Ngiam Tong Dow -Lecture @ NUS

SPEECH BY MR NGIAM TONG DOW AT THE INAUGURAL FASS
(FACULTY OF ARTS & SOCIAL SCIENCES) LECTURE AT THE
LECTURE THEATRE, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE,
ON 26 OCTOBER 2004
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EDUCATION AND GROWTH
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Professsor Tan Tai Yong, dear friends and fellow alumni

Thank you for having me this evening as speaker for the
inaugural FASS Alumni Lecture. I am deeply honoured. I will speak on
“Education and Growth”, relying on the Singapore Experience during the
period 1960-2000.

1. Synopsis
In my view, education has three imperatives, namely the
economic, the cultural, and the political. Over the last forty years, 1960-
2000, the overriding priority of education has been economic growth.
Faced with a young and rapidly growing population, our schools,
polytechnics and universities were all geared up to teach literacy in
English and the mother tongue, technical skills, science and technology.
Literature and the arts, history, geography, were derided as soft options.
Even those who excelled in law in their professional careers later on in
life, struggled to obtain A’s in the hard sciences in school.
Now that the world is entering an era of knowledge based
competition, we are unsure whether our hard science education will
stand us in good stead. By neglecting the "soft options" of poetry, music
and philosophy, have we missed something? What has happened to our
imagination? Do we find it difficult to think out of the box? Why are the
majority of Singaporeans followers? Isn’t that true of all societies? And
not just Singapore?  Politically, do we want to be a Sparta? Or an Athens?
Ideally, can we be both? Where do our political temperament and
instincts lie? I would like to invite you to join me this evening in debating
this proposition: While it is true that man cannot live by bread alone, can
he live without any bread at all?

2. The Three Imperatives of Education
Education has to serve society’s cultural, political and
economic imperatives. The priority and emphasis depend on a country's
time in history and its stage of development. In the case of China, the
political imperative was paramount during the period of the Cultural
Revolution. In contrast to Chairman Mao's ideological leadership, Mr
Deng Hsiao Ping, seeking truth from facts, brought the economic
imperative to the fore.

3. Historical Developments
At the end of the Second World War on the return of the
British colonial Administration to Singapore, English medium schools
funded by the Government were quickly re-established. During the brief
period of the Japanese Occupation (1942-1945), the Japanese civilian
administration used the private Chinese medium schools to teach
Japanese to youngsters like me. Japanese was taught whenever the
Japanese supervisor was around. Teachers and students reverted to
Mandarin the moment he was out of sight. In this way, I had one year of
schooling in Mandarin.

4. English Medium and Vernacular Schools
The British colonial government funded and staffed only the
English medium schools. Vernacular schools in Chinese and Tamil were
left to fend for themselves. They were financially supported by the
various ethnic clan and community associations. Teachers were poorly
trained and poorly paid. Most parents sent their children to English
medium schools, as school fees were lower and facilities better.

Being poorly paid, some teachers in Chinese schools
became embittered and taught leftist ideology to their students. The
Chinese Middle School Union was a powerful political force, which the
PAP Government had to contend with.
English medium schools on the other hand were apolitical.
The aim of the British Government was to teach English, so that young
Singaporeans can serve as clerks and bookkeepers, primary school
teachers and nurses, and policemen. The British Colonial Government,
supported by our own philanthropists, established the King Edward VII
School of Medicine and Raffles College. The two institutions merged in
1949 to become the University of Malaya, serving Singapore and
Malaya. The Law and Engineering Faculties of NUS were established
later in the 1960’s.
Colonial education policy was essentially aimed at oiling the
wheels of administration.

5. Jobs and Technical Education
On the attainment of self-government in August 1959,
Singapore had a population literate in English, an advantage over other
non-English speaking countries in attracting American and European
MNC’s. The population however possessed little technical skills.
Paradoxically, the Chinese-educated possessed more technical skills
through apprenticeship. This skilled labour went on to build complex
steel structures, such as jack up oil drilling rigs.
The indigenous skills however were not adequate for higher
end precision engineering and process industries. EDB was tasked with
starting up technical education in Singapore. We established joint
industrial training centers with MNC’s, such as Philips of Holland, Rollei
of Germany, Seiko and Yokogawa Electric of Japan. The industrial
training systems became models for our six polytechnics today.

