JUNIOR COLLEGE/UPPER SECONDARY EDUCATION

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Debate resumed.

Assoc. Prof. Chin Tet Yung (Sembawang): Mr Speaker, Sir, after listening to the comprehensive speech by the Senior Minister of State, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, I can only say that I rise to speak in strong support of the motion standing in the name of the Minister for Education. Over 30 Members of this House have already expressed their views and Members present here will be relieved to know that this has considerably reduced the length of my speech.

Sir, as I listened to the speakers, it struck me that the search for a perfect education policy is rather like searching for the Holy Grail. It is unlikely that one would eventually find it, but in the process of travelling down the roads and the pathways, which seems to be the buzz word these days, we will be enriched and, in some cases, even ennobled. But, of course, some may stumble and fall but the quest goes on. In this House, for the last couple of days, we have been embarking on a journey to search for a better education system for Singaporeans.

But, first, I think that our educators deserves credit for the many achievements of past education policies. These policies have enabled Singapore to propel itself to first world status within three decades. Singaporeans owe a debt of gratitude to educators, past and present. As a parent of two children who have gone through the system, I for one would like to say thank you to them for providing my children with an education that is hard to beat, especially if one were to consider the costs of providing for such an education. I am one of those parents who accept that stress is a necessary part of life and education, and that the development of intellectual rigour is of utmost importance in the education of children.

Reading Command Paper No. 8, I searched, first, for the vision that must ex hypothesi be different from the one that had held good for nearly three decades. The old vision, if one can call it that, was one that was designed to produce "high levels of achievement by international comparison, and prepared successive generations well for the workplace, citizenship and responsible adulthood."

The new vision is stated in paragraph 26 of the White Paper as follows:

'Going forward, we face the challenge of preparing students for a future of innovation-driven growth, and frequent and unpredictable changes in the economic and social environment.. The focus of education must shift from efficiency to diversity, from knowing to thinking, and from fitting people to specific jobs to equipping them for lifelong learning and creating their own opportunities.' Nice, eloquent phrases. But how true is this?

Is this a bold vision, a borrowed vision or a blurred vision? As I understand it, the old vision had to do with educating our students for specific jobs, and for training them to work efficiently. Emphasis was placed on knowledge.

Under the new vision, in a world subjected to the demands of globalisation and the knowledge economy, we should provide our students with a diversified education, with thinking skills rather than knowledge and with the ability to be extremely mobile, and to re-educate themselves, if need be, when their employment circumstances change. This is the new vision. If this can be achieved, I think the Minister for Manpower would no longer need to worry about structural unemployment, because workers will re-educate themselves for new jobs. And that would be a wonderful scenario, which would make a lot of sense in the current circumstances, I am sure.

Sir, the vision assumes that developing thinking skills and acquiring greater breadth of learning would meet the needs of the knowledge economy. The White Paper states that "in the knowledge economy, an ability to draw on different disciplines will be at a premium." Sir, my first query really is: how true is this? Will depth of learning be sacrificed for the breadth of learning? As Senior Minister of State, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, has fully addressed this point, even though this is not an unimportant question - and he had said so himself - I think that his answers more than satisfactorily cover the points that I want to make about the fact that even though we broaden the curriculum, it will not be at the expense of the shallowness of learning. And I assume that this will be very important when the new curriculum takes effect. But I think parents and their children may still be at a loss as to how to deal with this interdisciplinary approach. They ask simple and immediate questions, such as what would the new curriculum mean in terms of the chances for my children, for example, to secure a place in the university, in medical school, in engineering or in accountancy or law. Diversity in curriculum may bring uncertainty and even unhappiness to many, particularly in the years that such a new curriculum start because not many people would be sure as to how it would go.

