Given the heavy anti-left leanings of the PAP, I am baffled at how Acting Minister for Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam came to be where he is now. The introduction to an interview with him published in The Sunday Times reads:

At Anglo-Chinese School, he used to be 'totally uninterested' in his studies, enjoyed needling his teachers and always occupied the last row in class. His best friends were troublemakers and dropouts, he freely admits.

Most of his learning was 'extra-curricular'. He poured his energies into hockey, football, cricket and athletics, playing a match or practising almost every day - until he developed severe iron-deficiency anaemia and a heart abnormality when he was 17.

Afterwards, he immersed himself in leftist literature, student activism, exploring 'alternative' political and economic models, and at one point, even formed a study group with Tan Wah Piow, the University of Singapore student radical who exiled himself to Britain to avoid arrest.

At the London School of Economics, he eschewed the university's standard economic course and crafted and pursued his own degree programme: combining the economics of socialist economies with the sociology of developing countries.

Upon his return to Singapore in 1982, his passport was impounded at the airport and he was hauled up for questioning by the Internal Security Department. But that was no bar to his subsequent career in the civil service: He was managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore before he entered politics in 2001. Since that election, he has swiftly risen through the ranks - as Senior Minister of State for Education and Trade and Industry, then Acting Education Minister. By the end of this year, he is expected to become a full minister.

The link should expire in a couple of days, but there's no harm in posting it here.

I sympathise with the unenviable position he's in -- education has always been a grave concern of parents here and hence a hot political potato. Moreover, with the recent scandals involving schools -- police called in to investigate porn VCDs being passed among students in school, teachers allowing students to perform oral sex on them, and most recently a boy who committed suicide after his teacher said she was going to call his parents down to school to discuss the romance he was having with a girl -- Mr Shanmugaratnam's got his hands full. On the one hand he's can't be fire-fighting all the time. On the other he can't look like he's divorced from the masses in pursuing his large-scale education reforms.

Well, he makes all the right noises in that interview. That's a good start.