A couple of friends talked to me about it and pointed out to me that it’s a horrible post. The post is short-sighted and erroneous to a certain extend. I was thinking of deleteing the post after I realize it went to my front page. I have a habit of queueing posts and this is written after a bad day and it got published on this day anyway.

ignorantsoup is right about the part that I wasn’t happy with my principal. I’m sorry to have written this post.

I understand your point, Evans, and you wrote out most of my friends told me. The last argument is an excellent rebuttal. I fail to see the pleasure someone could have out of marching until someone explained that it’s satisfying to get things right together, doing things together and archieving common goals.

[Edited]

I’m an undergrad from a local university and I happened to chance upon your blog. This post on ccas obliges a reply. I was in a uniformed group (UG) and track in secondary school, and various academic clubs in JC.

I do not know if you are speaking about UGs in general or a selected few. Whatever it is, your grievances are unfounded and your assumptions, wrong.

Firstly, it is inaccurate to insinuate that uniformed groups benefit the school more than the student. I do not know what calculations your premise and rhetoric is based upon and I can only guess it was developed on a gut feel. In fact, in terms of returns (medals, recognition from the public) per unit investment (money, teachers-in-charge, resources, no of students), UGs are the most unviable setup a school can envisage. A group of 50-70 members consumes more money to manage than most other ccas (which only calls for a paid coach which often doubles up as a PE teacher). Now multiply that by four or five and you can imagine the strain UGs impose on a school.

For all that time and money, one UG reaps one medal per group if circumstances permit. Bearing in mind that all secondary schools have the same UGs and there are only a fixed number of medals to go around, such circumstances are hard to come by. Unlike in sports or academic competitions UGs cannot confidently target medals because there are no niche events to compete in. Except for the top schools with a tradition of retaining medals for UG excellence, medals from UGs are largely a hit/ miss affair.

On the other hand, sporting medals are cheaper for schools to achieve. Top medal winning swimmers, athletes, bowlers etc are usually affiliated to external clubs and they pay for their own training expenses. Clubs and sports tend to be smaller outfits with opportunities to strike at two divisions at the sec-sch level. You may think that sporting equipment and jerseys etc are paid for by the school. That is only partially correct. Most team sports or â??expensiveâ? sports receive monetary injections from sponsors or the equipment are paid for by the students themselves. There are no mandatory sports a sch must offer but a stable of UGs is compulsory. A sporting cca which is deemed too expensive will not be offered by the school. There is no such choice a school can make for UGs. That is why schools tend to expand the number of clubs and sports instead of recruiting the remaining UG they lack into their cca profile.

I have seen many of my non-athletically-inclined friends benefit from their stints in uniformed groups be it NCC, BB or Scout’s etc. They have grown fitter, mentally tougher and are certainly more disciplined. You may question a particular benefit of a UG claims to confer, but it is unmistakeable that there benefits, and more so for the student than the school.

Departing from the economic-utility calculus, to simply dismiss any benefits one may gain from being in a uniform group by asking if “marching” or any singled-out activity is going to help you in life at all is unnecessarily narrow-minded. If I follow this line of reasoning, I could similarly question how my “running 45km a week” in sec sch is going to help me in life (which begs the further question of what is the oft-mentioned â??helpâ? targeted at achieving. Money? Career -satisfaction?) when Iâ??m not making athletics my career. This narrow-mindedness is also reflected in the same way many parents and students question the utility of a particular academic subject such as geography or even math. Math is still useful even though there are computers. Taking 10 subjects teaches the more important lesson of time-management rather than deep knowledge of the subject-matter. Learning a second language is still useful even if youâ??re never going to use it in your work or life because the process of learning it trains the brain to handle a different type of problem. Those were just some simple examples which hopefully dispelled some of the negativity associated with apparently â??uselessâ? activities. I hope that you do not confuse the â??functionalityâ? of a subject matter and the â??utilityâ? of pursuing a degree of adeptness of handling the subject matter. Sometimes the connection between the two isnâ??t immediately obvious.

Thirdly, your concept of â??benefitâ? is sternly removed from reality. I quote, â??And if you think youâ??re indeed benefiting yourself, couldnâ??t you choose to do what you want to actually benefit yourself?â? You then cite watching television for enjoyment as a benefit. That is an abysmal failure to distinguish a â??benefitâ? from â??pleasureâ?. While the two are related, they are conceptually distinct. Pleasure is an emotion, triggered by doing things which you like, or want to do. A beneficial activity need not be a pleasurable one although one hopes for an overlap most of the time. For example, I may hate running, but I find soccer pleasurable. To play soccer skilfully, a pleasurable activity, I know that I must be fit. That comes from training â?? running, the â??beneficialâ? activity, which I hate. Similarly, a person may hate marching, but he may find it pleasurable to put on a decent performance for a parade which is viewed by many. To another person, marching may just be a singularly stupid activity.

That doesnâ??t mean that we can simply obviate personal choice and impose what we like onto another person. It would be wrong and unreasonable to ignore personality differences between individuals. For example, a personâ??s preference for solving Rubikâ??s cubes shouldnâ??t be dismissed insultingly as merely twisting a piece of disjointed plastic. In the same vein, you wouldn’t like cosplaying to be derided as a silly waste of money by someone with no interest in it. It is the cosplayerâ??s way of expression or relaxation. So long as benefits can be identified with the activity (eg, cosplaying- patience, aesthetics, attention to detail) and it does not harm others, I see no reason why their choice should be insulted or dismissed. You may love anime and cosplay, he may like regimentation and drills. Whoâ??s to say that one is stupid and the other isnâ??t? Surely, passing judgment in the form of an ill-informed opinion isnâ??t the way to go.

I said ’started’. I’ve only recently learnt some more. =S

Uniform groups are not all drills and nothing much to learn. You can make friends too. Granted they are the same as your anime appreciation club in this instance.

All I’m saying is that different people has different views and different characters. Some people really join uniformed groups out of interest. We should not make them look like a bunch of stupid idiots right? We should be fair to them.