LEE KY A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

LEE KY A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

He did not crave to be popular; rather, Mr Lee Kuan Yew sought to persuade people to see his point of view. A forceful orator in part due to his legal training, his ability to sway his listeners contributed greatly to Mr Lee’s effectiveness over the years. The man shaped in the turbulent power struggles of pre-independence Singapore grasped full well the importance of being able to win over the crowd, though he refused to be led by it.

A leader concerned with being popular was a weak leader, he believed, and he preferred to be feared than to be loved. In an interview in 1975, Mr Lee said: “My job is to persuade my flock, my people, and that’s the right way ... What the crowd thinks of me from time to time, I consider totally irrelevant … The whole ground can be against me, but if I know this is right, I set out to do it, and I am quite sure, given time, as events unfold, I will win over the ground.”

His former Cabinet colleague, the late Goh Keng Swee, said of his persuasive powers: “He gets his way not, as some opposition people say, by dictating to other people, but by persuading them. He spends an awful lot of time persuading people.”

BBC NEWS : LIFE OF LEE KY

With a sense of vision and a ruthless pragmatism, Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore as it transformed from a tiny island with no natural resources into a thriving economic success.

He successfully channelled the energies of Singaporeans to create what has often been described as an economic miracle, a mixture of private and state capitalism.

Mr Lee made Singapore prosperous, modern, efficient and practically corruption-free - and overseas investors flocked in.

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We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think”

Lee Kuan Yew

But while he was admired for his economic success, many expressed concern over his record on human rights.

Lee Kuan Yew was born on 16 September 1923 in Singapore, the son of third-generation Chinese immigrants.

His upbringing had a strong British influence and his grandfather dubbed him Harry Lee, a name by which he was known through most of his early life.

Mr Lee went to an English school in Singapore but his further education was disrupted by the Japanese occupation, which began in 1942.

Lee on the campaign trail in 1958

For the next three years, he was involved in the black market and also used his command of English to work for the Japanese propaganda department.

THE LEGACY OF LEE KUAN YEW

THE LEGACY OF LEE KUAN YEW  CHANNEL NEWS ASIA MARCH 2015

SINGAPORE: Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who was Singapore’s first Prime Minister when the country gained Independence in 1965, has died on Monday (Mar 23) at the age of 91.

"The Prime Minister is deeply grieved to announce the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Mr Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3.18am. He was 91," said the PMO.

Arrangements for the public to pay respects and for the funeral proceedings will be announced later, it added.

Mr Lee, who was born in 1923, formed the People’s Action Party in 1954, then became Prime Minister in 1959. He led the nation through a merger with the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, as well as into Independence in 1965.

KIDS CARE ABT GRADES THAN OTHERS 2014 ATLANTIC

KIDS CARE ABT GRADES THAN OTHERS 2014 ATLANTIC

A new study from Harvard University reveals that the message parents mean to send children about the value of empathy is being drowned out by the message we actually send: that we value achievement and happiness above all else. The Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Educationsurveyed 10,000 middle and high school students about what was more important to them, “achieving at a high level, happiness, or caring for others.” Almost 80 percent of students ranked achievement or happiness over caring for others. Only 20 percent of students identified caring for others as their top priority.

In the study, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending About Values,” the authors point to a “rhetoric/reality gap,” an incongruity between what adults tell children they should value and the messages we grown-ups actually send through our behavior. We may pay lip service to character education and empathy, but our children report hearing a very different message.

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WHAT’S SO SCARY ABT SMART GIRLS NY TIMES 2014

WHAT’S SOSCARY ABT SMART GIRLS NY TIMES 2014

WHEN terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls’ school.

That’s what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare.

That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books. In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.

What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy.

FLIGHT FROM CONVERSATION

The Flight From Conversation NYTIMES

SHERRY TURKLE APRIL 21,2012

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are. We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another. A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

INTERNATIONAL SURROGACY IS UNFAIR HERALD 2014

INTERNATIONAL SURROGACY IS UNFAIR HERALD 2014

Recent revelations by Fairfax Media that an Australian couple may have abandoned one of their surrogate twins who had tested positive for down syndrome, while whisking his healthy sister off to Australia, shed a rare light on the hidden and fundamentally unjust world of international commercial surrogacy.

