JUNIOR COLLEGE/UPPER SECONDARY EDUCATION (Motion)

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Debate resumed.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence (Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam): Mr Speaker, Sir, I rise to support the motion moved by the Minister for Education relating to the Report submitted by the Junior College/Upper Secondary Education Review Committee 2002, contained in Paper Cmd. 8 of 2002.

Sir, the changes proposed in the Report are of fundamental importance to the remaking of the Singapore economy and society. It is therefore appropriate that the Whip be lifted on this debate, so that when hon. Members vote on the motion they will do so not because they have been instructed by the Government Whip, but because they have studied the proposed changes and are personally convinced that the changes, even though difficult to implement and unsettling to parents and students, are nevertheless necessary, if Singapore is to nurture a generation of students who are well prepared to face a different world from that experienced by their parents in the first 37 years of our independence.

Sir, the education system of a country cannot be divorced from the country's economic circumstances. For Singapore, our education system has evolved in response to changes to Singapore's economy and society. Prior to our independence in 1965, when we were a British colony and our economy depended on trade and servicing the British garrison in Singapore, there was no real need for widespread education of our people.

Consequently, the British authorities concentrated on nurturing a small number of English language schools to educate clerks and a few professionals, particularly in medicine and law, to assist the Colonial Government to run what was then basically a simple economy. Consequently, large numbers of Singapore children were educated in vernacular schools, where teaching was conducted in Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and largely outside the purview of the Department of Education.

After our independence in 1965, the need was for a national integrated system of education, with uniform characteristics which would be taught to all children in Singapore, regardless of their race or language background. A national system of education proved to be enormously difficult to realise, with political disturbances and even communal riots in the 1960s and 1970s disrupting the process of integrating the schools.

A landmark in educational development in Singapore was the adoption by Parliament in March 1979 of the Goh Keng Swee Report on the Ministry of Education which shaped our present education system, with streaming at primary and secondary schools to enable children to study at a pace appropriate to their intellectual abilities. The success of streaming in our schools can be seen in the dramatic fall in the secondary school drop-out rate from 13% of each Primary 1 cohort of students in 1978 to just 2.7% last year. The primary school drop-out rate has similarly fallen from 6% for each cohort of Primary 1 students in 1978 to almost zero - actually, only 0.3% last year.

Today, Singapore is admired throughout the world for our success in educating students of all intellectual capabilities, not only the gifted students but also the average students and all social classes. Our schools in Singapore, whether the elite independent schools or the more numerous neighbourhood schools, are all well-built and well-equipped, and give to every child in Singapore, no matter what is his or her social class or intellectual capability, at least 10 years of basic education, which will enable the child to proceed further to junior college, polytechnic or Institute of Technical Education and, from then, on to university for those with the determination and ability.

As the Minister for Education from 1985 to 1991, I built on the solid foundation laid down by Dr Goh Keng Swee to fill out the education structure by upgrading our schools' physical infrastructure, improving the training of our teachers, and emphasising the critical role that principals play in motivating and guiding teachers and students in the search for excellence. Over the last 10 years, subsequent Ministers for Education - Mr Lee Yock Suan and, now, RAdm Teo Chee Hean - further improved the system with innovative measures, such as mass customisation and encouraging the learning of critical thinking skills.

Today, as I have said, we have an education system in Singapore which is admired throughout the world, even in developed countries like the US and Europe, and which delivers a high standard of education to virtually every child in Singapore. If the system is working so well, the natural question to ask is: why then do we have to change it? Why try to fix the machine which is operating smoothly and delivering the goods?

Sir, the reason why we have to change our education system is because the world has changed, and changed dramatically. We could have carried on with the present system for possibly the next 10 years, making adjustments here and there to meet difficulties or to fill in inadequacies as they arise. But when confronted with a major change in the operating environment, such incremental adjustments do not solve the problem. Instead, they aggravate the problem by perpetuating practices that should be jettisoned, if a country is to move ahead.

A vivid example of how small incremental changes do not solve but merely aggravate a basic problem is the response by successive Japanese governments to the chronic problems in the Japanese economy. Japan had an enormous record of economic success for three decades, from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. Japan as Number One, the influential book written by Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel received wide publicity. Nations in search of development were urged to emulate the Japanese way of doing business. Japan's leading position in the world economy's sweepstakes came to an end in the late 1980s when the world moved from an essentially manufacturing based economy to an innovation, knowledge-driven economy.

In this new economy, Japan's strengths of group cohesion, incremental improvements and life-time employment systems hindered rather than promoted economic progress. Many commentators, both in Japan and elsewhere, have come to the conclusion that for the Japanese economy to revive, a major restructuring of Japan's economic and monetary policies is necessary, and that minor adjustments would only prolong the deflationary slowdown in Japan, which has now lasted for more than a decade. As Japan shows no sign of embarking on such a major restructuring of its economy, there is little expectation that the Japanese economy will recover its former vibrancy in the foreseeable future.

Sir, in the two decades of the 1980s and the 1990s, Singapore, in general, enjoyed, despite occasional hiccups in 1985 and 1998, a very favourable combination of factors that enabled a small export-oriented economy like Singapore to achieve high growth. After struggling in the 1970s, the US economy began getting effect together in the 1980s. Companies restructured, slimmed down, took advantage of the latest developments in real-time information technology systems and generally achieved a sustained rise in productivity in the United States, which was not only higher but several times higher than that experienced in previous decades. The whole world, including Singapore, benefited from the strong growth of the US economy, particularly in the 1990s. And in addition to a buoyant US economy, Southeast Asia was also rapidly growing with the tiger economies of the East Asia being hailed as the fastest growing and most promising economic region in the world.

