KEYNOTE LECTURE BY RADM TEO CHEE HEAN, MINISTER
FOR EDUCATION AND 2ND MINISTER FOR DEFENCE, TO THE
30TH INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT SYMPOSIUM,
UNIVERSITY OF ST GALLEN, SWITZERLAND, 26 MAY 2000

"21^ST CENTURY EDUCATION: EMBRACING CHANGE YET REMAINING
CONSTANT AND TIMELESS"

1.     First, let me convey my warmest congratulations to ICS on its 30th Symposium. This is a unique forum for leaders in business, science and politics, and students from around the world to explore new perspectives and fresh initiatives for the future.

2.     Today, we find ourselves on the threshold of great new opportunities, but we also face new uncertainties. Recent scientific advances have enabled mankind to live longer, eat better, and have more leisure time. But not all countries and peoples have managed to reap the benefits. While computers and the internet are generating rich new opportunities, we worry that the digital divide will accentuate the differences between the developed and the under-developed in our world. Even as some are struggling to come to terms with the information revolution, a new revolution in the life sciences is upon us.

Globalisation and Technological Change

3.     Technological change has brought communities closer together, and globalisation is a fact of life that is here to stay. International trade and investment have increased interdependence among countries. Decisions on investments made in one country can bring jobs and hope to communities, or herald despair when jobs are lost. The flow of people, ideas and information has brought the world closer together. This is particularly so for the young. School children in Singapore engage in on-line discussions with their friends in the rest of South East Asia, Europe and around the world. They learn about each other's countries and cultures, and discover that they are not so unlike each other - they share the same aspirations, hopes and fears about the future.

Changing Time horizons

4.     Globalisation and advances in technology have shortened our time horizons, but paradoxically, lengthened them also.

5.     Jet aircraft and e-messages that whiz around the world have shortened our time horizons. St Gallen is only a pleasant dinner and a good night's sleep away from Singapore. The cycle of the daily newspaper or the weekly newsmagazine is in danger of being superceded by the up-to-the-minute breaking story on round-the-clock global news channels, and routed directly to your personal mobile communication device. The world financial markets never sleep. And the actions of governments are judged not only by citizens once every four or five years, but daily, hourly, and even minute to minute in financial markets.

6.     At the same time, advances in medical technology have lengthened our time horizons. We now live and remain active significantly longer. While it was usual for most people to retire at 55 or even 50, three decades ago, many now expect to remain active well into their 60s or 70s. Who knows what the revolution in the life sciences will bring in the next decades? As the world spins faster, and life spans get longer, we are literally able to pack in several life-times' worth of experiences into one life-time of 30 years ago.

7.     The challenge of globalisation and technological advances can also be seen as the challenge of treading a fine balance between the future and the past. And between the things that must change and the things that must remain constant. In short, what seems to be a phenomenon of geography and of technology can be re-interpreted as a phenomenon in time.

Education: Bridging Place and Time

8.     Education has a special responsibility to help each community come to terms with the challenges of globalisation and technological change. It aims to prepare the young for the future. When a child starts school at the age of 6, that child is preparing for the world 15 or 20 years into the future, and in which he will live for another half century and more. What that future will be cannot be predicted with certainty. But with globalisation, rapid technological change and longer lives, that future which he is preparing for contains more unknowns than before.

9.     Education therefore has not just to respond to change but also to lead it and continually re-invent itself to remain relevant. Yet, education also has the responsibility for preserving and transmitting values and heritage from one generation to the next. Education therefore has to act also as a guardian and trustee for the community. It is not easy to be trail-blazer on the one hand, and be custodian on the other.

10.   Educationists are being confronted with difficult choices in 4 areas: "What, how, when and where to teach?" Or from the student's viewpoint, "What, how, when and where to learn?"

Responses

11.    Let me respond to these four challenges, and draw examples from Singapore's and other countries' efforts in meeting the challenges above as a launch-pad for further discussion.

What to teach?

12.    First, "what to teach, or what to learn?" While education in the past could be focussed on local needs and a knowledge base that evolved slowly, education today has to cope with preparing graduands to be "world-ready", and to cope with an explosion of knowledge. There is no shortage of ideas as to what more to include in the curriculum. But there will never be enough hours and years to teach everything. The real challenge is not to dream up what else to include, but to decide what really needs to be taught. Apart from content, it is equally important to impart values, attitudes and a world-view that helps our people to harness and manage change.

13.    In Singapore, we have chosen a middle path, one which builds on the strengths of past achievements yet responds creatively to meet future needs. Two years ago we reviewed our school curriculum and decided that we had too much content in it, added on over the years. We have removed between 10% and 30% of the content in the various subjects in our curriculum. Our curriculum contains 3 elements.

