Page 4 - Education Change and Economic Development: The Case of Singapore Dr. Goh Chor Boon National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University

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to appreciate why and how education change serves to support the country’s

economic growth. It is divided into three main parts. The first summarizes
Singapore’s education change in response to the changing economic landscape
from the 1960s to 1980s. The second part covers the period since the start

of the 1990s when Singapore’s education went through an exciting phase of
change. The final part focuses on the new millennium – how Singapore planners
mapped out the education strategies to develop the knowledge and skills of the

people to face the challenges of the future. Singapore’s economic success since
independence in 1965 owes much to its leaders’ ability to establish, through
the education system, a close link between policies for skills formation and the
demand for skills at each stage of economic development.

Economic Survival and Take-off, 1960s-1980s

A voluminous literature had been produced on the rise of Japan and the
so-called Asian dragons – South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore –
in the 1970s and 1980s and how the “dragons” learned from Japan’s economic

transformation in a “flying geese” formation, with Japan at the front of the
1
flying pack. Writing in 1991, Ezra Vogel attributed their rise to the fortuitous

1 The phase “flying geese pattern of development” was coined originally by Kaname

Akamatsu in 1930s articles in Japanese. The late Saburo Okita (1914-1993), well-
known Japanese economist and a foreign minister in the 1980s, greatly contributed
to introducing the “Flying Geese” (FG) pattern of development to the wider
audiences including the political and business world. Thus, the regional transmission
of FG industrialization, driven by the catching-up process through diversification/
rationalization of industries, has become famous as an engine of Asian economic
growth