By Toh Hsien Min

When the news broke that Anglo-Chinese Primary School was going to move to Tengah, despite the news stirring all sorts of controvery, I couldn't rouse myself out of ambivalence.  I suppose having no kids of my own meant I didn't have any skin in that game, but as an ACS alumnus who spent the maximum twelve years there and who continues even today to be reminded of the fact, I had to feel, and I did.  It was just that any feeling didn't take any clear direction.  At the most I felt conflicted.  

To explain this, I must relate a bit of personal history.  I'm told (as school admissions were clearly not top of mind for a six year old) my enrolment in Anglo-Chinese Junior School was in large part aided by my sister being in Methodist Girls' School, a legal loophole, if you like, that has since been closed.  And she in turn got in, I understand, through another pathway via the Methodist Church.  It was neither about money or influence or living next to the school; my family were at best middle class, and I grew up in an HDB flat.  While we were not poor, I was certainly not the kind of ACS boy who grew up in a good class bungalow in King Albert Park.  Over the next twelve years from my admission, ACS was transformational in ways that I barely understood.  I would suppose now that it cemented my Christian faith; it normalised excellence (except in Mandarin, where it, contrarily, normalised incompetence), in part by fostering a mindset that whatever one achieved, one could always do better; and it normalised confidence, which was possibly the last of the lessons I learned, oddly because everyone else seemed so confident and so capable that I only understood what confidence meant when I left the Anglo-Chinese system.

What this means to say is that I would not begrudge anyone who wants it access to an ACS education.  Knowing where one has been helps to give a sense of where people want to get to and why.  My only question might be whether Tengah is the right way to go about making this education accessible.  It is arguably so, because of the rules now about priority based on proximity - shifting the school away from the expensive Bukit Timah neighbourhood takes away some of the embedded advantages of the rich - but then again the 1km rule is arbitrary anyway, no less so than the pathways that got me admitted all those many decades ago.  If all this does is to create a new local disruption in the property ladder in Singapore - someone I know with a Tengah BTO flat still under construction has already been tapped by property agents seeking to have a role in a sale after the minimum occupancy period - then a move like this would no more likely be a solution than just a way of shifting the problem elsewhere.

As for ACPS going co-ed, speaking as someone who just missed the Oxford colleges Somerville and then Saint Hilda's switching (from all-girls) to co-ed in the years before and after my time there, I find it hard to raise any objection.  At best I might observe that those cases were of tertiary colleges, whereas at least part of the ACS can-do spirit arises from boys-will-be-boys mischief.  Perhaps the change might be for the better, perhaps it might be for the worse, or as the school motto has it: the best is yet to be.  But from the vantage point of the present, I really don't know.  Hence I can't feel anything one way or the other.  I suspect it is for the forty years hence to look back and decide.  

This issue has been a bit tough to put together because of quite a lot of stuff going on at work; whatever advantages one might have from education doesn't spare one from having to continually work hard.  There's a small but elegant poetry selection and four fascinating short stories from writers of different backgrounds, but it is in the Criticism section that there is most celebration of difference, most evidently in New Singapore Poetries and in Brown is Redacted.  Perhaps there one might also find a reminder that not all pathways need to be the same.

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