The belief or attitude that the people who are considered to be the elite — a selected group of people with outstanding personal abilities, wealth, specialised training or experience, or other distinctive attributes.

Transforming a Third World slum into a successful modern city has created an elite class in Singapore in one generation that in the West took hundreds of years to develop. It didn't exist 40 years ago when the state became independent and the people were mostly poor and owned no property. The rich were few in number. But with education and wealth, Singapore became a middle-class society and gave birth to an elite force in almost every field - from schools to business to politics. As a student, let me explain more about singapore's education in detail.

First of all, everone around the world agrees that singapore has a good education system, thus for the past few years, the number of wealthy foreign students coming to our country to study has increased drastically. besides having good education system, they believe that singapore has better life quality, high standard of living and able to find a stable job in the future in a developed country. Although a small fraction of foreign students cannot afford to come here, they are talented and outstanding students in theirs countries whom our government or the minister of education are willing to give them the opportunity to study here.

Minister of education has introduced meritocracy into our education system by giving rewards or incentives to any outstanding students regardless of religions or races. By providing scholarship for outstanding students, we can attract more " foreign talents" to solve the recent problem--shortage of highly skilled personnel. However this policy only benefits the talented and bias on the potential students. And true enough, not only singapore, other countries such as America or England, have practised elitism in their education.

More attention and resources are afforded to students who are deemed most intelligent at an early age. This inequality tends to further separate the elite from the remainder of society Elitism is practised from the beginning of primary school education. The primary school children are streamed to EM1, EM2 and EM3 respectively, based on their primary 2 results. EM1 students who are more talented, are given special privilages and considered in gifted programme. How about the EM3 students?? In the movie " I not stupid", directed by singapore actor, it protrays 3 students in EM3 stream who are discriminated by other people. Even the teachers of the school, think that these students are hopeless and useless. Indeed, in today's society, they are being outcasted and people believe that they will not able contribute any to the country, so why not spend more time and effort to groom the talented ones in the EM1 stream to become a potential leader in leading the country? Because the talented students are given special treatment and classified as an exclusive group, some of them become arrogant and look down on others. It is a sterotype that the EM3 students will never excel in their studies but this is very wrong. Everyone has talents, in arts, studies etc. If we pay more attention on the weaker ones and help them along to discover their talents, I am sure that one day they too, can become one of the leaders in Singapore to lead us to a higher ground.

Academic results is not the most important criteria in a leader. One may have good academic results but poor leadership skills. Therefore, an elite may not be suitable for a leadership post and in this instant, elistism is not practical.