The big debate over parent volunteers
By Seah Chiang Nee
TV star Zoe Tay, like a US investment billionaire before her, has joined a growing trend in Singapore's high pressure education system.
The actress volunteered to work without pay at the elite Nanyang Primary School to improve her son's chances of being admitted there in two years' time.
The demand for a good primary school, regarded as a crucial start in life here, has soared since the government encouraged the intake of thousands of bright students from abroad.
In 2009, US investment billionaire Jim Rogers, who took up Singapore citizenship, and his wife also performed more than 40 hours of volunteer work at Nanyang Primary.
Today, their 11-year-old daughter Happy is getting the bilingual education that her parents had intended.
This practice has become more widespread in recent years as competition for admission into elite schools intensified during registration of Primary One pupils.
Singaporean parents are prepared to make sacrifices to get their kids into a premium primary school, which they consider as winning half the academic battle.
As a result, top institutions are swamped with applications every year.
A practice that promotes elitism?
Even as the practice spreads, the concept of parent volunteers is under attack for promoting elitism in Singapore society and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
An online survey which asked whether schools should do away with the scheme attracted an almost unanimous "yes".
There are benefits for everyone to get parents involved in the activities of their children's schools, according to ministry officials.
The broad complaint is, however, that it is helping to put the top primary schools further out of reach of poorer families, at least during registration.
At the same time it smacks of corruption; instead of paying money for a school place, parents are paying in service, said a social studies student.
"The scheme works in favour of the well-heeled parents who have the time and qualifications to do it," she said.
"What happens to the ill-educated and poorer parents who are unable to do so?"
In fact, then Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, in a visit to a premium girls' school last November, admitted that the primary school admission system was not meritocratic, as a child's family background played a part.
Whether a child went into a good school was based on the social class of the parents, Lee had said.
"So it's not so meritocratic. That's inevitable in any society."
The aim, he said, was to eventually balance things out at Primary Six.
"That's what we're aiming to do: regardless of who your father or mother is or was, we go by your performance."
Obsession with the paper chase
The preoccupation with the paper chase is a national trait. During recessions, the government often increased the education budget rather than reduce it.
At home, families spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for special tuition or extra classes for their children.
The word tuition is probably the first word a Singaporean kid hears as soon as he or she learns to walk.
And as he grows up, it seldom leaves him; even undergraduates here get tuition.
It is not surprising to see long lines of parents huddling overnight outside popular tuition centres, waiting to enrol their children when the centres open.
With this frenetic local preoccupation and tens of thousands of foreign children coming here to study, allocation of places has become a hot potato.
The education ministry has put in place a registration system giving priority to Singaporeans and PRs, with the first option being given to children of former students.
The second is reserved for families who live within 1km of the school.
Next is given to members of an association or a religious group, followed by community grassroots workers.
And if there are too many applicants, the parent volunteers — or PVs — are given preference but without guarantee.
Parents face their own test
In many cases, supply so overwhelms demand that parents who applied had to be interviewed and only a fraction are chosen.
In one school, only 44 were given the chance out of hundreds who applied last year.
"It has become laughable having parents anxiously trying to pass a test, something the kids do," said a private tutor.
"At certain times you can encounter groans and smiles from these grown-ups while their children run around oblivious to it all," he added.
The number of PVs has doubled in recent years, partly as a result of increased immigration.
Most PVs are wives of Singaporeans (now increasingly expatriates), some of whom have taken time off from their jobs to fulfil the role.
Some parents are surgeons, lawyers and corporate high-fliers with highly impressive application forms.
"A few submitted pages and pages of their achievements which were mostly a waste since, as a rule, parental qualifications do not count," a school official said.
Most volunteer work entails reading to pupils, helping to re-organise library books or, as in the case of actress Zoe Tay, it may relate to one's skills or profession.
School authorities say it is the parents' commitment to the school that is often decisive, including the number of volunteer hours.
Forty hours is the minimum, but the popular ones fix it at 80 hours.
One kiasu (a Hokkien term meaning 'afraid to lose') parent is said to have clocked in a staggering 600 hours, or more than four months' full-time work.
With pressures of life so pressing, I wonder how it is affecting young Singaporeans' enthusiasm to marry — let alone produce babies.
