  Wassup. I've been busy getting Chinese current affairs essays into context. Hate it. BBC says that women with hourglass figures are urlLink more fertile , which is synonymous with "Western views of beauty". Tomorrow, women with hairless armpits are more intelligent... not. Also: urlLink is it in anyone to abuse a captive?
One sentence in that article will sum up why I am not sanguine about letting teachers do anything they like to students: "...absolute power corrupts absolutely. " There is this exclusive i'll-trust-some-stressed-out-adult-who-could-give-less-of-a-damn-to-discipline-my-kid-fairly mentality of parents in Singapore, out of what, convenience? And, more revealingly, teachers don't have any more time to care about students than their fucking lazy parents do. Time for my tirade on caning students, I can't stand it anymore: How much time would you have for one student if you have to teach 200 students a week - and see each student only for 1 to 3 hours during that time? Eh, it's an absolute given that students aren't perfect. Neither are teachers. Teachers aren't superhuman. Yup, two hours of time a week to show a kid some love, discipline, and simultaneously earn his or her respect.
And about beating kids, I'll say again that, while I haven't got any alternative solutions (hence the subdued resignation to fate), caning isn't the be-all-end-all to all things. We're civilised people here. A painful, physical deterrent translates to absolutely nothing in our protected world. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. But you can't teach a man to fish if you pelt stones at him for whatever shortcoming, can you? Ever wonder why we lack social grace? Because we think Michael Fay is going back to Yank Land with cane scars on his ass and never ever do a naughty thing again. (They don't flog naughty kids in America, just shove them into luxurious state-paid prisons with television sets and beds.
) Why have children? To be part of a national statistic? Joy -- in all knowledge that he or she will grow up in fifteen years just to shout at you and make you life miserable? I've seen six-year-olds scream at their mom to shut up, and they haven't started full-time schooling yet. Where do we pull these things from, our asses? These things don't surface as genetically or magically as we'd all like to think they do.
Stop blaming us for what our shortcomings. And the teachers aren't to blame -- what right do you have over two hundred students that your fucking kid should be preferentially cared for? To put everything I've been so painfully trying to say into context: Singaporean parents are failures. They are the real wimps and the whiny slobs. Let's have a national campaign to breed us kids right. You never have that, instead you have futile campaigns to rid our pidgin English. The gov't, let's face it, can't force us to have kids. If you don't want to, don't. Don't give a chance to a kid to come into this world to regret so and hate you for your own shortcomings as a parent if you don't see the need to change them.
Of course, kids have many shortcomings, all of which have been covered in great, absolutely one-sided detail by moaning adults on the newspapers. 