We don’t know the identity of the couple: they found a broker and stayed firmly in the shadows until Monday when the father denied any knowledge of the second twin.

The woman who was used so badly does not have the luxury of anonymity. We know that Pattharamon Janbua was barely out of her teens when recruited. We know that she was pressured to have a late-term abortion when the baby’s condition was discovered but refused on religious grounds. We know that her payment depended on her misleading Australian Embassy officials in order to secure the necessary permissions for the healthy twin to leave the country. We know that she is now left caring for a sick baby that is not her own.

IMPACT OF POVERTY ON CHILDREN

Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.

Keywords: Education, Interventions, Poverty, School readiness

IMPACT OF POVERTY ON CHILDREN BY FERGUSON 

Poverty remains a stubborn fact of life even in rich countries like Canada. In particular, the poverty of our children has been a continuing concern. In 1989, the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by 2000 (1). However, the reality is that, in 2003, one of every six children still lived in poverty. Not only have we been unsuccessful at eradicating child poverty, but over the past decade, the inequity of family incomes in Canada has grown (2), and for some families, the depth of poverty has increased as well (3). Canadian research confirms poverty’s negative influence on student behaviour, achievement and retention in school (4).

Persistent socioeconomic disadvantage has a negative impact on the life outcomes of many Canadian children. Research from the Ontario Child Health Study in the mid-1980s reported noteworthy associations between low income and psychiatric disorders (5), social and academic functioning (6), and chronic physical health problems (7). Since that time, Canada has developed systematic measures that have enabled us to track the impact of a variety of child, family and community factors on children’s well-being. The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) developed by Statistics Canada, Human Resources Development Canada and a number of researchers across the country was started in 1994 with the intention of following representative samples of children to adulthood (8). Much of our current knowledge about the development of Canadian children is derived from the analysis of the NLSCY data by researchers in a variety of settings.

One of the key areas influenced by family income is educational outcomes. The present article provides a brief review of the literature concerning the effects of poverty on educational outcomes focusing on Canadian research. Canadian data are placed in the perspective of research from other ‘rich’ countries. We conclude with some suggestions about what we can do, as advocates and practitioners, to work toward reducing the negative impact of economic disadvantage on the educational outcomes of our children.

ELITISM WON'T HELP POORER CHILDREN GUARDIAN JULY 2014

ELITISM WON'T HELP POORER CHILDREN GUARDIAN JULY 2014

But perhaps none is more potent – apparently plausible and yet subtly dangerous – than the simplistic idea that education can be a universal route out of poverty. The argument goes something like this: if schools can only get it right, then every child can escape his or her background or, at the very least, jump up a social class or two.

No one doubts that education can profoundly affect an individual life course. The poor pupil made good, thanks to the 11-plus, remains one of the most romantic cultural narratives of post-war Britain. During New Labour's time in office, "aspiration" became the favoured, if rather more amorphous, buzzword. The 2009 Milburn report on fair access to the professions, for example, made much of the right of parents to get their children into a better school, while failing to make clear what should happen to those unlucky enough to remain stuck in a worse one.

TECHNOLOGY IS OUR PLANET'S BEST HOPE

TECHNOLOGY IS OUR PLANET'S BEST HOPE GUARDIAN JULY 2013

There is a new environmental agenda out there. One that is inimical to many traditional conservationists, but which is picking up kudos and converts. It calls itself environmental modernism – which for many is an oxymoron. Wasn't the environmentalism of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Greenpeace's warriors against industrial whaling and the nuclear industry, and efforts to preserve the world's last wild lands, meant to be the antithesis of the modern industrial world?

But the prophets of ecological modernism believe technology is the solution and not the problem. They say that harnessing innovation and entrepreneurship can save the planet and that if environmentalists won't buy into that, then their Arcadian sentiments are the problem.

The modernists wear their environmentalism with pride, but are pro-nuclear, pro-genetically modified crops, pro-megadams, pro-urbanisation and pro-geoengineering of the planet to stave off climate change. They say they embrace these technologies not to conquer nature, like old-style 20th century modernists, but to give nature room. If we can do our business in a smaller part of the planet — through smarter, greener and more efficient technologies — then nature can have the rest.