I attended the recent Ministerial Forum in my university hoping to hear answers on the state of, and the future of, education in this country. Unfortunately, however, the Minister for Education provided few compelling points that gave me any sort of confidence for the future. Instead of providing a clear concept of what he imagined the future to be, the speech – broken into two separate parts that mainly covered (strangely enough) the economy and the future of trade in Singapore – was filled with past and present figures of GDP, as well as how we are quite unable to compete with the developing country juggernauts of India and China.
My friend, a graduating student who runs his own social media marketing company, asked the Minister what he thought could be changed about the culture of risk aversion that pervades the local environment. While the moderator might also have to take some blame for allowing seven consecutive questions to be asked before the Minister answered all of them (at once!), the Minister merely acquiesced about the state of affairs; as an aspiring entrepreneur, I was hoping at least for a little more on some form of a policy that could change things.
But perhaps I was asking for too much. The main takeaway at the end of the Forum, I concluded, was that this Minister appears to be particularly interested in the economy and how education serves as a cold, hard input into increasing national income. Never once was there any mention about how education makes people creative, makes society vibrant, and increases mutual understanding. The 300-strong crowd filling the Mochtar Riady Auditorium was treated to a plethora of paranoid statements that most of us already know: Singapore lacks the drive, the critical mass, to succeed in almost anything. Right. So what’s next for us?
It is strange that I, as a university student, am unveiling the missing ingredient in education: entrepreneurship. As I type this I am imagining that some of you are trying very hard to stifle a groan. We’ve heard all these things before as well: we need to nurture our own Silicon Valley, we can be just like entrepreneurial Israel, blah blah blah. But I’m going to avoid talking about these cases in particular. Instead, I’m going to talk about an example that might be far removed from most of our minds today: Pakistan.
That’s right, Pakistan. In the 1970s the country was prospering from a wave of their overseas expatriates who remitted money back to their families. So? The interesting thing is that these families, who were now flush with a little bit of cash, decided to start what might best be defined as some form of a mom-and-pop shop. These little cash inflows helped stimulate and create a vibrant economy – until 1988, when the government decided to adopt the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment measures. The moral of the story? Cash grants can help to stimulate the economy – and not just that, it has the possibility of creating new jobs.
But yes, this country is known for quite a bit of risk aversion. We can encourage a more vibrant educational curriculum that includes ideation and creative thinking from young (according to some studies it seems that our creative levels start decreasing beyond a certain age – so it makes sense that we should tap on it early!). We can make sure that the syllabus includes principles of accounting and economics for as many students as possible. Perhaps most importantly, we can relax the restrictions for cash grants or loans that are provided to entrepreneurs.
The traditional middle class was dominated, as Donald Low mentioned in another discussion in my university, by bean counter-like occupations such as typists and clerks. As technology makes drastic adjustments to the workplace environment, these jobs, along with others, have become redundant. I foresee that the only way to prevent the inevitable income inequality from those at the “top” – CEOs, directors, and other leadership positions – compared with those at the “bottom” is to create new jobs. In short, we need to create a new middle class which is creative, flexible, and enterprising. And to me, this is why it is imperative to help young entrepreneurs succeed.
When the Minister spoke about how Steve Jobs was asked by Obama how engineering jobs could be brought back to America, and Jobs answered, “Sir, they’re not coming back”, it seemed that what he was thinking about was the jobs, with small letters. But what I was thinking – along with several of my peers – was Jobs, with a capital J. Apple today sits on a huge cash pile; the value-add of the iPhone and the other Apple products continue to surpass the assembly jobs that helped create it. What we need isn’t to make ourselves more competitive and hence join in the race to the bottom in the global sweatshop; instead, we need to create new jobs, in this economy, to propel us forward into the future. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear this during the Ministerial Forum.
