The book is now (June 2012) available for Nook and as an iBook.  In these formats it’s free – just type my name into the search and download.  If you get the iBook, read it in landscape format if you want the photo galleries to work properly.

According to the cabbies, in the late 1940s Chinese Singaporeans wanted a university that would teach their children in Chinese.  You may recall that until 1942 Singapore was ruled by the British, until it was overrun by Japanese soldiers on bicycles (a tale for another post).  Once the Japanese were in place, they exterminated all the young Chinese men they could find, on the grounds that they could be spies for mainland Chinese – mainland China being another place where the Japanese failed to distinguish themselves for kindness and understanding in the 1940s.

Suffice it to say that Singapore’s Chinese population had had a very rough ride for 150 years, and they felt the need to get out of their rut and take control of their destiny through education.  And education in a medium that was available to all of them, not just the elite who traded with the Brits.  So they organized a donation campaign.  Rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, hawker-stall cooks, everyone contributed something: $30 or $40.  And in 1955 Nantah University admitted its first students to a program in higher education in the Chinese language.

Great story, eh?  But it gets complicated.

During the war many students and staff at Nantah had ached to help out their ancestral country, China, and before 1955 they had worked in China itself, in the army fending off the Japanese among other things.  But once the Communist Party took over China official Chinese policy became to expel overseas Chinese, on the grounds of suspect loyalty. So Singapore-born Chinese were kicked out and returned to Singapore, where they turned to Nantah University to further their own educations or help their Singaporean compatriots.

In 1965 Singapore became independent of Malaysia and began to govern itself. When Lee Kwan Yew took power, a consistent thorn in his side were the Singaporean communists.  He suspected that Nantah University was a hotbed of resistance and commie plotting, since there were so many people there who’d been evicted from the (communist) People’s Republic of China.  So he shut it down in 1970, and instead created the National University of Singapore a couple of miles east – the flagship of Singaporean higher education, whose course offerings were to be English-only.  This was in keeping with Lee’s general course of looking to the western world for Singapore’s main cultural and economic ties instead of to surrounding countries in Asia.

Only in 1980 did it become evident that NUS was insufficient for Singapore’s tertiary education needs, and so the grounds that had previously been Nantah University were converted to the brand-new Nanyang Technological University, dedicated to pumping out engineers at an astonishing rate.  Every reminder of the old people’s university was expunged.  But this erasure of history was NOT accepted with sheepish compliance – since Nantah had been founded by the people of Singapore themselves, deleting it from history was an unwise political move.  So there are three remnants of Nantah University: the Yunnan Garden (containing the Nanyang Gate), the Chinese Heritage Center (which houses a permanent exhibit on what it means to be an Overseas Chinese), and, across the freeway and isolated in a park behnid the sports stadium, the Nantah Gate.

And nowhere on Nanyang University’s campus will you find any reference to the people’s university, Nantah.  To find out about it, you need to ask a taxi driver. Or read this blog.

Chinese Heritage Center: 2 views

To ensure that people actually cross the bridge, all major services were located on the left, in Engineering: banks, convenience stores, many different restaurants, with air conditioning.  The NIE side boasts only an open-air canteen and a stationery shop.  So plenty of traffic as the NIE folks go to eat or bank at NTU.

But has it worked?  How many marriages (and dearer to the government’s heart, children) have resulted from this architectural nudging?  Anecdotal evidence suggests not many, and the reasons are legion. 1) Singaporean males are afraid of really bright well-educated females; 2) those who aren’t tend to marry other engineers, computer people or accountants; 3) it’s just not fun being a mother in Singapore – as in other countries we could mention, it’s too damn hard to find good child care.  The teachers I know are married to other teachers, or to civil servants, often in the Ministry of Education. But then my sample is pretty small.

No, what it means is that all public transit to the area will cease, and NIE employees will have to take dedicated buses, which will run only at specified hours. Once the employees have taken the buses (and gone through 3 police check points), they will be restricted to their offices from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the days they work.  Unable to move about the campus, they will essentially be in lock-down.  Lunches will be delivered to their offices.  Vendors and suppliers will be forbidden to bring things to the building.  And staff who don’t show up during this time must apply for leave.  Ugh.

School, in case you didn’t know, will be in session from July 1 as usual.  Teacher training classes will not start until August 26 – usually it’s three weeks earlier. But those of us who work in schools will still have to juggle workplaces.

What if you have a project that requires you to move about, or leave campus?  Those of us on such projects are concluding that we’d better work from home for that whole month.  I expect a whole lot of computers, printers, data servers and office supplies to begin heading out of the building in July.

YOGI – Youth Olympic Games Insanity.  You’ll excuse me if I refrain from expressing joy and excitement.

But that’s not what my post title promises.  The new job I have is working full-time in education research, on two different projects for two different bosses.  So instead of trying to coordinate software development among three institutions (with the bosses of 2 of them being uncannily similar to Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss), I am now videotaping innovative teaching methods in two Singapore public schools, logging and analyzing the data we get and trying to reap some research papers from the wilderness of bits, bytes and field notes.  FUN!  And my two bosses are really great.

I had been thinking of doing a lot of job-related blogging in my previous job; it would be highly entertaining to tell you all about the institutional wierdness and management incompetence I encountered.  But for once discretion reared its ugly head, and I figured that some day a potential (good) boss might read that stuff and decide I was unworthy to claim a paycheck from her.  But now I think I can blog about my current job, since I’m on the ground in Singapore schools and seeing a LOT of interesting stuff.  And I know from reading my blog stats that readers are interested in Singapore education – it’s in third place in popularity among the searches, after sex and food.

So for the next few months I’ll fill you in whenever I have a chance on the various things I learn and observe about education in Singapore.  I can’t promise to intersperse it with nude photos of famous people or anything really titillating, but if you’re an education junkie this might be mildly interesting for you.

Bon Appetite!

I’m pleased with the focus on the individual diamonds that my camera managed to achieve.  I didn’t realize that the coloration of a snake is partially left behind when it molts.  We don’t know what kind of snake this is; no head or tail was left on the skin.  But I am delighted that I got it!  I never had a snakeskin in the U.S. – is this the one thing Singapore offers me that my home country couldn’t?

Here’s the underside: the focus isn’t so great, but you can see its scutes:

So now you know: Snakes don’t have scales, and they’re not slimy.

For this you get a computerized database online and many branches to visit.  There are pretty good collections of books, although the DVDs tend to be relentlessly oriented towards self-improvement or education – no mere entertainment!  And the architecture of some branches is great.  The Jurong East library has a waterfall in the lobby.  

And, this being Singapore, each library has a cafe in it.

As we went by the dorm’s recreation room, which was lit from within, we saw a single student, sitting cross-legged on the couch, with a wooden fish* on the coffee table in front of him.  He was banging away on it (noknoknoknoknoknok), with his eyes closed, apparently humming some prayers to himself.  So much for studying – time for divine intervention!

When you go by a Buddhist temple (or Taoist – there’s so much overlap I often can’t tell the difference) you’ll often see people pounding the fish – only really big, ornate ones that fill the neighborhood with a knocking sound.  This student imported the practice to the dorm.  And this explains why the temples in Bugis are so very busy at this time – all the families are praying like mad for good exam results.

*I’m not sure why these drums are called wooden fish, except that the ones in temples usually have fish designs carved into them.  Probably some connection to the association of fish (yu) with abundance.  Anyway, if you bang on them, in the temple or out, you’re performing an activity called “pounding the fish” – shorthand for “asking the gods for something you really want.”