Teaching romance in Singapore

how we live — By Bob Riel on April 30, 2008 at 7:15 am

Yes, teaching romance. The Singaporean government, you see, is concerned about a low birth rate. Singapore has a rate of just 1.24 per woman of child-bearing age, while 2.5 is considered a normal rate just to maintain a population. Aggravating the situation, in the view of the government, is that the rate among highly educated women is even lower.

Singapore being what it is – namely, a centrally planned society (granted, an attractive and very successful centrally planned society) – the government decided to do something about this childless state of affairs. The New York Times has the story.

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…

Mr. Lee himself acknowledged how silly some of this may seem. “Never mind the hullabaloo in the press, all the foreign correspondents writing that a crackpot government is trying to interfere in people’s lives,” he said when he inaugurated the Social Development Unit. “If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards.”

In other words, said Annie Chan, director of a matchmaking agency, “Our government wants smart ladies to meet smart guys to get smart children.”