Can Singapore’s leaders pull off real reform? In 1997 they realized they were short 7,000 students. The government projected that the economy would need something like 17,000 university graduates a year to service its economy in the year 2000, but its two universities were admitting only 8,000 Singaporeans, and overseas study was not making up the difference. Singapore’s leaders realized that they needed not just more graduates but different graduates. Lee complained that Singapore lacked the freewheeling “buzz” of Hong Kong. And while Singapore trained its best and brightest for government service, both Hong Kong and Taiwan were more successful in producing entrepreneurs. “It’s ironic that we should talk about building a more creative society,” says Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. “We are aware of the irony: can you actually teach creativity? But we say that we [will] give it a try.”
Singapore has some obvious advantages over its neighbors. Its meritocratic and largely corruption-free society will help it escape from one of the basic dilemmas of education reform in East Asia. A Beijing university official once put it to me this way. She lamented that her son had to cram so hard for university entrance exams that he “has no time to play or be creative. The exams make our schools teach the wrong way, but if we tried to change the exams, corruption would destroy what meritocracy we have.”
In typical fashion, Singapore’s topnotch civil service has designed a sensible strategy for change. At the primary- and secondary-school levels, the basic goal of its “Masterplan for IT” is to encourage creative thinking and lifelong learning. While the reforms are too new to see results yet, it will be easier to achieve computer literacy than to ensure creativity.
The next stage of Singapore’s strategy is to create a “Boston of Asia”–a vibrant university scene that will both produce creative knowledge workers and attract talented overseas graduates to return home. While Singapore is taking smart steps to boost professorial salaries and relax the university entrance exams, it also needs to carve out a comfortable environment for creative people. That, in turn, will require a relaxation of political controls, which Singapore’s leaders are at least beginning to consider. Though Prime Minister Goh warns against trying to change a system that has brought stability and growth for 33 years, he also recognizes that “in the new world, when you have to compete against others in terms of ideas, you just can’t be looking toward a paternalistic government all the time.”
Take the Internet, for example. The Singapore Broadcasting Authority so far is only censoring 100 pornography sites, and no Internet service provider has been prosecuted. But censorship of any kind will be difficult to reconcile with Singapore’s ambition to become a regional information-technology hub, providing each citizen with access to an interactive network of education, services, finance and business applications. I pointed out to Lee Kuan Yew that teaching schoolchildren advanced computer skills would allow them to evade controls. How would he address this problem? Lee’s hopeful reply: by the time schoolchildren are that skillful, it will no longer matter.
Singapore would also do well to ease the controls on political debate that have marginalized the opposition. For example, an opposition leader was recently arrested when he challenged a law that prohibits speeches in public places without a permit. When I asked Lee about this, he replied that giving speeches on busy street corners can be highly disruptive. When I suggested Singapore designate a place for public speeches similar to Speaker’s Corner in London, Lee agreed that such a reform would make sense.
What all this suggests is that Singapore is beginning to “get it.” As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has pointed out, the old debate on “Asian values” was always exaggerated. To the extent that the term refers to strong families and respect for institutions, many Westerners hold the same values. At the same time, as they grow more wealthy and middle-class, many Asians want more democratic freedoms. As Singapore strives to educate and retain the mobile information workers who are key to its future economic success, it may also find itself making broader reforms that transcend the old debate.
