Young Singaporeans are being taught how to fall in love, get a date, and keep the relationship going. The course is being taught in two of Singapore's five polytechnics, reports the New York Times today. The love lessons are part of the government's ongoing campaign to get Singaporeans to mate and multiply. Mate as in matrimony: single mothers are not encouraged. Singapore has a serious shortage of babies: the 4.5 million population could start shrinking if more young couples don't get into the act now. Grow more babies for Singapore!
But saying, "I do", apparently doesn't come easy to Singaporeans who are more likely to soliloquise "I want" — want the five Cs, that is, cash, car, credit card, country club and condo: those are what Singaporeans are alleged to crave, not the pipe-and-slipper routine of Darby and Joan.
Actually, it's not just the eligible bachelors and nubile bachelorettes who are more interested in their careers than in the "crazy little thing called love"; the government behaves like a yuppie too as it goes about playing Cupid. It wants more babies from "what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite". Not my words. I am quoting from the New York Times. Here is how the article begins:
It was like a college mixer, a classroom full of young men and women seeking a recipe for romance.
They had assembled for the first class of “Love Relations for Life: A Journey of Romance, Love and Sexuality.”
There was giggling and banter among the students, but that was all part of the course as their teacher, Suki Tong, led them into the basics of dating, falling in love and staying together.
The course, in its second year at two polytechnic institutes, is the latest of many, mostly futile, campaigns by Singapore’s government to get its citizens to mate and multiply. Its popularity last year has led to talk of its expansion through the higher education system.
“We want to tell students, ‘Don’t wait until you have built up your career,’ ” said Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, the minister of state for community development, youth and sports, at a news conference in March. “Sometimes, it is too late, especially for girls.”
The courses are an extension of government matchmaking programs that try to address the twin challenges embodied in a falling birthrate: too few people are having babies, and too few of those who are belong to what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite.
Over the past 25 years, the mating rituals organized by the government — tea dances, wine tastings, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies — have been among the country’s least successful social engineering programs.
Last year Singapore’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.24 children per woman of childbearing age, one of the lowest in the world. It was the 28th year in a row Singapore had stayed below the rate of 2.5 children needed to maintain the population.
But even a replacement-level rate would not be enough for today’s planners. The government recently announced that it was aiming to increase the population by more than 40 percent over the next half-century, to 6.5 million from the current 4.5 million.
“Teaching our youth in school how to fall in love” is a good solution, wrote Andy Ho, a senior writer at The Straits Times, a government-friendly newspaper that does its best to help out in Singapore’s many campaigns.
In 1991, for example, when the government began offering cash bonuses to couples with more than two children, the newspaper printed tips for having sex in the back seat of a car, including directions to some of the “darkest, most secluded and most romantic spots” for parking.
It suggested covering the windows with newspapers for privacy…
Read the rest in the New York Times.
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