In an article for Yale-NUS publication

The Octant

, concerning Dr Tan’s visit to the campus in October last year, executive editor Justin Ong writes that students who attended Dr Tan’s talk were left “wanting more” from the political veteran. Even though the liberal arts college represents a small portion of Singaporean Gen Z, it’s worth noting that the more politically conscious of our youth remain unconvinced about Dr Tan’s ability to build a future they want to see.

Justin himself went for the talk hoping to learn about Dr Tan’s take on our meritocratic system that seems perfect on paper, but less so in practice. The 24-year-old thought Mr Tan addressed some important points that were “very targeted at showing how meritocracy had some cracks”, especially when he spoke about how Singaporeans seem to be allocated to their vocations in National Service partly based on their race.

But Justin also points out that Dr Tan held an overly simplistic view that Singaporeans have learnt to see beyond race. An interviewee from Justin’s original article was also concerned about Dr Tan’s seeming blindspot regarding race.

Justin adds, “It doesn’t take many conversations with my Chinese friends to know that racism is still alive and well. In order to talk about meritocracy, we have to address these issues of race rather than assume we are all happy as ‘one Singapore’.”

Another Yale-NUS student at the talk, Chew Huijun, was also unimpressed by Dr Tan. The 22-year-old and his friends are concerned about what jobs would look like in the future, how Singapore could be a more inclusive and equitable society, and how we plan to deal with the income and wealth gap.

Unfortunately, Dr Tan “gave shallow answers that wouldn’t look out of place in a GP essay”. For instance, when asked about how Singapore could deal with tuition contributing to inequality, Dr Tan simply said his grandchildren in Australia didn’t need or have tuition, and that achieving a similar situation in our country would require a mindset change.

Huijun adds, “How do we change minds if the goalposts set by society doesn’t shift? How do we convince parents to give up tuition? These were all questions he didn’t or couldn’t answer.”

Huijun also didn’t get a satisfactory answer to his concerns about the changing nature of work in relation to automation, and the possibility of people getting left behind because of a lack of skills. Again, Dr Tan simply said there must be a “special scheme” to help these people, without specifying what that would look like.

“Dr Tan seemed to have poor technical knowledge of policy instruments, and wasn’t well-versed in the concerns and conversations of the day. If you come to a liberal arts college to talk about meritocracy, you should expect people to ask about social safety nets, inequality and how to reduce it; sustainable growth, and how to fix our flawed version of meritocracy, to name a few aspects,” says Huijun.

“I expected him to have some good answers, or at least good non-answers. But he had neither.”

More Singaporean youth like Justin and Huijun have begun to challenge the glossy narrative they’ve been sold about our country and the government. They see respect and admiration as something that public leaders have to earn, and they’re no longer satisfied with what older generations wanted in the past, such as BTOs and stable office jobs.

For a country to make significant progress, future leaders and politicians can no longer neglect youth voices like theirs.

As Huijun puts, “They need to decide if the youth vote is important for them to win. On our part, we probably also need to make ourselves relevant and less apathetic, in order to let politicians know that we will be willing to vote on these issues.”