
Education dominates Singapore's 'different' culture - tokenadult
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/11/education_dominates_in_singapo.html
======
forgottenpaswrd
"And no one would dispute that the key to all this success has been
education."

I would.

Singapore is what it is because of their strategic placing in the wold today.
The only reason the English decided to convert this tropical island in the
commerce nucleus it is.

People always rationalize how when something good happens to them it is always
because of their merit alone.

Spain discovered America because it is on the extreme of Europe and not in the
center, Germany is an Industrial nation because it has so much water and coal,
and is very cheap to transport things and USA has the bigger and most fertile
plains in the world for a very small population.

Now ask an American, German or a person from Singapore what is the key of
success and they will tell you hard work of course, but they don't work harder
than people from Central African Republic(I had been there, very beautiful and
rich but in the middle of nowhere, with no infrastructure, and very poor).

~~~
guylhem
[Disclosure- my best friend immigrated to Singapore after his PhD in Europe]

Natural factors play a role, but only so much. IMHO, _you_ are rationalizing.
There are many places in the world that are strategically located and resource
rich, but they didn't grow as much as Singapore did.

In Asia, if I was a villain, I would put my lair in Timor (if I wanted an
island) or New Guinea (if I wanted land) - just between India, Australia,
Japan, etc.

Water and coal are abundant in many places. Argentina has great fertile plains
and a lower population. Coal was first mined in China, and in the UK which
also had IIRC more coal and water than Germany.

Hell, following your explanation about the new world, Portugal and Ireland are
even more at the extreme of Europe- they should have discovered America! They
didn't (I know the story about Vinland, the vikings an so on - but they didn't
do as much as Spain did)

It we are talking about geographic distance, southern Morocco or Senegal would
have been at an advantage - but they didn't do it.

It's too easy to rewrite history. Education and investment are clearly driving
growth.

Show me a country that is betting big on education and pushing for investment
(preferably local, from savings), even if it has not much politically
stability it is a country with a bright future.

Besides India (who will certainly be the next big thing after the US - not
China IMHO), I'd put my chips on countries like Estonia, Kenya, Uruguay.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Show me a country that is betting big on education and pushing for investment
(preferably local, from savings), even if it has not much politically
stability it is a country with a bright future._

Historically that is not true. Countries which increased their investment in
education tended to have (slightly) slower economic growth, at least in the
period 1960-2000.

Paper:
[http://econ399.atwiki.com/file/open/21/Where+has+all+the+edu...](http://econ399.atwiki.com/file/open/21/Where+has+all+the+education+gone.pdf)

Blog post with key graph:
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html)

~~~
guylhem
Thanks a lot for the link, it is a very interesting study (reading that ATM),
however they only consider the increase in year of education - or, as written
in the comments on the blog _"There is proof that more people received more
years of schooling, but there is no proof that more people became more
educated"_

It could be another Leontief-like paradox, ie discarding the education
efficiency.

I would be curious to know if such results hold when only STEM education is
included (no humanities), and if there appear difference between pre-
university and university education (I would expect raising the population
literacy to have less effects - ie starting from a lower education might
require more investment in education) once corrected by emigration (brain
drain- remittances will help, but we're looking at something else)

~~~
yummyfajitas
There are all sorts of possibilities. My only point is that the link between
education and economic growth is far from clear.

~~~
guylhem
Indeed, and I should have been more careful with my affirmations.

But at least I now have learn something interesting - it has been disproved
that only increasing education length had any effect of growth.

------
ewolf
This is a very simplified view of the education system in Singapore. Of course
education should be important, but it can also go too far.

I've been in Singapore for 1 year as an exchange student. While I managed to
cope well, many slightly less talented students suffer from the great workload
and have almost no free time. In a middle class secondary school, about 95% of
the children need tuition to keep up with school. Weeks or even months before
their exams, all free time is eliminated and dedicated to studying.

The learning itself isn't perfect either. It's heavily focused on memorization
and involves no oral participation. Foreign languages are almost never taught;
math and natural sciences matter the most. Competition is promoted instead of
teamwork (not only amongst students, but also amongst teachers and civil
servants in general). The teachers are ranked according to their students'
results, which does work as a motivator, but discourages them to explain any
background information or topics that are not required from exams.

Parents urge their children to get the best degree they can in order to be
able to take up the best paying job they can find. Money is the measure and
not personal satisfaction. Arts, therefore, are not very popular.

I'm highlighting here all negative aspects to contrast the posted article; of
course it is good that Singapore does promote education and the education
system certainly works better than the ones of most other countries. Also,
this is not directly related to Singapore, but represents the Confucianist
mentality that one can find to a lot extremer extents in Japan, China and
Korea.

~~~
guylhem
> (competition, no foreign languages, science first) > Parents urge their
> children to get the best degree they can in order to be able to take up the
> best paying job they can find. Money is the measure and not personal
> satisfaction. Arts, therefore, are not very popular.

> I'm highlighting here all negative aspects

It does not look like negatives to me, but a recipe for success - ie focus on
the important and cut the useless.

(And in a country with as many immigrants as Singapore, I'm sure the issue of
foreign languages is self solving :-)

~~~
ewolf
That's a very narrow-minded way of looking at success. The success of a state
is much more than just attaining wealth — it's about serving the people and
giving them all possible opportunities to pursue their dreams and live a happy
life. Money is just a means to be able to carry out these tasks.

