Ignorance and stupidity are natural traits of human beings. You need not put any effort to become ignorant and stupid. On the contrary, you have to study, think, ponder hard, rationalises and receive enlightenment from great gurus to fight against your natural ignorance and stupidity, as well as from sliding naturally into them. Yet instead of making children intelligent, the way our parents brought us up in Singapore has been making us and keeping us stupid.
“Ignorance and Stupidity” was the speech I used for Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest in 2014 where I won at the club level and the area level.
- Humorous Speech Contest
- Speaker: Daniel Sun
- Club Humorous Speech Contest on 21 August 2014
- Area B2 Humorous Speech Contest on 6 September 2014
- Division B Humorous Speech Contest on 11 October 2014
- Title: Ignorance and Stupidity
Table of Contents
Childhood Ignorance
Childhood is sweet. Childhood is memorable. Some people wish to relive their childhood all over again. Do you agree? However, I beg to differ. Childhood is helpless. Childhood is vulnerable. Childhood is a constant struggle against ignorance and stupidity.
Watching Television And Movies Make You Stupid
Television and movies were sources of great entertainment. However they too were great causes for stupidity. While we are thinking that watching television and movies is making us more knowledgeable, they are actually causing us to become more stupid.
We Chinese have always claimed that the Chinese are the original inventors of many things, which included the compass, gun powder and even ice cream. Long before America had Superman, long before Japan had Ultraman, we Chinese have always known that men from ancient China could fly, especially if it is a Chinese that carries a sword.
To the Chinese, the sword fighting film has been a popular genre that lasted for more than a decade, and perhaps even two decade or more. Today, these movies would have been rated as PG – Parental Guidance.
Where Parental Guidance is concerned, my parents certainly did not do a good job. I believe most parents would want their children to grow up wiser and smarter. Somehow I suspect that my parents were determined to keep me stupid and ignorant. My father would say, “Eat more chicken wings if you want to fly.”
This ruler that I am holding is a typical wooden ruler primary school children used during my era. It was supposed to be a tool for us to draw straight lines. However, the lines we drew were never straight because the sides were all jagged. That was because my peers and I have used the rulers to cross swords during recess.
Occasionally we would even love to stick it behind our back like a swordsman we have seen in a Chinese movie during our era.
Awakening From Ignorance And Stupidity
With hindsight as an adult, I wonder which movie director’s stupid idea was it that the sword was meant to be hung this way. As you can see, the moment you reach for the sword, your wrist, elbow and shoulder are locked in an immobilised position. The front of your body from the head to the toe are completely exposed, unprotected and vulnerable to attack.
I can see a big invisible sign written all over my body telling my opponent, “Be my guest! Come poke me!”
Perhaps that was why the director came up with this idea that a swordsman will always stick out his other two fingers when he wields his sword. He is trying to tell his opponent, “Chupped! Wait for me, I am not ready!”
Censorship Makes You Stupid
Besides action film, there were of course films on romance. But I was a boy. I preferred action film. Wait! Did you hear me say, “I was a boy?” Did I say something wrong? No, I did not make a mistake. I meant that I was a boy, but now I am a man. I did not mean that I have changed my gender at any point in time. You guys out here were boys also. And if I may add, some are still boys, they have never grown up.
Now I was saying that there were films on romance. During my childhood, television programmes and movies were all very decent. There was never a single bed scene. Not even a hint of it. Sometime there would be some dark clouds and some thunder. But then again I have collected many of these old movies because I have very sentimental attachment to these movies.
After watching these movies again, I discovered that it was not because that old movies have no bed scenes. In fact some of them had very explicitly graphical bed scenes.
It was our Singapore government who had them all removed. So it is not just my parents who were trying to keep me stupid and ignorant. Our Singapore government was also determined to make us Singaporeans stupid and ignorant. During then, they were trying to keep Singapore’s fertility rate down using all sorts of extreme measures. I suppose, keeping the citizen ignorant and stupid is one of those means. I must say that they have been very successful now that Singapore’s fertility rate is among the lowest in the world.
