Lee Kuan Yew is publishing a new book this month, the title of which suggests that bilingualism in Singapore has been the ‘challenge of his life’. Much controversies have spawned over the years on the issue of bilingual education here, but LKY seems reluctant to drop the argument that bilingualism will add or have added a crucial competitive advantage to this tiny country which thrives on global connections, especially with China’s ascendance and the opportunities it brought about. So, initially in the 60s and 70s, local tongues were to be suppressed, in order that the Singapore workforce could took advantage of Western capital; later, Mandarin was to be promoted, also in order that Singapore could better ride the rising tide of China. First Chinese had to be suppressed because of its connections to Communism; later it was to be promoted because it was said to contain the Confucian values that Singapore needed. Hardcore pragmatism begets erratic policies that irritated many, and achieved…who knows what?
Here is thus my naught cents’ worth of opinions on the matter. In my opinion, bilingualism in Singapore had problems, but perhaps not the ones people usually associated with it.
Firstly, it depends on how one defines bilingualism. If it is defined as general comprehensive functional proficiency in one language and a rudimentary proficiency in another, then the average Singaporean Chinese student in NTU seems to be an archetype of this kind of bilingualism. He reads textbooks and newspapers in English, answers exam questions and prepares job interviews in English. In daily conversations with his mates, depending on their family backgrounds, he might speak more or less short or broken sentences of Mandarin, sprinkled with the occasional Army Hokkien. He might speak completely in Mandarin with his parents back home, but the topics are naturally very limited. In fact, as a rule, he is not able to express complicated thoughts in Chinese, and the chances are he won’t be able to understand were the contents of his studies to be delivered in complicated and sophisticated Chinese. Even on more general intelligent topics, he would find his Mandarin put to great strain, though this is partly due to language and partly due to the limitations of his general intellectual horizon, particularly for the students in engineering and science studies.
This forms a stark contrast with some of the European bilinguals that I have met. Privileged as they are by experiences of elite education and cross-cultural exposures and mobilities from early ages, they are comprehensively and sophisticatedly proficient in both or all the languages they claim under their belt. Much as it might sound counter-intuitive, I have even met Americans who speak Mandarin better (not just pronunciation) than the average Singaporean Chinese.
I guess I can render my doubt about bilingualism in Singapore more specific and explicit by asking this question: how many truly elite people in Singapore are truly, i.e. comprehensively and sophisticatedly, bilingual? The local ministers, the CEOs of large GLCs, the very rich business men and women, and LKY himself… Invariably, they are only comprehensively and sophisticatedly proficient in one language—English—and then speak perhaps a smattering of Mandarin, which they might have picked up or cultivated later on. LKY started to learn Mandarin properly when he was in his 70s, and one wonders if he can really comprehend all the contents of, say, ‘新闻联播’.
In case I start to sound chauvinistic or somewhat contemptuous toward Singapore—which as people who know me will know is certainly not true—I will now lay my cards bare. My speculative position is: an unnaturally fostered bilingual education (as it seems to me the very case of Singapore, and as opposed to the natural absorption and internalization of those privileged multilingual Europeans) might become an impediment to the development of the intellect.
Bilingualism seems to have the inadvertent effect of preventing deep and complicated cognition. People schooled in monolingual environment have had more leisure to master all the concepts that they need to think with, and can then dive into thinking itself. They don’t have another language and anther set of vocabulary to confuse them, to interrupt with their thinking. They can think purely and deeply. Whether they succeed in doing this is another matter.
Bilinguals, on the contrary, easily stand the danger of being alienated from knowledge. Bilingualism in Singapore, which seems to bungle both languages, makes the student a linguistic homeless. He is at home in neither language, because he is not used to expressing anything purely and sophisticatedly in one tongue. At home, he uses pidgin Mandarin Chinese, and at school, he learns knowledge in English with difficulty. Knowledge, conveyed in English, becomes like a Goffmanian front stage, just as school is the formal side of his life; at the back stage, he uses his pidgin Chinese which is the language of the informal side of life. When he doesn't understand Knowledge in English, he seeks help from his Mandarin, which reinforces his sense of alienation from Knowledge; but the worse problem is, his Mandarin doesn't help him much either, because it’s only a pidgin Chinese! So he ends up with thoughts like: ‘Then你拿这个subtract from那个, then你cancel X, then你就拿到Y loh, right?’
This constant shuffling back and forth from the back and front stages makes a shallow subjectivity not disposed towards depth and sophistication. Like not a small portion of NTU’s half-hearted engineering students, he hates his studies because he is alienated from it; and when he is not studying his thoughts are confined to the narrow range his pidgin Chinese has defined for him.
What I said above is all quite dramatized, and probably sounds overly harsh. And it has to be qualified, as we know very many Singaporeans are more than academically competent and achieve great excellence; but the point is, those who do so tend to have either been educated comprehensively and sophisticatedly in only one language to start with, or have at some stage switched to this de facto monolingualism. The talent, the depths of thoughts, and the sophistication of the intellect that have been lost due to the shallow bilingual education cannot be measured.
Lastly, if my speculative position on unnatural and bungled bilingualism is correct, then a more important question is at stake here, one I wonder how LKY will respond to, namely, should the intellectual development of a class of people be inadvertently jeopardized for making Singapore a better bridge between East and West, so that the de facto monolingually educated elites can reap the economic fruits?
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