Question: The Prime Minister put forth several ideas and plans regarding education in his National Day Rally. How realistic do you find these plans and to what extent are they important to the future of Singapore?
The Prime Minister addressed several education issues and policies in his National Day Rally, among these are raising quality of all our schools in Singapore, including all of the neighbourhood schools and not just on a few top schools, developing young talents to the full, encouraging syudents to take up third language and providing more channels for Singaporeans have tertiary education.
" MOE has worked hard at this. I would say they have given you four “more” things. First “more’ -- freedom for principals and teachers to experiment. So, you can try out new ideas. Second “more” -- resources for schools with good ideas, so that if you succeed, well, we will help you build on that success. Third “more” -- opportunities for needy students through the Opportunity Funds. And fourth “more” is more learning, less teaching. "
Prime Minister mentioned that four "more" things will be given to the students and teachers, which are more freedom, more resources, more opportunities and more self directed learning. Suh changes can be felt in all schools. All schools are given more opportunity to make decisions that best suit their schools' culture. Also, students are encouraged to practice self- directed learning.
Recently, MOE strongly encourage students to take up third language; non-malays take up Malay as their third language. Malay language used to be the lingua franca in Singapore. Because it aspired to be a global city, it had no choice but to adopt English as the language of government, business and education. Still, we should be conscious of our losses. The demise of Malay as a lingua franca is one loss. Young Singaporeans today, unlike their parents and grandparents in the 1950s and 60s, cannot communicate in Malay. That means young Singaporeans are no longer in a position to communicate effortlessly with Malay Malaysians on Indonesians. In order to reverse this linguistic development, PM Lee is going to have two new initiatives in our secondary schools. First, the Malay Special Programme to study Malay as a third language. It’s there already in all the schools, but it’s not very popular. So, MOE is going to introduce incentives to encourage more students to do the Malay Special Programme. Singaporeans like incentives, so we’re going to have small incentives -- two bonus points for JC admission and a few more things.
However, PM Lee's decision to introduce incentives for non-malay students to study Malay as a third language will not make the language the lingua franca again. Some things in history are irreversible, this is probably one of them. The incentives PM Lee proposes to offer in schools can do only good.
PM Lee also aim to get every student into post-secondary education and as many as possible into tertiary institutions. The government has invested very heavily in our ITE, in our polytechnics, in our universities. Because of the investments, MOE has increased the intakes year by year and they've increased the upgrading -- more students progressing from ITE to poly, more students going from poly to university, more students going into the entire post-secondary and tertiary sector. And with good schools, more and more students want to go up and want to go to university.
I think such plans are necessary as there's growing number of students having difficulties in enrolling into the three state-funded universities, NUS, NTU, SMU. Thus, plan of building the fourth publicly-funded university is a must. Recently, There's an article which state that taiwan students who get grades as low as 5 % are eligible for tertiary education. This is because there's over supply of universities and demand is low. In order to fill the vacancies, Taiwan universities basically accept all sorts of students. Such decision will definitely ruin the future workforce in Taiwan as the quality has sacrificed in place of quantity. I am glad that students in Singapore are not facing such problems. It’s better not to have graduated but to have a good job than to have graduated with a skill which is not useful and then you spend your time feeling unhappy. The decision to build a fourth publicly-funded university is wise and they are important for the future of Singapore.
