By Serene Koh

At his annual National Day Dinner for residents in his Ang Mo Kio constituency, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong urged Singaporeans to strengthen their “heartware”—values such as mutual respect, care and compassion, meritocracy, and integrity—and to focus less on “hardware” such as new HDB flats and more train lines. He goes on to talk about how Singaporeaness ought to be defined by the extent to which we exhibit these traits in our daily lives and by the manner in which we treat each other.

It is almost certain that the target audience for PM Lee’s speech was the adults in the constituency. But there is another audience about whom the Prime Minister should also be thinking. The privileging of “hardware” over “heartware” has become so endemic to the country’s psyche that our children are not immune. I suggest that there is much we can learn about the rights and obligations of citizenship from our youngest Singaporeans and that understanding children’s ideas about national identity is vital if we want to nurture an enthusiastic, thoughtful, and engaged citizenry. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we ignore them at our own peril. If we truly believe that children are our future—and literally, they are—then we need to starting listening to them and hearing what they have to say about this country and its people.

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of spending some time interviewing children both in Singapore and the U.S. and talking with them about their notions of citizenship.

The differences were stark.

Even though these students were only in primary school, many of them already had very thoughtful and mature opinions about issues such as national identity and what it means to be a citizen of a country. The Singaporean students were clearly very proud of our nation’s progress over the last four and a half decades. They talked about our growth from a mere fishing village into the global financial player we are today and listed the various accolades we have achieved despite our relative young age – our highly esteemed airport, our efficient transportation system, clean housing estates, and the world’s largest ferris wheel. Together, these stood for how developed a nation Singapore has become. The following exchange comes from my conversation with a Primary 4 boy telling me what he believes to be the greatest thing we have achieved since independence:

Serene: What was Singapore like in the past?

Jerome:  Run down. Old. Smelly. Hot.

Serene:  How is that very different today?

Jerome:  So different! We have air-con now! We have flats. And good transportation.

Serene:  What else?

Jerome:  Clean water. Most important.

In other words, national identity in Singapore—as it was conceived by schoolchildren—is one very much steeped in the discourse of the material and pragmatic, where the image of the nation is often inextricable from concerns about high standard of living, good housing, and access to clean water. All hardware.

The primary school students in the U.S. were just as proud of their country. But they had a very different vocabulary to talk about it. Children in the U.S. evoked ideas that were more ideological and creedal; specifically, American students referred more to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, rights, and equality as embodied in the American Creed. The term “the American Creed” was popularized by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 in The American Dilemma. Scholars have defined the concepts of the Creed in various ways, but they almost universally agree on the central ideas that Myrdal identified, “the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity.” [1]

Take the following excerpt for example: a fifth grade girl, Rachel, is talking to me about her belief that being able to choose your own religion is symbolic of a whole host of other freedoms Americans have:

“Because we feel strong depending… I don’t know, like what god we worship. We feel that we can pray in our own way. And we don’t feel afraid. And that helps us kind of grow, some people say spiritually or like mentally. We feel we don’t have to be um… afraid that we can’t worship any god we want, think however we want. And so that makes America stronger as a people because we can… because our beliefs are safe. No one can take that away from us.”

In other words, religious freedom is important to these children beyond just being free to worship any god you choose; it is a sacred and essential part of American national identity insofar as it represents the larger freedom of thought and belief that is entrenched in the American Creed. And this student is not alone in the way she speaks about her country – the prevailing narrative evoked by the students in the U.S. is one that is strongly marked by a faith in the basic freedoms promised to Americans by the Constitution and the Creed. Samuel Huntington calls this the ideational basis of national identity, where the ideals and values of the American Creed define American national identity and are essential to the continued existence of the United States as a nation. [2]

I believe PM Lee would call this heartware.

One can argue that children merely echo what they learn in their textbooks, hear from their parents, and watch on TV; that perhaps what I gleaned were merely scripts that have been hardwired into the children by the Singaporean and American education systems and media. But maybe that is precisely the point. If we want to inculcate in our populace a deeper regard for Singaporean values and ideals—a Singaporean Creed, if you will—we need to re-look the scripts that are being handed to our children from the moment they begin school, if not younger. A script is merely a narrative, a story, if you will. So how can we tell a different story so that our children will begin to develop a greater appreciation for Singaporean heartware?

First, recognize that we already have a Creed from which to derive our values – the National Pledge. Schoolchildren recite it daily but do they truly understand what it all stands for? As reflected by my conversation with Jerome and with many other Singaporean children, I feel confident saying that children in Singapore have fully internalized the fact that the “happiness, prosperity, and progress [of] our nation” are of paramount importance. More often than not, when Singaporean children talk about why they are proud of Singapore, they cite material and pragmatic issues such as our economic success, our airport, the Singapore Flyer, etc. But what of the other parts of our Pledge? Do they comprehend what it means to build a democratic society that is based on justice and equality? In what ways is the Singapore system—whether education, judicial, economic, or social—democratic, just, and equal? If we do not want the Pledge to be mere words that students regurgitate every morning and for it to actually mean something, then we need to engage our children to think critically and thoughtfully about it– about all of it– both the hardware and heartware parts.

Next, make reality more like the story we want to tell. We cannot expect children to develop a sense of rootedness to our nation or an appreciation for Singapore’s history and heritage if legislation and public policy appears to do just the opposite. It is hypocritical to ask that they choose heartware over hardware when they see the burial ground of Singaporean pioneers demolished to make way for a new road and public housing. They are asked to exhibit the traits of “mutual respect, care, and compassion” (as called on by PM Lee) and so children should be able to see this reflected in our social welfare system as well. They need to be shown how these very traits are embodied in the way the government takes care of our disadvantaged – families in the lowest income bracket, single mothers, the homeless.

And finally, help our children become more politically literate (and I do not mean to get them to be politically active, although if that is an eventual outcome, it may not be a bad one). Beyond appreciating our clean and green environment or our award-winning airport, students should also be well-versed in our parliamentary system of government, understand how public policy decisions are made, and comprehend the sanctity of the vote. Research suggests that children as young as nine years old are able to discuss issues related to immigration policy and social inequality [3].They can be engaged to think harder, probe deeper, and discuss what might appear on the surface to be “grown up” topics. This is all part and parcel of being emotionally invested in a country; at the risk of sounding hackneyed, loving someone or something is loving not just what is fancy and shiny about it on the outside, but also the cogs and gears on its inside that make it tick.

In his speech, PM Lee also said that the heartware traits must be nurtured in everyone and not coerced through laws and fines. I cannot think of a better segment of the population to start this nurturing process than with our young. There is a developmental history by which children grow up to embody political and ideological variations — loyal soldiers, obedient followers, anarchic agitators, or strident supporters of one or another government. If we catch them early enough, we can help impart to children a commitment to the kinds of rights and responsibilities we believe good citizens and human beings ought to possess. We would do well to recognize what important players our youngest citizens are in the ever urgent, ever evolving debate about civic duty and national identity or risk having no choice but to turn towards coercive and legislative action when they get older.

[1] Gunnar Myrdal. An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Row, 1944).

[2] Samuel P. Huntington. “American Ideals Versus American Institutions” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 1 (1982): 1-37.

[3] Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).