Well, somehow in the early 1990s, they began allowing R-rated movies. Perhaps they realised then that they had been too successful in keeping the citizens ignorant and stupid. As a result, our fertility rate was suffering tremendously. So then they tried to salvage the situation by letting the citizens know the truth in order to prop up the fertility rate.
Ignorance Or Innocence
Perhaps you may think, “Isn’t it good to be innocent?” My friends, innocent is nothing but a polite and gracious term for ignorant. It is a word we specially reserved for someone who is cute. Don’t we say, “You are so cute and innocent!”
If you are ugly or old, or worse still, both old and ugly, nobody will say that you are innocent.
You will be told, “You stupid ignorant fool! When will you wake up and realise that the world is not round but flat!”
I said that on purpose because people who arrogantly call others foolish are usually foolish themselves. Wasn’t that the case back in the middle age when Galileo was forced to declare that the world is not round but flat?
Parents Want To Keep You Ignorant And Stupid
Back to my childhood experience with watching movies on romance. Even though there was no bed scene, at some point of the movie, the female protagonist will say, “I am pregnant!” Now I am a thinking person even as a child. I asked my mother, “How friendly and kind could you be to an opposite sex to a point that she becomes pregnant?”
I was learning to be a responsible person. My mother always had a one-liner universal answer to all my questions: “When you grow up, you will know!” My mother did not realise this but from a teacher’s point of view, do you know what this mean? It is called discovery learning.
Go and experiment and discover it for yourself.
This is a dangerous answer to my question on how do women get pregnant. Do you know what it means to learn by trial and error? You will go through a lot of trials and end up with a lot of errors. And in this case, would you like to imagine what kind of error that would be?
Apart from my mother’s one-liner universal answer. I soon came across another smarty pants answer from one of my primary school teachers: “I know but I won’t tell you. You go and find out for yourself.” Now let me assure you that my teacher did not say that because I asked him how a woman get pregnant.
Nowadays, I have encountered a third kind of answer and I’ve been getting this answer frequently from my colleagues, “Go and google for it!”
TV Drama Series Make You Stupid
In present days, some movies have become very intelligent. They no longer tell you explicitly what is going on. And may I add, ignorant and stupid audience do not appreciate such intelligent movies. They hate them. One of those directors who directed such intelligent movies is the Chinese director, Wong Kar Wai, who has won many awards. In Singapore, you could see audience leaving the cinema before the end of his movies.
On the contrary, TV drama series are mostly stupid. They are stupid for various reasons but the main reason is that they are produced for ignorant and stupid audience. I hardly watch TV drama series nowadays. However a few years back, I bought a Korean TV drama series mistaking it to be a movie. Not wanting to waste my money, I painstakingly watched it in agony.
In this drama series called, “IRIS”, there was an assassin who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. He is always at the right place at the right time to kill anybody he wants to kill. And he always succeed. However he would fail to find a little girl hiding in a small house. May be he did not play hide-and-seek while growing up.
Nearing the end of the series, this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and invincible assassin was so easily found and caught off guard in his own home. He was beaten to a pulp and killed by the male protagonist. The only reason that he simply had to die is because the series has to end.
The danger of watching TV drama series is this. At the beginning of the series, an intelligent person like myself would be so disgusted with the stupidity of the script. However after continual watching the series for hours, my intellectual faculty began to become desensitised to a point that I begin to accept the plot.
More frighteningly, I even began to enjoy it. Fellow toastmasters, let me give you a very solemn advice. TV drama series can really make you stupid.
Listen here parents. If your children’s examinations are approaching. Stop them from watching TV drama series at all cost. Not only because you do not want them to waste their time but because it will make them stupid. Then they will fail their exams. So start wising up. Turn off that TV!
0 Comments