Observing others' last semester

I nearly forgot that there's one more topic that I may expound upon, and that is - just random life observations that I make here and there.

Am sitting around school these days although I have graduated, and am still observing many of my friends doing their design project. As usual, they were fed the familiar narrative of needing to slog and be very private about design ideas from one of the faculty.

I am not too sure if our education system systematically forces all of us, impressionable young people, into thinking that life is just being an unfeeling robot, devoid of all humanity and emotion and care for others. Since the time a young Singaporean enters school, he or she is only judged by his/her academic performance. And thanks to the need to enter a better school via credentials, good results are not really enough - a fetish for co-curricular activities and involvement develops. People vie for roles of club presidents or to be in students' councils, and many who are elected are but popular people and not truly people who want to serve the community and/or have the best SME or organizational skills.

As I got to university, similar structures are in place for people to pursue such accolades and narratives. In certain areas, you notice a "role-reversal" - people who were not really vocal and active in JC or Poly or Sec Sch suddenly becoming key figures in building the "vibrant culture" of the university, while those who used to be active became quiet figures. It's really funny. All these educational institutions promise us a vibrant academic journey and community, but what happens is that when people are put together they are likely to be judged and measured upon various scales. Judgment is a necessary evil and we all agree upon it, but can we teach ourselves to see that societal and monetary value of a person does not cause our innate worth as a human differentiated?

My dream is that, even if we were to continue to embrace the capitalist state of an economy, can we learn to detach monetary value from the worth of a person? Every day I go back to tap on some wifi and air-con and library links, I see this cleaning aunty, and I really think that we should ought to value her as much as the HYSYS we are working upon. But what is sad is that some students see her as a hindrance... my friend, she's there to clean up the mess you make by buying Macdonalds into the computer lab, and you turn around to hate her? I hope we can learn to be a society that looks less at all these metrics, and embrace one another's innate humanity.