And there are enough statistics out there to prove that money is far from
leading the list of things that matter most to the happiness of humans.

PS: _(And in a country with as many immigrants as Singapore, I'm sure the
issue of foreign languages is self solving :-)_

The three ethnic groups in Singapore get in touch with each other quite well,
that's true, but contact with any other culture such as European ones is rare
(expats just stay amongst themselves). Furthermore, learning a language
requires more than just knowing native speakers.

~~~
guylhem
I admit my way is narrow minded, but it is also the currently admitted way of
looking at success - attaining wealth to maximize intertemporal consumption.

Money is indeed just a way to carry out one's dream, but without this way,
dreams will in fact remain dreams.

Personally, I would disregard cranky statistics or ranking such as the highly
subjective Happiness Index where the US get the last place, which does not
match the data since many people want to immigrate to the US (and not so much
want to flee that Berlin-wall style fences had to be erected to protect Mexico
from the hordes of US emigrants)

I'm sorry if this is offensive, but there are plenty of statistics, yet I like
it better when statistics match the actual facts like decision made by humans
beings who want to immigrate to another country.

[IIRC, there are other indexes which gives points by default, like based on
longitude of the country (for the climate), etc. I guess Canada won't win on
them :-)]

------
darylteo
Singaporean here.

My biggest gripe with Singapore's state as it is (and why can't we criticize
it?) is that while Singapore does have a stronger emphasis on education
(GREAT!), it still falls behind in knowledge.

Singapore has no natural resource, and thus no natural export. Its main
exports (other than "tourism" which doesn't count) is through secondary
products like petroleum, and through its workforce, considered high-value by
companies around the world.

Its workforce, being a resource, is therefore treated like a resource. And
resources must always be more readily available, more efficiently farmed, more
accurately quantified. The only way to survive in this country is to go
through the gauntlet, and get stamped with a quality grade like beef.

My personal hope for the future of Singapore is to slowly make the transition
away from treating its humans as a workforce resource, and to start treasuring
their humans as a knowledge bank. Indeed, I believe Singapore has realised
this, with its growing bio-technology sector, A* etc. However it is a race
against time; unlike other resources, its workforce can turn against it.

No I'm not really speaking about revolution etc. But years of being a resource
has put a toll on the population... just as a engine that is run in overdrive
for too long wears out. Many of the Singaporeans who can afford to find a
better life elsewhere, where their knowledge is valued higher, are doing so.
Those that do not have that knowledge are simply resigned to being the
nation's workhorse, and take no effort to seek it themselves (or perhaps they
cannot afford to).

This puts Singapore in a weird position. It is suffering from "brain drain".
And the current remedy for it is importing knowledge from elsewhere. Unlike
regions like the US, EU, AU, where populations are made up of many varieties
of cultures, Singapore is a young country with only 3 major ethnic groups, and
outsiders are viewed as such. This further axacerbates the feeling that local
workers are just their workers.

Anyway, after that long blob, my 2nd personal hope is I may be able to return
to my country and contribute back, not through workhours, but through
knowledge.

Disclaimer: this is all my views and intuition, I don't have any links or
numbers to back things up.

~~~
tokenadult
A Singaporean friend of mine just saw my posting of the same United States
editorial on my Facebook wall, and she suggested the 29 October 2012 article
"A less exam-centric approach to build character, creativity,"

[http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-les...](http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121029-0000030/A-less-
exam-centric-approach-to-build-character,-creativity)

featuring quotations from a speech by Deputy Prime Minister Tharman
Shanmugaratnam of Singapore as a possible response. It does appear that people
respond to incentives, and the Singapore education system has set up pretty
good incentives for one set of behaviors, with an ongoing debate in that
slowly democratizing society about what behaviors to encourage for the next
stage of Singapore's development.

AFTER EDIT: I just reread all the other comments in this thread, in light of
what they are saying in response to one another. I should respond to a couple
that come from someone evidently much younger than I am, who has spent time in
Singapore as a foreign resident (with what language background?).

At the top comment level:

 _Foreign languages are almost never taught_

Grandchild to that comment (from same HN participant):

 _The three ethnic groups in Singapore_

As a member of the older generation, I can remember when Singapore had a lot
more than the current "three ethnic groups" (that would be Chinese, Malay, and
Indian, by the reckoning of Singapore) as an actual linguistic matter. To both
points, by the Singapore government's own statistics,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Langu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Languages)

as recently as 1990 there was no one language of the four languages that are
official in Singapore--Malay, (Modern Standard) Chinese, English, and Tamil--
that was even spoken at home in the majority of homes in Singapore. School
instruction has been in English since independence in 1965, but only a tiny
minority of the population spoke English at home in my generation. I would
have to consider a country that has four official languages from four
different language families, NONE of which the plurality of the population
spoke at home just a generation ago, a very successful country in teaching
second languages. And if today people in Singapore think that "Chinese" is one
ethnic group, they have forgotten a lot of ethnic division between Hokkien
speakers and Hakka speakers and Cantonese speakers (who speak mutually
incomprehensible Sinitic languages, all of which I have studied in addition to
Mandarin) that is also very recent history in that country and other parts of
the Chinese-speaking world.

