State measures have fostered racial harmony in Singapore Discuss policies used to foster racial harmony and discourage intolerance.

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Racial harmony is commonly known basic pillar in building a nation. As the Singapore has a rich and diverse society where individuals from a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds cohabit and interact with each other with little trouble.  The history of ethnic and religious tensions still cast a long and dark shadow on the social and political life in Singapore.         In Singapore, many measures are done to foster racial harmony and discourage intolerance, such as, Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), Internal Security Act (ISA), Internal Security Department (ISD) and the bilingual policy.  “State measures have fostered racial harmony in Singapore”, out of the measures, not all have helped to foster racial harmony.

Today, eight out of ten Singaporeans live in Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates. To get the major races mingling and to pre-empt polarized racial enclaves, the HDB’s Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) was introduced in 1989.  The EIP implemented by Singapore is to developing common spaces, where all the races come together.  Under the EIP, the Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians in Singapore will each have a representative quota of homes for them in a housing block or neighborhood. Once that limit has been reached, no further sale of HDB flats to that ethnic group will be allowed.  This would ensure a balanced mix of ethnic groups in public housing estates.   For the majority of Singaporeans, the HDB’s housing estates are more than mere spaces for raised flats that shelter us. It is in these estates that we interact with other Singaporeans from various backgrounds and communities and enjoy a collective experience of interacting with one another.  An example would be in the past, there was little or even no interaction between the different races as they would keep within their own race. Now, about a quarter of the housing estates in Singapore have met the ethnic quota, standing at 87% for Chinese, 25% percent for Malays and 15% for Indians and the other races. The EIP provides opportunities to interact with each other, allowing the different races to know and understand more about each other better.  With more time spent together in the same neighborhood, different ethnic groups would start bond and understand the other’s religion and culture more.  With common understanding, there would be higher tolerance and fewer conflicts would happen, creating a prosperous and harmonious multi-racial society.  However, the effectiveness of this measure would depend on the cooperativeness of the people.  This measure would only provide opportunities for social cohesion; it would not ensure that different races would actually interact with each other.  The different races may still stay within themselves.  The EIP is a measure to provide a platform for different races to bond and it would only be effective if the people are able to grasp the opportunity given.

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Widely hailed as an educational success story, Singapore, a multilingual island nation in Southeast Asia, embraces an officially bilingual education policy.   The aim of the bilingual education policy is to ensure that while Singapore remained viable economically all over the world. English is the medium of all content-area education from the start of schooling, with students’ official “mother tongue” required as a single subject. Although called the student’s “mother tongue,” these languages may not be the student’s home language, resulting in many students studying two non-native languages in school.  English is used as a language linking the different ethnic ...

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