6. The Economic Imperative
In the first three decades of independence, the economic
imperative was the driving force of our education policies. In our
schools, attention was focused on the teaching of science and
mathematics dubbed the hard sciences. All other subjects were derided
as soft options.
As a result, less and less students in English medium
schools studied English literature. Paradoxically, it was harder to score
an ‘A’ or distinction in English literature than in maths or science, simply
because English is not our mother tongue at home. Without studying
literature and history, whether in English or Chinese medium schools,
our literacy in both languages fell.
History is a neglected subject in all our schools. Politically,
we have been an independent country since 1965, hardly 40 years old.
In world history, we rate only a comma. Yet our multi-racial and multireligious
society must retain our roots. Without a sense of history, we
will become a people lost in limbo.

7. Singapore's Path?
In the first half of our short history to date, Singapore had no
choice but to embrace science and technology for economic survival. At
a very basic level, we established industrial training centers to train our
young school leavers in precision machining and mould making, still the
core skills for manufacturing industry. At the polytechnics, students are
taught process engineering and technical analysis. They also learn
finance and cost accounting. As our manufacturing and service
industries grew and became more sophisticated, there was a great need
for trained manpower who can go beyond the "how” to the "why" of
things.

8. Nanyang Technological Institute
When we had achieved full employment in the mid-1970’s,
our Economic Advisor, Dr Albert Winsemius, persuaded Prime Minister
Lee Kuan Yew to establish the Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI), to
train practice oriented engineers, to complement engineering science
taught in the University of Singapore. The EDB, nicknamed metal eaters
by Mr Lee, had boldly asked that our university, polytechnics and
industrial training centers produce 1,000 engineers, 5,000 technicians,
and 10,000 skilled workers annually to meet surging demand for
technical manpower.

The elitist establishment at University of Singapore baulked
at increasing the engineering enrolment, raising the spectre of
unemployed graduates. The professors had little faith at the ability of
EDB to attract high tech jobs to Singapore. Yet, even in the recent
recession, MNCs still find difficulty recruiting skilled personnel for tech
industries, such as wafer fab plants. As a result, a number of them are
relocating to China.
NTI was therefore established as a university of science and
technology. To establish its academic credentials, NTI was allowed by
NUS to award a joint degree with NUS. NTU now conducts degree
programmes in almost every academic discipline other than medicine
and law.
As someone who had a role in the establishment of NTU, I
hope my university colleagues will allow me the privilege to state once
more that the aim was to establish NTU as the MIT, and for NUS to
become the Harvard of South-east Asia. The goal of all academic
institutions must be excellence in both teaching and research. Simply
establishing new faculties and departments because the other university
has such a department will just distract the faculty and administration of
both universities from the drive for excellence.

9. Cultural and Racial Roots
Out of sheer necessity, we concentrated on the economic
imperative in education. Efficiency, rather than effectiveness, was the
name of the game.
Along the way, we also lost some of our cultural roots and
ethnic instincts. In the late 1960’s, the Government decided to drop
Chinese dialect programmes over radio and TV. There may be
compelling reasons for stopping Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka
and Hainanese programmes over the airwaves. One reason given was
that we wanted our children to concentrate only on learning Mandarin,
and not have their young minds confused with the various dialects
spoken at home.
Whether this hypothesis is true or not, we do not know for
sure. But, we do know that the grandparents who speak only dialects
and no Mandarin, were deprived of one of their few sources of news and
entertainment. As less and less dialect was spoken at home, the
communication gap between the young and the old widened.
Transmission of cultural values from generation to generation was
diminished. Our children and grandchildren had to learn to speak
Mandarin ab initio, and to study the Chinese language outside what was
our natural cultural environment.
Today, we cannot go back to the status quo ante. It will be
pointless to restore dialect programmes back to our airwaves simply
because the young grandparents of today do not speak any dialects at
all, growing up under the non-dialect regime. A back of the envelope
solution might be to encourage our English-speaking to read Chinese
history, literature, and even poetry, in English to enthuse their
grandchildren on their Chinese heritage.
Though translations will not have the richness of the original,
they do give the English literate some flavour. We can start by reading
Lee Lien Fung's Bamboo Green columns in the Straits Times.

10. Literature
With the neglect of English literature in school, young
Singaporeans do not have enough command of English to absorb the
essence of western culture. Hollywood is their western cultural diet.
At the same time, unable to speak to their grandparents, they
cannot relate what little culture they are taught in their Mandarin lessons
to their daily lives.
My generation, schooled entirely in the English medium and
speaking dialect at home, can at least get a flavour of Chinese history
and culture reading the English translations of All Men are Brothers,
Dream of the Red Chamber, and Lin Yu Tang's My Country and My
People.

