Education, Careers & Professional News
The quest for new vistas of education
Source
The Hindu
Date
2005-08-24
Information
Singapore, now the proud home to a century-old university, has begun to look for new vistas of education in the context of the rise of China and India as major players on the international stage.
Participating in one of several events that marked the centennial celebrations of the National University of Singapore (NUS), Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong turned the focus on this refreshing perspective in a speech on July 1. He quoted Thomas Friedman as telling his daughters: Finish your homework. People in China and India are starving for your jobs.
The moral of the anecdote was that children in the United States in the 1950s were admonished for not finishing dinner when people in China and India [were] starving for food.
The educational progress of these two countries is the new story.
Harmonious blend
Singapores education-planners and managers are now trying to weave this new factor into their blend of eastern and western models of education. Increasingly, the city-states Economic Development Board (EDB) is seeking to facilitate the establishment of local campuses of world-class educational institutions from these two Asian countries too.
The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, are being heralded in Singapore in this category. Both are expected to take off in their new environs by yearend or early next year. While IIM-Bangalore will probably stay on its own course, IIT-Mumbai is teaming up with the National University, according to the Board.
The courses in this and other cases of collaboration may lead to: a joint degree to be given by both institutions or dual degrees (two certificates, one each from the two collaborators) or just one testimonial from one of the partner-universities.
A global schoolhouse
INSEAD of France, which started its office in Singapore inside a container several years ago, is today a booming centre of learning, says EDB director Kenneth Tan.
In 2003, the EDB launched a plan of action to make the city-state a global schoolhouse for higher and other levels of learning. It hoped to have 150,000 foreign students at any given time. The figure now is estimated at 66,000.
Singapores current population of about three million is augmented by about one million foreigners as residents, who play a vital role in keeping the city-states open and global economy on a fast track. An estimated 7,000 foreign-owned companies of various sizes - 1,400 from China and 1,500 from India - are already based here. The small landmass too has had a long history of being an immigrant society.
Talent search
Such data are projected by the authorities to justify the transfusion of foreign educational institutions. These institutes will supplement the city-states own brand names such as NUS, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU), all of which also have foreign students and professors.
Singapore, which hopes to attract in all about 50 high-class foreign academia with international staff, will not turn into an overcrowded global schoolhouse, says Mr. Tan. For Singapore, the spin-off will be: economic benefits, higher talent-quotient on the home turf and hope that the foreigners educated here would later on, as captains of industry or civil servants or even heads of government elsewhere, continue to care of Singapores interests.
Nestling between the spectrum of foreign institutions and the publicly funded universities - NUS, NTU and SMU - is the Management Development Institute of Singapore (MDIS). Founded in 1956, MDIS is prominent among Singapores own private education organisations. MDIS secretary-general R. Theyvendran emphasises that the motto at the institute is borderless education with a truly international flavour - neither entirely Western in orientation nor an Asian course as some form of an alternative.
Set to become autonomous
Of the publicly funded universities, NUS and NTU will become autonomous next year, just like SMU, in the category of private, not-for-profit companies limited by guarantee, the Prime Minister has announced. Set to take wings next year is a university for working adults, to be set up by the Singapore Institute of Management.
In a different but important class -the scale-up of professional skills - is the new Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, now headed by the articulate Kishore Mahbubani, a diplomat-turned-dean.