I was born in 1983. That same year, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said in his annual National Day Rally speech
“If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards. Standards of competence will decline. For how can we avoid lowering performance when, for every two graduates… in 25 years’ time, there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three?”
Both my parents are not graduates. I must have felt shitty if I could understand what he had said at that time.
In 2011, after almost 30 years, he has not changed his views. In the book, Hard Truths, he was quoted as saying
“When the graduate man does not want to marry a graduate woman, I tell him, he’s a fool, stupid. You marry a non-graduate, you’re going to have
...