14.    The first element continues to emphasise the fundamentals that provide the foundation for future learning. These fundamentals include both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are basic foundational knowledge such as literacy, numeracy and quantitative reasoning. Singapore pays particular attention to Science and Mathematics in our schools as they form the basis for subsequent study of many of the professions, and branches of the physical and life sciences. We are also encouraging creativity and critical reasoning ability. But we also place heavy emphasis on developing the softer attributes such as basic values and attitudes. Values and attitudes are important, as they create an environment in which teaching and learning can take place, and help ensure that our young grow up as good persons and good citizens.

15.    The second element in what to teach is the practical skills that our students need to fit into the globalised economy and secure a good, well paying job. Some of these skills are highly specific, and might even become obsolete very rapidly, requiring regular re-skilling and re-training. In Singapore, our schools focus on basic foundational knowledge, while our post-secondary and higher education institutions develop higher order reasoning ability and knowledge, as well as equip our students with skills directly relevant to the workplace. We have also put much greater emphasis and resources into research and the development of techno-entrepreneurship in our higher education institutes to spearhead our drive into the knowledge economy of the future.

16.    The third element in what to teach follows from the second. Today's students need life-long learning skills to be tomorrow's innovative and entrepreneurial workforce. Because there is just too much to learn, and because the specific skills that one learns become obsolete, perhaps the most important thing for students to learn, is to learn how to learn. This includes knowing when and what to learn, having the passion and desire to learn and having the skills to internalise new knowledge independently.

How to teach?

17.    The second question is "how to teach?", or from the student's point of view, "how to learn" - what is the mode of imparting and obtaining knowledge? In the last century, education has moved from a highly personalised activity - the interaction between a master and disciples at his feet -- to a more structured system of instruction provided by institutions, often funded by the community. Technological change is opening up possibilities of even less personalised learning, for example, through computer based, or distance learning, and yet promises ever more customised educational experiences delivered in bite sizes.

18.    Singapore has embraced these new technologies for education wholeheartedly. For example, on the hardware side, we are two-thirds way through implementing a 6-year Information technology Masterplan for schools. The Masterplan will move computer provision in our schools from one computer for every ten students to one computer for every two students; and improve existing Internet connectivity from narrow-band to whole-school internal networking and broadband external connectivity for every school by 2002.

19.    With the information revolution, some have argued that schools are obsolete, a product of the industrial revolution; and that the internet heralds not just a new economy, but its corollary, a new wave of education that is as decentralised and distributed, as the world-wide web. Teachers too become obsolete, or at best serve merely as facilitators and guides on an individual's search for knowledge.

20.    Computers and the Internet seem to offer the prospect of delivering education in a teacher-free environment. One could think of this as a version of the Turing test (proposed by Alan Turing in the 1950's) for determining whether a machine can be considered intelligent: in this case, it is when a student is unable to tell whether he is communicating with a machine or a human teacher.

21.    While computers and the Internet can replace teachers in specific learning contexts, especially for adult learning, the process of teaching and learning particularly for our young will continue to be a uniquely human enterprise. For those at a tender age, computers and Internet resources cannot replace the wisdom and guidance of the teacher.

22.    Apart from teaching specific knowledge and skills, the teacher is, above all, a human embodiment of the values and world-view we want to pass on to our children. Through their interactions with students, teachers guide, inspire, encourage and push their students on to achieve their potential, and provide them with a moral and social compass to deal with the world beyond.

23.    Even in higher education, the intellectual challenge, the ferment, the sparks that fly from a meeting of the mind of a master with the nimble, questioning and hungry minds of his students is hard to replace.

24.    Schools as we know them may become less structured, and less anchored in place and time than schools today, but the role of the teacher at the heart of the system, even if he be at the other end of a fibre-optic cable, on the other side of the world, or even fast asleep while his student is listening to his lecture, will be difficult to replace.

Where to teach?

25.    This brings us to the third challenge - "where to teach?" - where will students, young and old, learn in the future? With the Internet and Information Technology, information is available 24 hours a day, anywhere in the world. Knowledge is no longer confined to a school or library. Tomorrow's school may well be a virtual learning platform hosted in cyberspace.

26.    Already there are exciting new developments in distance learning, and cyber-universities that do not exist in any particular geographical location. Established universities are extending their outreach by forming alliances or setting up branches across the world. There are examples of a number of these modalities in Singapore.

27.    Polytechnics in Singapore require students spending a semester on industrial attachment to simultaneously complete an academic module through distance education. The INSEAD management school and the Chicago Business School have both decided to set up campuses in Singapore. For their executive programmes, they expect students to fly in from around the region at regular intervals, for a few days at a time, for face to face interaction, but will conduct significant elements of the course while the students continue with their full-time occupations wherever they may be. The National University of Singapore is conducting a joint Masters programme in Advanced Engineering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where students from both campuses attend lectures conducted either in MIT or in Singapore, using video-conferencing through the very high speed broadband network (or VBNS) system in the US, connected to SINGAREN, Singapore's high speed research network.

When to teach?