------
codewright
Hacker News clearly has a strong interest in education, I find this
interesting because I see misguided attempts in trying to educate the masses
on HN. The tone comes off the wrong way and it hurts the substantive content
coming from the knowledge many HN contributors have to offer.

Some thoughts for HNers and their future attempts at educating others in this
forum:

The comment threads are here for conversations and the exchange of thought,
not for the assignment of homework in the form of white papers/books.
Mentioning your sources I'm sure is always welcome, but many seem to assume
that anybody who hasn't read the same material as themselves is somehow
incapable of contributing to a conversation on the subject at hand. That is an
egregiously poisonous mindset.

If you want to make the most of your time on HN have more respect for others
and synthesize your knowledge. Let a conversation happen.

By all means link your sources, but say what you're going to say and don't
assign homework.

Contextual synthesis > PDF

That's my $0.02 (not denominated in Verizon-units).

\--- With that out of the way ---

More related to the article, I've visited Singapore and know a few
Singaporeans. One of the main takeaways was that they're hyper-competitive and
aggressive in ways I'm not sure US gov'ts/voters would ever really countenance
for the sake of progress.

The article is rife with Orientalist gawking and murmuring of approval.
Typical for the current mode of reporting on how Asia does things differently
than the West. (Cf. Friedman's absurd pseudo-capitalist posturing on China)

Mentioning the chewing gum ban, seriously?

Money quote: "But it's really more about discipline than intelligence."

~~~
dkarl
_The article is rife with Orientalist gawking and murmuring of approval.
Typical for the current mode of reporting on how anybody in Asia does things._

It's superficial, to be sure, but at least it lets Singaporeans speak for
themselves about the cultural difference. The true purpose of the article
seems to be to say some things about Cleveland that can't be said directly, so
a more nuanced take on Singapore might be beside the point.

~~~
codewright
It's better than others I've seen, for sure. I'm just not familiar enough with
Cleveland (other than knowing it's a disaster zone) to really know how this
article is supposed to reflect upon circumstances there.

I can hardly believe anything more than a tiny fraction of HN readership is
familiar with the situation there either, so I have to go with the more
obvious parts.

I'm not an English Lit major, I'm not super-interested in deep meta-analysis
of author intentions.

------
yzhengyu
Singaporean here. The article is a typical outsider view of our system, which
isn't as perfect as it sounds.

In the first place, the majority of Singapore's successes is largely due to a
pro-business policy which has attracted massive amounts of foreign direct
investment.

In the second place, my observation is that in general Singaporeans are well-
schooled, not well educated. As Mark Twain put it, there is a difference.

And there is also the uglier side of a hyper-competitive system which darylteo
has pointed out. And then you ask yourself, where do the "losers" of this
competition end up?

The challenge at this stage is to ensure we move our lowest gear up - and I
can assure you, our lowest gear is pretty low. Unfortunately, unless the
technocrats get mind-transplants from the people who did the Finnish or Danish
model, I don't think its going to change.

~~~
rkwz
>And then you ask yourself, where do the "losers" of this competition end up?

Where do they end up?

------
smirksirlot
I grew up in Singapore and went through the education system there before
moving to North America at 16. Singapore isn't really the "education heaven"
that it is made out to be.

The biggest different I would say is that Singapore education churns out book-
smart students. These are the people who are best at following instructions,
steps, and established methods. We're very good at following and reinforcing
the paths well trod.

Coming to North America, while I did far better than my peers in strict
academic settings, they would constantly do better in things such as dealing
with people, creative activities etc. People here have a better sense of
adventure and are willing to challenge themselves/the status quo to experience
the world.

------
balsam
What percentage of successful HN applicants are Singaporean? I know at least
half (he was born there), but it could be a interesting number to know.

------
jasonjei
I wonder, though, if there is a software business in Singapore that is on the
same level as Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Google, Apple, VMware, etc, as well as
the Linux foundation and FSF being present in Singapore. The US may not have
the best education system, but I wonder if it is the lax education that has
fostered the software industry (as well as engineering, HP, anybody?) in the
US.

~~~
aen
We're extremely good at some things but at the expense of everything else.
Thus our lives generally aren't very interesting. I'm a pretty smart guy (140±
IQ) who dropped out of the system when I was 15 and went through non-
systematic but relentless self-education. The learning habits formed in school
helped. But I was 'free'. My point is whatever the status quo, there will be a
minority that will abandon the system taking along with them only the good
parts and then become interesting. So with a bigger population, you get more
of such minority which causes Microsofts, Googles and Apples to happen.

------
ramgorur
A very nice read. But are "a good schooling" and "a good learning" same? I
have seen many folks with good schooling and with perfect GPAs, but most of
them are only good at sitting and scoring in exams :-S.

