Is meritocracy really foolproof?
In this article, I will be touching more on meritocracy and eductaion in Singapore. How did our education system become a stressful and competitive environment, and our poorer-performing students find themselves with fewer opportunities than their higher-performing peers?
Meritocracy is in and of itself is a concept. It refers to a social system in which advancement in society is based on an individual’s capabilities and merits rather than on the basis of family, wealth, or social background. This makes education a good social leveller in theory, but…
The concept of meritocracy: Success = hard work + talent. BUT what’s the balance?
Additionally, is the hard work organic or forced? Students may be forced to do tuition to supplement the lack of talent, but what about students who work hard in their time and do not have the monetary capacity to afford tuition?
Let’s say: meritocracy = Social mobility
Singapore, although having a high social mobility index, ranks fairly low on social protection and fair wage distribution. This can be attributed to factors like heavy reliance on migrant unskilled workers, an absence of minimum wage, and a lack of universal unemployment benefits. Hence some may not have the monetary capabilities to give their children the opportunity to partake in ‘forced hard work’ like tuition. Additionally, some students in lower income households may also try their best to support their family, and take on outside jobs, or have to spend time to take care of younger siblings whereas those who can afford it will hire maids or send their children off to childcare centres. A meritocratic system hence unfairly privileges the rich and well-connected.
7/10 parents send their children for tuition in Singapore. The industry is growing at a rapid rate, with its worth increasing almost 200% since 20 years ago. This comes as no surprise, especially since majority Singaporeans bear the ‘kiasu’ mindset. Parents even send their child for tuition at the kindergarten level. Tuition centers are quite lucrative businesses as well, since there will always be a demand for tuition.
Hence, meritocracy and the rush for enrichment classes since parents do not want their children to lose out helps to increase the abilities of students and the amount of time spent studying. Although it is important to note that children must be driven to a certain extent for tuition to be effective, else tuition would just be like attending school.
3 reasons WHY we should have an alternative to meritocracy
- “Meritocracy is the way into higher education — and really — government.” It is inherently unjust to have students meet a set of arbitrary standards to climb the social, political, and economic ladder. We are essentially measuring people on a scale of human value and might result in students thinking that participation in government is dependent on achievement based on a hierarchy of values that someone may or may not have subscribed to in the first place.
- There is a huge correlation between students’ socioeconomic status and their ability to perform well on tests. The advantages of an elite education are not equally distributed, like as mentioned, tuition. Although you have articles like these that highlight that anything is possible: https://theindependent.sg/secondary-school-dropout-becomes-first-ite-graduate-to-be-accepted-by-nus-medical-school/ , realistically speaking these people are really the minority (exactly why the media feels the need to make a big deal out of it). Some even speculate that the reason to go to Harvard isn’t to receive a stellar education but to gain social and political capital.
- Ivy League and other prestigious colleges drain talent and ambition from local communities and concentrate the highly educated. This is just like the ranking of primary, secondary schools, and junior colleges in Singapore. This rank is obtained from The Booklet that has all the secondary schools and junior colleges inside with their respective cut-off points, distributed to all students.
Despite all the contentions and arguments, critics of meritocracy can’t seem to find a better alternative to meritocracy, as without meritocracy, outcomes would be disastrous too. All in all, there is no easy answer to this — some parents prefer shorter hours at school, after all the alternative of free tuition will equate to longer schooling hours. Students might find it hard to focus too, if they are in school for such long periods of time (we already spend an average of 7 hours in school!).
The government implemented the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) for students from low-income families, where FAS students receive extra help in the form of meal vouchers, subsidies for educational materials etc. This helps to level the playing field more, however this discounts the amount of additional help a student would get from enrichment classes.
Not surprisingly, expenditure figures from the Household Expenditure Survey indicate that higher-income families are spending more on tuition, with the top 20 per cent of households by income spending nearly four times as much on tuition as those in the bottom 20 per cent. While there isn’t much data regarding how much tuition really improves one’s grades (apart from tuition promotional materials), having extra help would definitely be a boost for their academic grades.