But, Sir, I am all for the diversity in the curriculum. I hope that there will be some serious attention given to working out exactly what sort of workers are needed in a knowledge-based economy. We pride ourselves in the past for providing education that would fit our people into different jobs. And a large part of that success has been due to manpower projections about how many engineers, how many doctors, how many lawyers, how many accountants are needed. How will such projections now work in the age of uncertainty? I think this question needs to be addressed and, so far, I believe, has not been quite addressed by the answers given.

Sir, I turn next to a problem already referred to by some Members of this House, namely, resources. It is true to say that when we shift the balance from the acquisition of knowledge to the acquisition of analytical or communication skills, we are talking of a very serious increase in the number and quality of teachers of these skills. As we found out in teaching advocacy and lawyering skills in the Law Faculty, staff-student ratios have to be drastically reduced in order for such skills to be taught effectively, because the emphasis would be on each individual student and his or her ability to analyse and communicate. We found out, for example, that a staff-student ratio of 1:8 would be just about manageable. Do we intend to increase staff resources to that level? Can we train sufficient teachers in the short space of time available in such skills, and not only in such skills but in imparting such skills to hundreds or even thousands of JC and secondary students?

Sir, I would like to emphasise the words of the motion that "the curriculum will better develop thinking, communication and other process skills ." Whether this will actually achieve the result or not depends not so much on the curriculum per se, which only provides the opportunity for the acquiring of such skills, but on the teachers and the time given to the training of such skills to their charges.

Sir, this is not to say that the new vision and approach does not promise much. It does. It has many good elements in it. The development of independent thinking, teamwork spirit and social consciousness are critical objectives. They are worth developing for their own sake. It seems, however, that a balance must be struck, and the Senior Minister of State Tharman has addressed some of the problems. A balance must be struck between knowledge and skills - which he has addressed very thoroughly - diversity and specialisation, teamwork and individual development. Working out these balances will take time, and as he so properly pointed out, if the balance is properly addressed and worked out, it will be a system that the world has never seen before, and I doubt if any other country can lay claim to having worked out such a system. So instead of a borrowed vision, Senior Minister of State Tharman has convinced me that we can say that this is a bold vision.

But, if it is wrongly balanced, we would see an increase in workload and stress, and decrease in the effectiveness of the programmes and a lack of focus in the education given to students. So, of course, I sincerely hope that we will succeed in working this out properly.

While supporting the motion, Sir, I would like to raise a problem that does not seem to have been mentioned, and that is whether the implementation of the new curriculum would require not just an increase in human resources in terms of teachers and trainers, but also infrastructural facilities, such as language laboratories, recording studios, what have you, needed for the teaching of communication skills and the like. Has the Ministry already got the plan in place to build such additional facilities in schools selected for this new curriculum?

Finally, Sir, I would like to make the point about competition among colleges and schools, the ranking system in this new setup.

The ranking of colleges according to their students' performance records, and the like, appears to have created an atmosphere of competition among the colleges and schools. However, what I would like to ask is: has this so-called competition caused schools to lose their collegiality, their sense of cooperation with each other, their willingness to share resources and experiences with each other?

Sir, the diversified curriculum would impose a demand on resources, the like of which has never been experienced before. The new curriculum will bring a period of uncertainty too for the schools. There may be a tendency to hoard expertise and experience rather than to share and weld a collegial spirit among all our colleges. So I would like to ask what are the current measures and future measures that are necessary to build up this collegiality in the schools and colleges that hitherto we have not promoted. Sir, in the new age of diversity, we must all the more look for collegiality, among the schools and colleges, among the teachers and students, and among the students themselves.

With the diversification also in terms of private schools and public schools, we are entering into an era of what one might call an embarrassing richness of choice and opportunity for students compared to the relative poverty of choice under the old system. I hope that all in this House will of course agree that we must make it work. But in order that the new curriculum and setup will work, educators and manpower planners must provide, I believe, more guidance and direction than that given in the White Paper. Only then would there be public confidence that this sea-change of policy into uncharted and uncertain waters will end up in a safe harbour.

Sir, I strongly support the motion.