By TAN SAI SIONG
SINGAPORE is a nation on the move in more than the metaphorical sense. This year even saw a reshuffle of school heads on a scale said to be unprecedented in our education history.
Moreover, this upheaval is not a whim but a ministry of Education policy, introduced in 1995 to ensure that no principal remains the leader of a school for longer than seven years.
The policy has drawn mixed response, probably because of the sheer scale of the latest exercise.
In my column Look Back In Wonder last month, I had supported this approach of not letting grass grow under the feet of any school principal.
But in one respect I have to concede that those who worry about possible adverse consequences may have a point - where the history of the affected schools is concerned.
And that may mean many schools because few are likely to be left untouched once the ministry's policy is in full swing. Particularly vulnerable are schools which don't boast a long history and are shut down when enrolments fall. Or schools which have to move because they have outgrown their premises or their site grows to have other, more valuable, uses.
The affected schools could then lose their place in Singapore's education history while those students who had gone through their portals could suffer the loss of an important reference point in their lives.
Imagine, when men and women who had spent four, five or seven years in a particular school, look back at that experience and all they can find is a void. No publicly available records. No outsider remembers a thing.
Sure, the nostalgic group could approach the ministry's memory bank for help.
But remember, each year it oversees hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of pupils.
Ten, 20 years down the road, and it may not have much on a pebble of a school whose name and even its buildings have been swept away by urban progress or demographic changes into the mists of time.
However, schools with no fixed heads, no long-term fixed abode and which are a little short on roots, need not despair. Neither should those associated with them.
It is possible to preserve their place in history, however fleeting it might turn out to be, if each school endeavours to document its annual highlights for posterity.
An in-house scribe can be assigned to maintain the records while teachers and students can be sensitised to scrutinise everyday school events for any that could be history in the making.
Such painstaking diary-keeping will be useful and not only for schools fearful that they may be an overnight wonder like the tan-hua.
They will also be useful for those which, contrary to expectations, turn out to have the longevity of St Joseph's Institution (143 years), Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (144) and Anglo Chinese School (112).
This is because a well-documented chronicle will not only capture the facts and figures of the school concerned, but also the ethos and the personalities of times past, providing a rich archive to those who want to write its history in future years.
A further spin-off is that those who read the work will be inspired and informed, as I was recently by books on ACS, SJI and CHIJ, none of them new but all nevertheless fresh discoveries for me. The volume on ACS gave me the true story of Clare Chen that will make the ads on TV extolling the virtues of teaching look shallow by contrast.
Chen, according to Hearts, Hopes And Aims, served ACS intermittently between 1961 and 1973. During that time, unknown to anyone, she was suffering from a painful and incurable disease that affected her whole body.
Medication affected her eyesight and made her bones brittle. Yet, she returned to school on support frames, negotiating stairs and taking classes. She used a magnifying glass to help her see the homework she had to mark.
When her illness finally confined her to bed, she told those who visited her that she had plenty of time on her hands and offered to pray for anyone in need.
From Peter Low's Memoirs Of An SJI Boy, I am reminded of what school discipline was like 30 years ago when nobody questioned the soundness of the premise: Spare the rod and spoil the child.
So, Low and his peers were caned for poor results, and effeminate as well as unruly behaviour, although the author confessed that it was more effective on the first two offences than the last, if a child was bent on being uncontrollable.
Convent girls ... CHIJ leaves a remarkable
sense of place on its students.The third volume, Convent Chronicles, is, as its name suggests, about CHIJ, which happened to be my alma mater.
What comes through best in the sometimes breathless and not always coherent compilation is a remarkable sense of place that the Convent left on those who went in as mewing schoolgirls and came out mostly as young women sure of our goals.
It is as if the buildings - the chapel, the cloisters, the open-air grotto overgrown with creepers sheltering a statue of the Virgin Mary, the orphanage, the walls which surrounded the complex, the spiral staircases leading to forbidden rooms - moulded young minds as much as the mainly Irish nuns who ran the bulk of the classes.
And some of the same buildings, conserved to modern-day standards, today continue to exert their hold on a wider section of Singaporeans now that the old CHIJ site has become Chijmes, a discreet entertainment complex.
But for schools which can't boast as rich a heritage in stone and mortar, they should aim to keep good records of what they did and how they did it, if they don't want to be a ship passing in the night on Singapore's education sea, leaving no trace of themselves.
First published in The Straits Times, Feb 13, 1998
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