11. Humanities and the Arts
In education as in any field of human endeavour, we have to
face reality. Our single-minded pursuit of economic prosperity has
brought us to a crossroad. In a knowledge-based global economy,
inputs of land, labour, and capital, are necessary, but not sufficient for
growth and prosperity. We have to learn to apply knowledge creatively.
A vice-minister of Japan's Ministry of Trade and Industry
once told me that knowledge is power, if applied with wisdom. Or, with
insight and creativity. How do we become a society with insight and
creativity?

12. Holistic Education
The short answer is a holistic education system. Such a
system will have to serve all the three imperatives of education, the
cultural, political and economic. We have successfully established
industrial training centers, polytechnics, and universities, to teach the
“how” but, in my view, not the “why” of things.
At the risk of being dismissed as an educational Rip van
Winkle, may I suggest the Ministry of Education revisit the grouping of
subjects for the O Level examinations. In 1953, when I sat for what was
then known as the Senior Cambridge School Certificate examination,
candidates were required to offer not more than 9 subjects, divided into
three groups of English and English Literature; Mathematics and
Science; History, Geography and Art. Latin and Religious Knowledge
were optional subjects.
A candidate has to pass in at least two subjects from each
group, graded into pass, credit and distinction. Your scores determine
your overall grading into Grade I, II, III. Only those with Grade I were
admitted into the Post School Certificate classes to prepare for university
entrance examinations.

13. Arts and Science
The curriculum required competence in arts and science. In
my view, a broader rather than a narrow curriculum is likely to produce
greater creativity in individuals, and society as a whole. The competition
for entrance into university is at the final stage of schooling. Streaming
at too early a stage is not only unfair to the individual student, but is also
less effective overall in terms of cost.

14. Becoming a Nation
The prosperity achieved from pursuing the economic
imperative in education comes with a cost. Mr Robert Kuok, the
Malaysian entrepreneur whom I know and greatly respect, once told a
private gathering at NUS that to survive beyond economics, Singapore
has to retain its Chineseness, and by extension its Indianness and
Malayness. It was not a rhetorical answer to a rhetorical question.
Because of our political history, Singapore embraced English
as the lingua franca. As English is also the language of international
commerce, science and technology, and the language of today's only
world superpower, the United States, our literacy in English gave us a
head start in attracting MNC investments. Our pragmatism led us to
adopt English as our first language, and our mother tongue, whether it is
Malay, Chinese or Indian, our second language.
Our legal system based on English law is understood and
accepted by international banks, shipping companies, fund managers,
and the rest of the international business community.
As Microsoft dominates the internet, software is largely
written in English. So those fluent in the English language, have an
advantage in writing software than those who are not. Hence, Indians
who are more literate in English have an edge over the Chinese.

15. Cultural DNA
But is language facility the only competitive criterion? Or is it
the cultural DNA of the Indians, Chinese, and Malays that will count
increasingly in the new millennium? Mr Robert Kuok is right in stressing
the importance of remaining culturally Chinese, Indian, and Malay.

16. The Future of English
MM Lee, in his memoirs, said he sang three different national
anthems living in Singapore. First, as a schoolboy he had sung God
Save The King in English, in the crown colony of Singapore before the
Second World War. Then, for three short years, he sang the Japanese
national anthem during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. On the
defeat of Japan, it was back to God Save The King. Finally, the
Singapore national anthem Majullah Singapura when we obtained selfgovernment
in 1959, composed by the late Mr Zubir Said, a Malay
Singaporean and sung in our national language, Malay.
The origin and language of the national anthem is
determined by the political power governing Singapore. Now that
Singapore is an independent country, the origin and language of our
national anthem is settled. Singapore however has still to evolve its own
national cultural identity.

17. China and India
Western civilization, which has spawned most of the major
discoveries in science and technology, has been in the ascendant for the
last 500 years. Before then, the Chinese, Indian and other civilisations
have been in the forefront of the quest for knowledge. Not being a
historian, I will stick my neck out and postulate that western civilization
overtook eastern civilisation because the peoples and societies were
more outward looking, including conquest and colonisation of foreign
lands. An outward orientation forced on us by necessity has enabled
Singapore to make progress.
Continental size countries, such as China and India,
stagnated because they considered themselves to be the centres of the
civilised world. China named itself as Zhong Kuo, center of the world.
There is a rock outcrop on the island of Hainan, my Chinese ancestral
homeland, facing south, which is considered as the spot where the
civilised world ends.
Similarly, my impression is that Indians consider themselves
to be morally superior to other people. Gandhi coined the slogan of
simple living and high thinking. But when India goes on to imply that this
is the only way to progress, it falls into the Chinese trap of
ethnocentricity.

