Bulldozing through Obstacles

May 15, 2010 (with thanks to Straits Times)
the education man
Shaking up the Education Ministry
He pushed controversial policies like streaming and religious education
By Susan Long & Ho Ai Li

DR GOH Keng Swee believed 'we should be prepared to stand Confucius on his head where necessary'.
Referring to the question of whether Confucian filial piety should take precedence over the impersonal implementation of law, he concluded that a Singaporean traffic policeman should book his own father if he were caught speeding and the elder should take pride in his son doing the right thing.
'Now, that is the sort of ethic we should teach in Singapore. It is up to the scholars to find it somewhere in the Confucian literature... If you teach the old ethic in its original form, which is all right for feudal China or imperial China, you can't use it in modern Singapore,' he opined in a 1982 newspaper interview.

This was the sort of unsentimental, clear-eyed radicalism he applied when overhauling the Education Ministry from 1979 to 1984, his last posting before he retired from political life.
Although he shook up the ministry with highly controversial and hard-nosed policies such as streaming and religious education, he often described his time spent at the Ministry of Education (MOE) as the 'dullest' and 'possibly the most frustrating period of his life'.

In August 1978, eager to 'troubleshoot' the education system he had always been 'critical' of, even before the official announcement of his appointment was made, he assembled a review team comprising mostly Ministry of Defence systems engineers with an average age of 25, ignoring criticism that there was insufficient representation from 'insiders'.
He then summoned school principals to a brainstorming meeting, but was 'aghast' when it degenerated into a farce - a 'bellyaching' and 'mudslinging' session where principals accused one another of slights and misdeeds. As someone who always depersonalised issues, this session proved too much for him.
In the plainest terms possible, he disparaged the 'poor quality' of the staff and set-up then. 'Education was a lousy place. I decided to change the system. Simply because the teachers did not know what they were teaching. You're teaching people English and you're teaching it as a first subject, as if all these people are from English-speaking homes,' he said.
Within six months, his team, dubbed the Daring Dozen, put out the Goh Keng Swee Report, a seminal document which continues to shape the broad contours of Singapore's education system today.
It opened with this damning observation: 'It has not occurred to many Singaporeans how unnatural the present school system is. Most school children are taught in two languages - English and Mandarin. Eighty-five per cent of them do not speak either of these languages at home.'
It took umbrage that all students, even those who consistently failed exams, were put through a 12-year regime that had been designed for the top 15 per cent of the cohort. Because of this, those who could not keep pace dropped out.
Then, only 42 per cent of a Primary 1 cohort completed secondary school. Out of this lot, only 16 per cent made it to the A levels and a mere 6 per cent went on to universities and polytechnics.
Among the key recommendations of the Goh team - which included Mr Lim Siong Guan, who later went on to become head of the civil service - was that a child's academic ability should be assessed as early as Primary 3; the less able would then be streamed to the Extended or Monolingual stream to complete their primary education in seven or eight years.
Despite a heated four-day debate in Parliament, during which MPs argued virulently against streaming, the team's recommendations were adopted.

Over the ensuing years, the streaming controversy was used to maximum effect by opposition politicians, especially in the 1984 elections.

But the policy was stoutly defended by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who cited figures to show how it had reduced educational wastage. In the six years between 1978 and 1984, he pointed out, the percentage of Singaporeans with secondary education jumped from 42 per cent to 48 per cent, while those with post-secondary education went from 16 per cent to 18 per cent, and tertiary education, from 6 per cent to 8 per cent.

Mr Moo Soon Chong, the first head of the Singapore Sports School and former Anglican High principal who passed away in March this year, told The Straits Times in an interview in 2008: 'It was good that he came over to MOE. We needed somebody like him. Most educationists are soft-hearted people. We use too much feeling.
'You needed a hard person with the courage to implement a policy like streaming. Most parents were not educated at that time. If the children did not do well, they made them leave school to start working.'

Mr S. Ganesamoorthy, 65, a former senior specialist in moral education with the ministry, remembers the discipline and 'systems approach' Dr Goh decisively introduced. 'The ministry then was having lengthy meetings with copious minutes, without individual accountability for decisions made. Dr Goh's view was that any meeting that went beyond an hour should be treated as a seminar, and beyond three hours, as a conference,' he says.

Dr Goh even publicly commended a junior officer for writing to him directly. 'The officer had asked for Teachers' Day to be declared a holiday for all ministry officials. Dr Goh immediately said 'yes',' he recounts.

Appalled at the fallen social standing and poor quality of teachers, Dr Goh raised their pay as well as opportunities for them to be promoted and improve themselves.

His management style was to bulldoze through obstacles and axe poor performers. His mantra: 'Nothing like trying.'

Mr Goh Tong Pak, 62, former principal of Xinmin Secondary, remembers: 'Many senior education officers had to leave. In the beginning, there was fear, discomfort and unhappiness. But he laid down a strong foundation of change for the education ministers after him. Dr Goh believed that education was a kind of investment. Because of that, priority was given to it in the Budget.
'From then on, teachers' pay went up. Principals were sent for courses so that school leaders could see the big picture and have the courage to make changes.'

Dr Goh saw a clear line between moral order and economic progress. In a 1972 speech to a gathering of Methodists, he recounted his 'fanciful' answer to an American banker who had asked him for a single solution to the economic problems of a hypothetical poor country.
He said: 'I would recommend that the population be converted to some demanding, narrow-minded, intolerant form of the Protestant religion, such as one of the more extreme Calvinist sects. This would bring about an end of easy-going thriftless habits among the populace and the beginnings of scrupulous honesty in public administration. This combination must result in spectacular economic growth.'

He long believed that religion was a systematic way to inculcate values, temper Singaporeans' individualism and build social cohesion. In 1982, he introduced religious knowledge to the secondary school curriculum, in spite of widespread reservations that this would lead to overzealous proselytising.

But barely seven years after Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Confucian ethics classes were offered, they were phased out because of a 'heightened consciousness of religious differences and a new fervour in the propagation of religious beliefs'.

Mr Moo observes: 'The rationale to develop the student's character was good, but implementation was difficult. Since then, the MOE has never brought up religious education again.'

But undeterred, Dr Goh served as chairman of the Institute of East Asian Philosophies, which was formed in 1983 to spearhead the Singapore Government's promotion of Confucianism.
But in 1989, signalling the wane of Confucianist discourse in Singapore and the economic rise of China, it was reorganised and renamed the Institute of East Asian Political Economy (IEAPE) - a reflection of Dr Goh's shifting his attention from ethical concerns to the pragmatic business of trading with China.

Towards the end, he bemoaned how putting education in the service of the economy had cultivated conformity rather than creativity. In a 1970 speech, he was openly critical of the examination-oriented education system: 'The idea of education as a search for truth, the excitement for intellectual inquiry and speculation - all this are given lip service and little else. And so we have in Singapore intellectual conformity in place of intellectual inquisitiveness. And it all adds up to a depressing climate of intellectual sterility.
'If we are completely honest with ourselves, I think we can detect in contemporary Singapore a strange and striking similarity of intellectual climate and social values with Victorian England, together with much of the hypocrisies and cruelties of that age.'

At the end of his political career, he was sceptical about the role government played in the area of culture and intellectual life.
In an interview on retirement, he said: 'Let's not despise material gains. And there is also a need for some soul. You must never ask the government to provide for the needs of the soul... I don't think you want the government to provide comfort for the soul. This is very dangerous. After some time, we tell you what to think.
'We must not underestimate the ability of Singaporeans to think for themselves and come to their own judgment. We can persuade them, but in the end, they make up their own minds.'