SPEECH BY MR THARMAN SHANMUGARATNAM, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW PREMISES OF THE NAFA ARTS KINDERGARTEN ON SATURDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2005, AT 511 EAST COAST ROAD, 11 A.M.

SPEECH BY MR THARMAN SHANMUGARATNAM, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW PREMISES OF THE NAFA ARTS KINDERGARTEN ON SATURDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2005, AT 511 EAST COAST ROAD, 11 A.M.

Professor Cham Tao Soon,

Chairman, NAFA Council

Mr Poh Choon Ann

Vice-Chairman, NAFA Foundation and Chairman, Executive Committee, NAFA International

Mr Choo Thiam Siew

President, NAFA and Supervisor, NAFA Arts Kindergarten

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

I am delighted to join you this morning to open the new premises of the NAFA Arts Kindergarten. Having spent almost a year in NAFA’s large, new campus at Bencoolen Street, the children in the kindergarten and their parents now have a space to call their own, here in East Coast.

Cultivating Creativity through Arts

2. NAFA’s venture into an arts kindergarten is an important innovation in education. It is a new approach to how we can provide children with a holistic education in their early years. Our schools and pre-school sector seek to nurture the whole child. We all know the five dimensions of development that this encompasses - the moral, intellectual, social, physical and aesthetic. What NAFA has done is to give the aesthetic dimension a new and enhanced focus, within this framework of holistic learning.

3. Through the aesthetics, children gain a new way of exploring the world around them. They communicate thoughts and feelings through art, in a way that is different from how they can communicate through words. And they use their hands to explore. It brings in many ways to stir the imagination and natural creativity of the child.

4. We know it helps to start this process early in a child’s education. We have to try many ways to nurture the child’s imagination and creativity. But we also know that we cannot try too hard. Creativity often comes about naturally, in subtle or even indiscernible ways - for instance when children play with paints and find themselves creating new shades of colour unexpectedly, or when they play with different textures in sculpture or pottery, or encounter variations of rhythms in music.

Taking the Lead in Early Arts Education

5. NAFA’s kindergarten venture also adds something to what the institution is all about. NAFA enjoys a distinguished and colourful history. Over the years, it has come to be regarded as an excellent institution for artistic studies, both locally and in the region. Many of us are aware of the long way NAFA has come, from its modest first enrolment of 14 art students, to its current enrolment of more than 2000 full-time students offering a comprehensive array of diploma, degree and postgraduate programmes in diverse creative disciplines.

6. In that sense, NAFA is well-placed to start pre-schoolers on the arts. Other than its obvious expertise and track record in arts education, there is something of NAFA’s innovative spirit in this year-old Arts Kindergarten. It is the same spirit of testing out new ideas, and overcoming obstacles, that guided its founding community of artists, volunteers and lecturers through NAFA’s pre-Bencoolen Street days, and continues to be seen in the NAFA of today.

7. I understand that NAFA’s decision to set up an arts kindergarten was also in response to some of the parents whose older children were involved in the programmes of NAFA’s School of Young Talents. These parents had approached NAFA to see if their pre-schooling children could also take part in activities that nurture their creative energies.

8. Certainly, what is unique about the Arts Kindergarten is the continuity it offers, with NAFA’s programmes for older children. The Arts Kindergarten provides a kind of preamble to NAFA’s School of Young Talents. Children who display potential in music, dance, drama or art can, once they reach school-going age, join in the programmes offered at the School of Young Talents. Many of these students will eventually take their passion and talents to the national stage, and even internationally.

9. But we do not expose and immerse students in the arts just for the purpose of nurturing outstanding artistic talents. The arts are for everyone. The arts are one of the principle trainers of the imagination, regardless of whether you end up as an engineer or technician or banker, or even civil servant or politician. That’s why many top scientists, for example, have a passion for arts, or often attribute their progress in the scientific field to their interest in the arts and humanities when they were in school. The arts are not there in education just because we want artists. They are part and parcel of what it takes to develop the whole mind.

10. They are also some individuals, like Prof Cham Tao Soon who is here, who excel in both the hard sciences and the arts - in his case music. Yesterday evening at a party at the Biopolis, I listened to other top young scientists display their musical talents - young A*STAR scholars with real gifts for singing or the piano. And Ed Liu, head of the Genome Institute of Singapore, who takes his jazz very seriously.

11. The new premises here at East Coast will provide many spaces for the children to explore both artistically and physically. It will help make learning fun. I understand that the children this year have learned about Vincent Van Gogh, and some had started work on their own versions of Sunflowers. Next year, I am told that dance lessons are also in the pipeline, which is possible now with the larger spaces here.

12. My hope is for NAFA Arts Kindergarten to help nurture its children into happy and confident individuals. Eager to learn, to explore new ways of doing things, and to develop a zest for life.

13. Let me congratulate the NAFA leadership for this new venture in education. I now have the pleasure of declaring the new premises of the NAFA Arts Kindergarten open.