And this is not excluding enrichment classes on top of academically-inclined tuition classes. Enrichment classes help to hone one’s special skill like music, dance or sports, which is a consideration in Direct School Admissions (DSA). DSA only exists for top-performing schools, quite telling on how strong the competition is to enter these schools.
Hence we feel that there is no better option than meritocracy…
An indicator of our education: The PISA
What is the PISA? The Programme for International Student Assessment is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading, every three years. PISA testing used to be done exclusively on paper but has now moved to a system where computers are mostly used– the OECD says that computer testing is now ‘the default’, but that ‘for the small number of countries who were not ready for computer-based delivery it was possible for them to take the tests on paper’. There have been criticisms of this, suggesting that this change could have had an impact on scores (particularly in East Asian countries) despite the OECD suggesting they have accounted for the change carefully.
Who exactly takes the PISA?
Students are randomly selected to take the PISA. This means that there was no cherry-picking involved and countries could not select students from better-performing schools. In Singapore, 6,300 students from all 153 public secondary schools and 376 students from 13 private schools were randomly selected to take part in PISA 2018. They are representative of the population of 15-year-old students in Singapore. The PISA test takes samples in two stages: firstly, they use a stratified sample to select schools containing 15-year-olds using probability proportional to size. Then a simple random sample of 35 pupils is chosen from each sample school. If a school does not respond, it is replaced with one of its two nearest neighbours on the list; if a pupil does not respond, they are not replaced.
Just very recently, Singapore’s 15-year-olds top OECD’s PISA global competence test. This was due to the ability to understand and act on intercultural and global issues. Singapore students scored an average of 576 marks, followed by their peers from Canada who on average scored 554, Hong Kong (542), Scotland (534) and Taiwan (527). Singapore students scored around 20 marks higher than in the 2018 PISA. About 46% of the Singapore students who took the test achieved the highest global competency proficiency levels — four and five.
This is the highest proportion compared to the average 14% across the 27 education systems that participated in the test… but what about students’ mental wellbeing?
As can be seen from the above, although Singapore ranks high, our fear of failure is also extremely high. So does good grades come at the expense of one’s mental health?
Our education generally breeds a belief that doing well in school equates doing well in life and that conversely, doing badly comes with huge, adverse consequences. With increasingly educated and average income parents that see the value in education as a social leveller, parents will go all out into investing in their children, including enrichment classes at an early age.
Understandably, there is no perfect measure to gauge a multifarious concept of merit. However, studies have shown academic achievement is positively correlated to later occupational performance, and remains a valid measure of merit in Singapore’s context.
According to PISA 2015 reports, 76% of Singaporean students reported test anxiety, much higher than the OECD average. This is worrying, as the pressure to do well evidently shows the toll it takes on the mental health of students.
Many students and their parents, driven by this belief, place utmost emphasis on academic achievement, and as seen below depression is the most prevalent mental health disorder in Singapore(for more information on mental health, you guys can visit or revisit my #localdatastory on mental health on slack!)
Mental Health of Singaporeans:
The PISA also takes scores of self-efficacy! So I did some data cleaning and combined the PISA scores for ‘I usually manage one way or another’ (Index of self efficacy) and scores for ‘When I am failing, I am afraid that I do not have enough talent’. You can view this in my public tableau workbook here:
Countries that tended to score higher in the PISA also scored high in both self efficacy and fear of failure. For Singapore, though students are ranked quite high on self efficacy, with a score of 94, the fear of failure scores are extremely high too, which is not a good sign, as it meant that Singapore students reported greater fear of failure DESPITE their performance. This implies that insecurity levels amongst Singaporean students are high.
All in all, despite the detriments of meritocracy, it has helped to bring Singapore to one of the best scoring PISA countries, but also has quite a large impact on the mental health of students. We feel that maybe we should keep trying to let the hardest-working and most-talented people win, as best we can.
