For the past day or so, I’ve been occupied with helping my little cousins to fill up their Anti-Drug educational activity books and I came across something so apalling, so disturbing and so horrific that I just had to blog about it.

Here is Exhibit A. It looks innocent enough from a distance. Cutesy characters, straightforward enough title (’My Blog’) and ‘fun’ colours. However, closer inspection revealed the following:

This excellent piece of poorly written bull excrement is supposedly an excerpt of a blog. Let me point out two things.

1. This booklet is being distributed to primary school children nationwide.
2. The point of this booklet is to educate

WHAT KIND OF IDIOCY IS THIS? This is why I see children’s concern for a good grasp of  languages in Singapore, especially English, is sadly lacking. You know, I’m sure HPB and its mindless subsets has done a darn good job of education the public about drugs and to ‘just say no’, but somewhere within the amount of time proposing this particular campaign and printing this booklet, someone should have pointed out that this page is out to RUIN ENGLISH FOR GOOD.

How can children possibly expect to improve their English and get rid of the assumption that being smart is weird or nerdy because of examples like this?  Oh and by the way, as an avid blogger myself, I have made a conscious effort to never write the way these people have. I understand that oh, the adults want to communicate to the younger children by appearing ‘hip’ and ‘cool’, but come on people, this is not the way to do it. I WANT TO COMPLAIN TO SOMEONE!

My two cousins, Sabrinah and Diyanah are two examples of primary schoolchildren being affected by this total lack in English literacy. Every time I have chatted with them, I have had stop myself from puking at the kind of language they were using on the internet and also at the amount of emoticons they were using (and not out of irony). Call me pushy and overbearing but I’ve insisted that they use proper English when chatting with me online because not only does it improve their English, but it helps to develop their typing skills.

Honestly people, let’s try to be a bit more conscious with the “Speak Good English” movement. PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH, MOE!