28.    Finally, "when to teach or learn?" The seven ages of man is a stylised account of a lifetime with clearly segmented stages for different activities. With knowledge creation proceeding at a rapid pace, education will need to move from being an enterprise for the young and guileless to an endeavour for all, at all times.

29.    The belief that we can provide all the education that a person needs before he enters the workforce - i.e. pre-employment education and training - no longer holds true, if it ever did. We all live longer, and technology marches on at an increasing pace. We have seen even highly skilled jobs, such as precision machinists, architectural and engineering draughtsmen, and shorthand stenographers, become obsolete. In each of our now longer life-times, we will need to re-train ourselves a number of times.

30.    It is crucially important therefore to have a system of life-long learning in place - both to upgrade the skills of those who might have missed out in their younger days, and also to constantly re-skill the population so that their skills match the demands of the economy.

31.    The Ministry of Manpower in Singapore, together with my Ministry, the Ministry of Education, are studying how best to structure such a system, including determining the types and levels of life-long learning likely to be required, the institutions to deliver them, what financing structures need to be put in place, and who should bear the cost of such learning - the individual, the employer, or society at large.

Global Literacy

32.    Before concluding, I would like to touch briefly on one other issue that cuts across all that we have discussed thus far. It is an important issue, and has become more important in our globalised and interconnected world.

33.    The issue is language. Language is a means of communication, within communities, and between communities. Language is closely linked to cultural identity, and is a powerful medium for transmitting culture and values. In many countries, language helps forge national identity.

34.    Language policy in education is a fundamental, and often a delicate issue. The choice of language or languages is important in multilingual countries like Switzerland, or in countries that place a high value on their historical and cultural uniqueness.

35.    Here in Europe ability with languages is highly prized. People who have the facility to communicate in many languages have access to several networks, and new opportunities in business, academia and culture. In many Asian countries, learning a foreign language, particularly English, is a high priority. Japan is discussing making English an official second language. The European Union will be launching a "Mother Tongue + 2 (European) Languages" campaign in 2001 to foster closer European ties.

36.    In Singapore, we too have had to confront this issue. We are a multi-racial, multi-lingual society, drawing our people from the great civilisations of Asia, and we have a history of a century and a half as a British colony.

37.    We aim to be a society with an Asian soul, but which remains open, attuned and welcoming to the world. Hence, our students learn English and a "Mother Tongue language" (Mandarin, Malay, Tamil). Those who are able learn a third language, often German, French or Japanese. While English and the foreign languages allow us to plug into the international scene, Mother Tongue languages help our young to learn about and appreciate their history and their cultural identity.

38.    In every country there is an increasing need to strive for the literacy that will allow our people to retain their identity and uniqueness, and yet there is a need for our people to be "world-ready", able to interact comfortably across borders, cultures and cyberspace. The requirements for literacy now extend beyond local literacy - being able to interact and communicate within your own community, to "global literacy" - being able to interact and communicate with the world. It is possible for a person to be completely literate locally, and yet to be lost outside his own community, in the wider world beyond - or illiterate globally.

39.    It may well be that technology might eventually provide the answer - with instantaneous translation and interpretation from any language into any other. But till then, language policy remains a crucial question. Global literacy can also be thought of in terms of time. The world might be divided into those who require translation, and those who don't. Translation and interpretation take time. It may be a mild social inconvenience, like laughing at a joke a few seconds after others do; or it might mean missed business opportunities; a time lag in capitalising on the latest research findings; or a reduced ability to influence fast moving events at multi-lateral fora.

Conclusion

40.    Throughout history, education has transformed society for the better. Education has evolved in waves, from a privilege for an elite, for a select few, to an entitlement for the general population. Beginning in the last century, the industrial revolution and efforts to modernise agriculture provided a strong impetus to provide mass primary education to the workforce. Mass secondary education followed as the demands of the modern industrial society increased. In the latter half of the last century, opportunities for further and higher education were greatly expanded - first in the United States, and then in other developed countries, heralding the age of mass further and higher education. Many developed countries have only recently come to terms with the huge demands placed on universities and further education systems that were not designed or funded to cope with such numbers.

41.    The next great wave in this century will be mass continuing education. Mass continuing education will allow our peoples to continue to seek knowledge and skills, improve themselves, and find self-fulfillment throughout their longer lives.

42.    But many countries in the developing world are still struggling to provide even a basic education for their people. There are no simple solutions. While help from the international community is needed, the ground too needs to be fertile, for the best intended aid cannot bear fruit where there is civil strife, war and a breakdown in governance.

43.    The future poses tremendous challenges to those of us in Education. In the 21st century Education must not just respond to change but be at the forefront of change. Yet it has to preserve and transmit history, values and culture that allow us to know who we are and where we want to go. But education is also in a unique position - it has the power to shape and mould our future. Education therefore cannot be passive. For education to be relevant, it must embrace change, while remaining rooted in timeless values.

44.    I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this discussion and look forward to the benefit of your views. Thank you. ……..