Every School is a Good School

 

In hindsight, there is some consistency in the policy that the government wants to close down Yale NUS, and wants to close down the GEP. In both cases, they're taking what was purportedly an elite form of education, and trying to scale it up and make opportunities available to more people.

I'm an alumnus of the gifted program. I enjoyed my time there, and I will mourn the passing of that program, but I'm not going to mourn if some of the programs that made it what it is are opened up to more people.

When Singapore was newly liberated from colonial rule, there was some kind of sense to elitism. You didn't have a lot of money, and whatever you did have, you probably wanted to pool them together and select a few of your brightest people to send to developed countries, so that they could get educated, come back to Singapore and help build a society.

That was why a Columbo Plan scholarship was set up. And that's why, in a family of five, you would choose your eldest son to study and get into the middle class, so that after that happened, he could figure out a way to bring the rest of the family into the middle class. There's a mirror of that in Black America: Harlem was the place of art and culture for the Black people. It was where the entertainers went to prove themselves, at the Apollo theatre. Morehouse would be their Harvard University. (It's a respectable school but probably not an Ivy, unfortunately.)

But then the existence of elite universities is an uncomfortable one, because a few people could climb the ladder, and then kick it away when they reached the top. Over the years, there was this obsession about who would reach the top of the pile. There was the mentality amongst Singaporean students, that they needed, as children, to obtain the best credentials, then as adults they could take it easy and coast along on those great credentials. This is hardly a formula for maximising peoples' potentials.

Also, there was a crying need for Singapore to embrace multiple paths towards excellence. There was a lot of wastage of talent for people who may not fit in with the main strain of test taking.

These days, the computer science schools of NUS, NTU and SMU all have good students coming in. I know some of the graduates who are from neighbouring countries. I wish I knew what the Singaporeans who came through those programs are like. At the Factory, which is where I work, I've seen people from those three major universities, as well as Singapore Tech and SUTD.

Another significant change is that they've narrowed the credential gap between polytechnics and “A” levels. There are clueless morons who are chiding the youngsters for choosing polytechnic over the “A” levels. But polytechnic is better for preparing you for engineering and IT, whereas “A” levels is better for preparing you for science and data science. Obviously “A” levels is more intellectual, but polytechnic teaches you a lot of different skills. Instead of teaching critical thinking, it teaches pragmatic thinking.

We're in a different phase of developing our education system. We're no longer seeking to find our best people to create a beach head. It's now about Singapore being a magnet, and trying to attract the best talent from everywhere to turn it into a future ready economy.

I even spoke to one or two of the colleagues who worked with me, and they were wondering why Asia has this obsession with sending their children to the best grade schools. It's also notable that a lot of youngsters from overseas just enroll into whichever neighbourhood school they can find, and the best amongst them still end up in the best integrated programs and get good university places. 

They may be living in a world where it was no longer the case that all the best resources would be funnelled into the Raffles schools. Those schools would probably continue to be centres of excellence, but they would have to compete with the rest on a more level playing field. 

The idea that a leaving cert from a good school would set you up for life is an old idea from the 80s and the 90s. We have entered an era of creative destruction where it would not be good enough to latch on to a prestigious institution - a blue chip company or a prestigious government department. You had to be good, and had to prove yourself constantly, or else you'd get left behind.