually I have a different take. Decades long policies, long standing practices, must be good, cannot be bad and must be defended or else look silly.  The punishment of a 12 year old child was not meant to be. It was meant to punish the parents. The little glitch is that this is not explain to the little child who, if he/she has a little intellect and a bit sensitive, would have felt it quite badly.

It is so easy to remedy this. Get all the school principals to explain this in the morning assembly, tell the children, affected or not affected, that this policy is only to punish the irresponsible parents, not the innocent children of the irresponsible parents. And also produce more media material for the press, TV and social media that this is the real reason. No one should look unkindly at the affected children of irresponsible parents. See QED. And the long standing policy can stay. No fake news.

The same applies to the annual $238m tuition fees and grants for foreigners. This is also decades long standing policy and must be good. To stop this generosity would be a slap on the face of silly civil servants that approved this policy and also an admission that so many billions of public money have been wrongly spent. This case has better merits to defend like mad, and quoting that it is decades long policy would make good sense in every sense.

In conclusion, good policies that have been implemented for decades must be kept, die die must not change. If not, some people will look very silly for the unkind policy to 12 years old, and in the case of using OPM to give to foreigners would, yes, look damn stupid and irresponsible.

So, what do you think? Civil servants always make good policies and such policies should be defended at all cost if they are long standing, or, civil servants can be very silly and stupid and unkind in making stupid policies?

PS. Just think of all the good long standing policies that would have to be scrapped, eg high HDB prices, high water prices, high school and tuition fees equal good quality education, CPF money retention and shifting goal posts, more foreigners as new citizens, CECA already more than 10 years, must be damn bloody good, millionaire ministers, millionaire civil servants and CEOs of GLCs .....