18. Japan
Japan, like India and China, has supreme confidence in its
own culture. I once read in Japan Echo, which publishes Japanese
"think" pieces in English, that foreigners can never penetrate Japan’s
cultural barrier. The author, a professor in Japanese economic history,
held the view that while Japan can be forced to lower import duties,
remove quantitative restrictions, or reduce non-tariff regulations, the
cultural defence of buying Japanese first is a barrier other countries
cannot penetrate. Japan does not promote the study of English.
Instead, there is a huge translation industry publishing Western works in
Japanese.
Japan, unlike China and India, is not a continental country. It
is an archipelago of islands with the sea as the border. Though insular
by nature, Japan has no choice but to trade with the world. The
orientation is outward. Ezra Vogel, a personal friend of mine, who wrote
Japan As No.1, would have done the Japanese a great disservice if the
Japanese had believed him. My hunch is that the Japanese were not
taken in by the accolade.
Japan in the last fifty years has been successful
economically in the league of the United States. Now that China and
India have begun to embrace openness, how will Japan adjust to
compete economically and culturally?

19. Notes from a Very Small Island
In a speech delivered on 19 April 04 at a meeting of the
Association of American Universities (AAU), Professor Shih Choon
Fong, President of the National University of Singapore (the very small
island) and Chairman of the Association of Pacific Rim Countries
(APRU), posed a very intriguing question to his North American
colleagues: "Will the center of higher education remain in North America
or will move? (To China and India?).
He quoted a Goldman Sachs prognosis that the world in
2050 will face a tectonic change. In 2050, China and India, each with a
population far exceeding 1 billion, and the United States with a
population under 450 million, could be the largest economies in the
world.
In another forecast by an English applied linguist, David
Graddot, the English language will probably drop in prominence by
2050, ranking after Chinese, and comparable to Hindi and Arabic.
Although the United States has become the global education
universe in the 20th century, China and India now poised to become two
of the world's largest economies may aspire to become the new centers
of learning. They will strive for cultural and technological primacy. Can
they?

20. Harvard MPA
I attended the MPA course at the Graduate School of Public
Administration of Harvard University in 1963. On arrival at Harvard, midcareer
officers such as myself were told that while it was easy to pass,
having been carefully selected by Harvard, it would be difficult to excel,
as we will be among the best competing with the best.
The teaching method at Harvard was in stark contrast to the
University of Malaya (NUS). The professors assumed that, as we were
learning at a post-graduate level, we already know the subject matter.
I was startled at one of the first American-style lecture when
the professor began the course by asking a question. The student he
asked responded not with an answer, but with another question! The
process was a relay of questions rather than a round of answers.
Though strange at first, I soon learnt to navigate this system by thinking
of the whys rather than the hows. This is a more stimulating way of
learning.

21. Open Societies
Without a doubt, the wealth of human talent in China and
India can propel these countries and societies to intellectual and
technological prominence if, and it’s a big, big if, they can break out of
the mould of Confucian philosophy of the emperor knows best, and the
Indian caste system where some are preordained to be masters and the
others slaves.
For such large countries, because of endless cycles of war
and famine, stability was prized above everything else. In my view, it will
take decades, if not centuries, before Chinese and Indian societies will
be ready to embrace openness and risk chaos. Yet, they must.

22. Cultural DNA
In the view of Mr Robert Kuok, if we lose our Chineseness,
our Malayness, and Indianness, we would have lost everything. Having
only western DNA in our blood will lead us to a dead-end in an era when
China and India are in the ascendant. Without cultural DNA, our best
and brightest, schooled in the leading western universities, will not be
stayers. They will rationalise and migrate at the slightest tremor.
Though bright Chinese and Indians also migrate, they have
enough cultural DNA to leave their hearts behind. As China and India
become more open societies, the best and brightest of their people will
return to help build their own country.
Our size and diverse languages leave us in a no-man's land.
The present adoption of English as our first language has served the
economic imperative of education. But is economics the only
imperative? Can national survival depend only on economics?

23. Being Monolingual
Personally, I was schooled in the English medium. English is
my master language. In the world of the future, a monolingual person,
such as myself, will not survive whether he is English or Chinese educated.
Indeed, in a global knowledge based economy, an individual
has to be multilingual and bicultural to survive.

