Mr Chairman, Sir, I submit that the current character development initiative in Singapore schools is insufficient to make any major impact on our students. Today's Singapore is marked by families with working parents, leaving the upbringing of many children mostly to domestic helpers and schools. Schools may have to take a lead to foster a process of inculcating values in our young.

Character development is now conducted primarily through the Community Involvement Programme (CIP) which specifies a minimum of six hours per year, ie, half an hour a month. I would like to ask the Ministry to consider making three changes in this regard:

(1) Identify and communicate more extensively a set of common core values that the majority of people can agree on, eg, kindness, respect, learning, consideration, responsibility;

(2) Develop a resource database of how these values might be translated to practices and outcomes in three settings, ie, school, home and community; and

(3) Increase the number of minimum hours of CIP service hours to at least one day a month per student. This can be a combination of service contribution within the school, home and community settings. They need not be big projects, but could be tasks done on a daily basis, eg, peer tutoring, be a buddy for a disabled classmate, serving at a neighbourhood home, join a friendship club to help somebody else, take one's disabled grandparent out for a walk each day, etc.

Gandhi said this before: "A person cannot do right in one department whilst attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole."

Sir, character development is the same - one indivisible whole. It cannot just happen in school. We must ensure the same rigour at home and in the community, and I urge the MOE to take the lead in this matter.