"Singapore is like Sparta, where the top students are taken away from their parents as children and educated. Then, cohort by cohort, they each select their own leadership, ultimately electing their own Philosopher King. When I first read Plato's Republic, I was totally dazzled by the great logic of this organizational model where the best selects the best," he said.

"But then, as I reached the end of the book, it dawned on me that although the starting point was meritocracy, the end result was dictatorship and elitism. In the end, that was how Sparta crumbled. Yet, Athens, a city of philosophers known for its different schools of thought, survived. Sparta is long forgotten. (Do we want to be like) Sparta, a martial, well-organized and efficient society, but in the end, very brittle; or an Athens, untidy, chaotic and argumentative, but which survived because of its diversity of thinking?"