All these favourable developments however came to an abrupt end with the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and the meltdown of the dot.com and technology boom in the United States in 2000. As the United States is the growth locomotive of the world's economy, a slowdown in the United States has repercussions not only within the United States but also throughout the world. When the US economy began to slow down in 2000, the initial expectation among many economists was that it would take perhaps 18 months, at most 24 months, for the slowdown to run its course and after that, the US economy would settle to a new base from which it would grow again. What is clear today is that this period of adjustment is going to be longer than had been expected in 2001 or even earlier this year. How long this period of adjustment will be is a question which is perplexing the best economic minds in the world.

The effects of the US slowdown are being felt throughout the world, including in Singapore. Due to the impact of the US slowdown and the stagnation of the region's economies, our economy turned down sharply with negative growth last year and slow growth this year. In view of the current economic and security uncertainties, the outlook for the Singapore economy is cloudy.

Sir, even after the world economy has recovered, Singapore will be faced with different economic circumstances from those we enjoyed during the 1990s. For one thing, there will be more competition with the entry of China into the world market. In the long run, China will make a positive contribution to world growth with its large domestic market. But in the immediate future, China will present fierce competition for foreign investments. With its large reserves of skilled labour at very low cost, China will exert deflationary pressure on prices world-wide and be a strong economic competitor to countries throughout the world, including Singapore. As a small open economy, Singapore will have to continue to rely on attracting multi-national corporations (MNCs) to locate their operations, particularly manufacturing in Singapore.

Despite the competition, we have fortunately been able to hold our own in attracting foreign direct investments (FDIs). EDB expects manufacturing fixed asset investment commitment this year to remain at about S$9 billion, with more than two-thirds coming from foreign investors. However, to progress ahead, we need to move up the value chain and restructure our economy to complement our MNC base with a larger base of domestic enterprises and entrepreneurial companies. As our economy becomes more sophisticated, our people require different skills to survive and thrive in an environment of rapid and drastic change.

At independence, what Singapore needed to do was to industralise rapidly to create a large number of relatively unsophisticated jobs to absorb the large number of Singaporeans who were unemployed or entering the workforce. In the 1970s and the 1980s, we moved up the skill and value chain, attracting industries that needed large numbers of trained technicians with technical skills at the polytechnic and the Institute of Technical Education level. As our enterprises became more capital-intensive and sophisticated, and as the supply marketing chain became more integrated into the world's logistics, it became necessary for us to educate more professionals with university degrees. Now, with the knowledge-based economy and our move into new areas like the life sciences, we not only need better-trained and innovative people, but also people with post-graduate education at the Masters and PhD levels. All these will ensure that we can keep ahead of the competition of low-cost countries like our neighbours and China.

With an uncertain economic climate, it will also be more difficult for companies to rely on products which have long production runs. Companies will have to be flexible and change their products more frequently. This puts a premium on having Singaporeans who are not only well-educated but who also have a flexible frame of mind and a nimbleness to cope with more rapid changes in the business and economic environment. Sir, in today's world, competency in skills is necessary but no longer sufficient for economic success. For our economy to succeed, our people need not only to be skilled but also be flexible and innovative.

The new junior college curriculum and diversified upper secondary school system seek to nurture flexibility and innovation in our students by making the JC curriculum more broad-based and providing more latitude for our schools and junior colleges to provide education programmes that are better tailored to the needs and capabilities of their respective cohorts of students. The new system is a radical departure from the present system where the scope for a junior college or secondary school to go its own way is kept within fairly narrow latitudes.

In the new system, more initiatives will be given to junior colleges and secondary schools to decide how to teach subjects and how to prepare their students for school-leaving or university entrance examinations. Sir, implementing the new system will not be easy. A whole generation of teachers will have to be re-educated in order to teach the new curriculum and, eventually, we will need our own examination system in order to complement the new JC curriculum and upper secondary school structure. Constructing a new examination system is difficult for a small country like Singapore. MOE has wisely chosen to continue to work with the University of Cambridge, Local Examination Syndicate, to keep the Singapore-Cambridge "A" level brand name while implementing the new JC curriculum and upper secondary school structure to allow schools to take various routes to prepare their students to sit for a variety of school-leaving examinations including the "A" levels, International Baccalaureate or the American SAT I and II. With more experience, we will eventually be able to settle on our own examination system which is not only rigorous and appropriate for our own needs but which will be internationally recognised.

The new upper secondary school system also provides for the introduction of private schools. I welcome this initiative because it promotes competition. We have developed our national secondary schools and junior colleges to a stage where they are world-class. I am confident that our junior colleges and secondary schools will be able to meet the competition from private schools.

In this connection, MOE could also consider allowing more flexibility in allowing Singaporean children to attend foreign systems schools. This will help to ease the worries of returning Singaporeans about the education of their children and will spur our own schools to achieve new heights of excellence.

To sum up, Mr Speaker, Sir, we need a new junior college curriculum and upper secondary school structure because the world has changed. If we continue the present system, making adjustments when necessary, this will only defer the changes which will ultimately be necessary. It is better for us to grasp the nettle by the thorns and change the system so that we can keep our education system abreast and up-to-date and prepare our students to face the future with confidence.

As we embark into the 21st century, these changes to the junior college curriculum and upper secondary school structure will be among the most important steps that we can make in the process of remaking Singapore. Much work lies ahead for the Ministry of Education to translate the proposed changes into workable procedures. But notwithstanding the bumpy road ahead, I urge all Members of this House not to let down our children but to have the courage to attack this problem head-on and endorse changes proposed in the MOE's report.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I support the motion.