Basket.

Something came in the mail today: an announcement by MOE that it has loads of cash to spare and is thus happily throwing money away.

Also known as an official letter for my brother inviting him to go for a dinner next year commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Gifted Education Programme. At the Grand Hyatt Singapore, no less.

Now, seeing as it is another elitist action taken by a Ministry in a country steeped in elitism, where the education policy is a virtual caste system, this is not surprising at all. It, however, is certainly enough to provoke my anger at the way this country and its education system is run.

What is so incredibly idiotic and asinine about this is it celebrates something completely not worth celebrating. Something that has no useful purpose and has been a waste of taxpayers' money for the last two decades, as I have now been so kindly informed.

Let us look at the Gifted Education Programme. After nearly two decades in operation, what can it claim to have done at all? What tangible benefits has it given the country? Have students that have gone through it done better in life than those who haven't? How does it exactly do good to the student? Can it be proven via facts and figures and charts and tables that GEP students are more of a success, are somehow better than their Express counterparts?

As I see it, the answer is no. No to every single one of those questions. The GEP is a waste of money, and it has not done much more than create a selfish, self-important group of individuals who see them as above all else just because they are in the GEP. Consequently, it has created a similar group of parents who turn arrogant just because their sons and daughters are in the GEP. Is this good for the country?

No one denies most of the students in the GEP are smart. The main question is, would they have done as well, or better even, without the programme? Because Express has plenty of smart students too, and plenty of them go on to be more of a success than GEP people. So why the division? What is the rationale for it? Why take out supposedly the brightest brains in the country (based only on the results of two maths and english tests) and educate them differently, supposedly in a better way? Why grant them a different syllabus and different textbooks and subsidies? The system is flawed. No system is perfect, but MOE is expert at making flawed systems even more imperfect.

It's just stupid. MOE sees the GEP as significant and a success, obviously. Yet they do not examine and reevaluate its usefulness, and realise how useless it really is in the long term. Thus, they will not scrap it and save Singaporean taxpayers a whole lot of money. What's more, they are now dumping more cash into the hole. What folly.

And I can only see the elitism pervading Singaporean society get worse, what with shit like the NUS High School. Next time we'll have balloting for places there and parents boasting of their children's exploits in getting there. It could well replace the GEP as the number one boast and cause of arrogance amongst over-protective and Bounderbyesque parents.