24. Bilingual and Bicultural
I am encouraged by recent Government announcement of
plans to set up a scholarship scheme to nurture a group of Chinese
students to have a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and history,
so as to be able to engage China in depth. The scheme will groom 100
to 200 Chinese students in every primary school cohort yearly. This will
ensure that Singapore could continue to have in depth exchanges and
close relations with China.
While we await MOE's proposal on how to accomplish this,
my guess is that such schooling will be at SAP plus level. This select
group of students will have to study both English and Chinese at first
language level.
Indeed, some friends of my generation, at the insistence of
their Chinese- educated parents, attended English medium schools in
the morning and Chinese medium schools in the afternoon. They were
schooled in both English and Chinese at first language level. As a
result, they were comfortable in both cultures.
Though it is tough to achieve, the Singaporean of the future
has to be not only bilingual, but also bicultural. It will be a challenge for
MOE, society and the family, to bring this about. It is a worthwhile goal.
Indeed, Singapore's very survival rides on us being multilingual and
bicultural.
Unlike China and India, Singapore has no other choice. MM
noted that language and culture were inseparable and the Chinese elite
of the new generation had to be like students from the Chinese schools
in the past who not only mastered the Chinese language. but also knew
the culture and history of China.

25. Singapore's Destiny
I began by postulating that the purpose of education is to
serve the cultural, political and economic imperative of a society.
Singapore's education system has focused almost exclusively on the
economic imperative. While it is true that man does not live by bread
alone, can he live without any bread at all?

26. Ideal Teaching Method
Finally, what is the ideal teaching structure? Is it to be
prescriptive like Confucius or Plato? Or, interactive like Socrates? Or,
divine like Christ? Learning and teaching will exercise the minds of men
forever. A society that stops learning and teaching will be dead and
fossilized like dictatorships.
But the worst dictatorship is dictatorship of the mind.
Societies which allow themselves to be trapped by political indoctrination
or religious fanaticism will ultimately self destruct. Singapore has to
change and evolve, breaking out of our present mould and mindset.

27. Continuity of Policies
Whatever the endowments of a country, the one single
aspect that foreign investors will not tolerate is lack of continuity in public
policies, whether economic and financial, social or educational.
I recall a conversation with a senior Chinese Communist
cadre in 1985 when I asked him about the Cultural Revolution. He
replied with great sadness that, leaving aside the immense personal
suffering of individuals, the greatest damage was the loss of a whole
generation of students. In the mid-1980’s, there was a lack of midcareer
cadres with the education, or the experience, to drive the
development process that China was then embarking on.
With its vast population and talent base, the wounds were
quickly healed. China today is on everyone’s radar screen. A tiny city
state like Singapore cannot survive even a mini-cultural revolution,
whether in the body politic or in education, in the schools, universities, or
society at large. Yet, we must change. How?

28. The PAP and Political Stability
Continuity of policies is only possible if a country enjoys
political stability. The post-independence (1965) generation, who are
now young parents themselves, have taken the political stability of
Singapore for granted. Without the leadership of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and
his first generation founding colleagues, Singapore could well be another
sorry third world story.
The older generation of our citizens born during the war
years will remember the Singapore of the 1950’s and early 1960’s,
wracked by religious and racial riots, and crippled by left-wing
communist inspired strikes.
The non-communist English educated leadership of the PAP
fought the chauvinists, racialists, and communists on their turf, and won.
It is not surprising therefore that the PAP which came into power in 1959
has won every general election since.
The political and economic prosperity wrought by the PAP
Government has to be jealously guarded. In such an environment, there
will be no fertile soil for the opposition to grow.
Only the PAP can defeat itself.
The greatest danger to the PAP, which has been the
governing party for the last forty years, is elitism and complacency. I am
glad that our new Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, wants to create
an inclusive society, not an exclusive ruling class. Complacency sets in
when the administration flies on auto-pilot.

29. Creating a Nation
As we know, the Jewish nation which is larger than the state
of Israel, is bonded by the Torah, the old Testament. As a multi-racial
and multi-religious society, this is not open to us. My personal belief is
that to build the nation of Singapore, we have to value human life and
respect the core of the person. As a Christian, I believe that God has
given each one of us at least one talent. In God's eyes, there is no
person who is completely stupid. Some of us may be cerebral with
abstract thinking skills. Some blessed with motor skills are good
practioners. Artists and great violinists are blessed with both.
So I believe that to become a nation, we as parents,
teachers, siblings and friends should search hard for the talent that each
child has inherently, and help him or her to grow and excel in it. In this
way, we can become a people with diversity of skills and temperaments.
In time, we will evolve into a nation.
Finally, the nation of Singapore will not just be the state of
Singapore. It will embrace all who have their hearts in Singapore.

--------The End--------