1) 文以载道：“道”在新加坡也有两面性：新加坡人的道和华人的道 —— National Education and Chinese Morals. 我们要教的东西很累赘哦。尤其当我们有时也很难分辨什么是文化，什么是道德，还是两者是交汇的。
You raised a good point, and an important one which I have not been able to deal adequate with depth in my paper. As I was reading, a big issue we have is the formulation of our "five shared values" by a group of Chinese scholars from the West like 余时英 and 杜维明, passed in Parliament in 1991. It's based on Confucianism, though scholars tended to call it "plastic Confucianism" aka "fake". Chinese textbooks developed in 1992 had to evolve around these five shared values as the main curriculum framework (this has been reduced in intensity since 2004). Herein lies a big controversy because on one hand, shared values were supposed to be for the nation, regardless of race; on the other, because its roots are in Chinese culture, the Chinese subject tends to intensify it in teaching. The dilemma then arises as to the two 道, but look deeper and perhaps what we need to understand is how the current "NE morals" have borrowed and evolved from "Chinese morals", and seeing the bigger picture, how the PAP ideologies in education have constrained the "Chinese culture" taught in our CL lessons. Now, some CL teachers say, the focus of Chinese lessons should be on language, and feel that if they were asked to teach culture and other related stuff, it gets too heavy. Well I can understand their concerns, but I think it's time we reversed the logic of our thinking and see that the content of teaching ultimately determines learning motivation of language, and that language teaching is brought out as a product of content teaching about culture and identity. I would say at least this should be the case at secondary and post-sec levels. My own theory based on speaking with teachers is this: children don't speak Mandarin because they are not confident; they don't read because they freak out at the sight of Chinese characters, and because we have never taught them reading strategies - which, in order not to become staunch exam techniques, have to be built upon the process of content understanding; they don't write because they don't have sufficient life experiences and also because our exams have constrained the scope of writing too much. The learning of a language ultimately has to be self-motivated, because as we all know, there is really no "knowledge" in the language itself. You have to cross that psychological barrier, and then want to understand and express some thought, before you go and pick up the language. Fundamentally this should be the way our CL education proceeds. At MOE, I believe the new secondary CL curriculum will be a progressive step towards this, based on the initial plans I have heard, plus because the director （陈之权老师） and deputy director （陈志锐老师）at SCCL are quite liberal-minded. But I think we need to spark a debate of some sort, and then hear what teachers have to say. They - ourselves included - determine the course of action.
2）我非常非常欣赏你的 ——So the aim of basic education should not be to provide answers. Rather it should be to learn some facts, then do 2 things: 1) stimulate questions that need not be answered right away; 2) helping students maintain the curiosity to find out the answer(s) as they grow older. 因为许多老师——无论是不是中文老师——
3）我从来就不觉得我们和中国华人是一样的。我想在上海的四年，
That is a very good point as well, the dynamism between national identity and Chinese identity. Perhaps one of the greatest possible loopholes in using Wang Gungwu's framework in my essay is to see national identity as part of Chinese identity. This is certainly so for first-generation immigrants, but for the third generation and beyond, it warrants a re-consideration. In a sense PAP has been successful in making us "Singaporean" through our "race". Maybe, underlying my arguments in the paper, I have already begun to acknowledge this shift subtly when I realized that the key context of "cultural identity" today is to foster a reconciliation between "basic Chinese norms" (tradition, historical formation etc) and "modern cultural norms" (individualisation, Western ideals etc) in ourselves. The national identity has been left unquestioned in my essay, not because I don't want to but because there is no simple answer to it and no consensus academically. One key point to note as a future projection is whether the sense of national identity will be strengthened in light of China's growth and increasing foreign immigrants, or whether that Chinese perspective will come forth more. And in order not to confuse ourselves, we also have to place this in the light of Chinese EDUCATION: How are we going to balance the dynamics between these two? I have no answer too, but thanks for raising the point because it should inspire further thinking.
Education, like all power-driven discourses, shapes and is shaped by social trends and what members of society think. But so long as it is kept within a limit, most often the "shaping" has more dominace over how systems are shaped by social forces. That is where it can get a bit scary, because policy makers and researchers then believe what they do and try to make everyone believe them. And somehow while young educated Singaporeans have more and more doubts we seldom find a way to consolidate and crystalize these issues for rational debates. Perhaps sub-consciously we never felt the need for this because PAP dominates everything. But this will, and should change in the next one or two decades.
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