To objectively define talent

Dear readers:

I would like to continue the debate on a topic that has been brought up in Aaron Ng's blog. I touched on this issue a bit in my previous blog post on "migrants and stayers". Mr Philip Yeo has kindly commented on my blog especially on the issue of talents, and hence, I would like to keep this issue alive.

First and foremost, I would like to highlight excerpts of SM Goh's speech.

"Singapore, he said, is leaking talent. Not just ordinary talent, but its best and finest."

"The issue which we are most concerned with is the loss of our own people at the very top," said Mr Goh. "These are bright young people, children of very well educated Singaporeans."

I would assume he was referring to the loss of academically bright young people, whom he described as talented. Now comes the debate. Is talent associated with academic achievement? From what I have noticed, there do not seemed to be much correlation. There are readers here, who can attest to the fact that there straight As students in GCE "A" levels who do not perform well at unversity level. Of course, there are exceptions and there are GCE "A" levels high-fliers who go on and do well in university. A fair number of our government scholars are shining beacons of this fact. However, then again, the counter-arguement is that if one is exam-smart, he would do well under examination conditions at any level, a fact acknowledged by one of my Professors who happened to have an interest in undergraduate education. I had the pleasure of speaking to someone from the education service and he seemed to equate good grades with meritocracy from what I could gather.

Allow me to produce the first definition of meritocracy from dictionary.com.
"an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege or wealth".

Of course, I didn't have the heart to tell this chap that I managed to ace my "A" levels due to a foolproof exam-smart tactic that I picked up from my seniors, allowing me to mug for three months to get my As, whilst the large part of my college years was spent in playful abundance. Did I deserve my As on merit? Hardly.

There was an article by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek on the comparison of Singaporeans with Americans. It can be accessible at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663340/site/newsweek/

There was a telling admission by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, our education minister, from what I have perceived.

I reproduce the excerpts of a quote by Mr Tharman below:
"We (refers to Singapore and America) both have meritocracies," Shanmugaratnam said. "Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy.

There was another interesting piece by the author:
"He's the minister of Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the fact that even though Singapore's students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids, by contrast, test much worse in the fourth and eighth grades but seem to do better later in life and in the real world. Why?"

I have commented earlier in Aaron Ng's blog that talent does not necessarily co-exist with academic excellence. I happened to have a chat with a good friend of mine over some drinks. Both of us happened to read this artice by Fareed Zakaria. We both uanimously agreed that scoring well for science doesn't mean being good in science. Someone who is considered good in science should be able to DO GOOD SCIENCE. Any good scientist should be able to come up with a hypothesis and test it, formulate a model and test its consistency with observed scientific phenomenon. The judgement of this ability lies not so much in academic transcripts, but rather feedbacks/recommendations from academic advisors and publication records.

Thus, it can inferred that talent should be defined based on performance as opposed to standardized test. If we want to identify a Beethoven or Vladimir Horowitz reincarnate, we would be better off observing the fellow's piano performance as opposed to being focused on his grade XX theory examination, right?

Mr Philip Yeo asked me in his passing comment to show him the talent. My reply would be I have none at the moment. However, I would like to add that Tuesday (two days ago), it was one of my happiest days of the year. I am currently a Life Science course facilitator and I had to take a Normal Stream (the lowest tier in the hierarchy of secondary school stream) class for their Life Science course. I showed them a demonstration of serial dilutions and asceptic techniques ONCE. Furthermore, the conditions of the lab was not really sterile with no biosafety cabinets, and with just a blowing fan on top that would have blown an impurity on the agar plates. However, close to 50% of these Normal students obtained good bacterial culture plates (with visible colonies and minimal signs of impurities), beating their express (higher tier than Normal Stream in the hierarchy of the secondary school stream) who had close to none good bacterial culture plates. I thought it was a remarkable achievement considering the fact that the containers used were not exposed to sterile treatment, and that I had gone through the demonstration only ONCE! Even their teacher in charge was extremely happy with their performance that he took a few pictures of their masterpiece! I swore to myself that I must impart to them at least one part of the Scientific Method, important skills that allow these future talents to conduct experiments effectively as future scientists. I DO NOT BELIEVE in regurgitating what is needed to be reproduced in examinations, I rather impart important skills that one needs to perform in his task. It's the establishment's next move if one of these future talents comes knocking on its doors. I just hope that their academic record will not disadvantage them.