Education, Industrialization and the End of Empire in Singapore

Kevin Blackburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138679764
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317190226
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Singapore under the ruling People's Action Party government has been categorized as a developmental state which has utilized education as an instrument of its economic policies and nation-building agenda. However, contrary to accepted assumptions, the use of education by the state to promote economic growth did not begin with the coming to power of the People's Action Party in 1959. In Singapore, the colonial state had been using education to meet the demands of its colonial economy well before the rise of the post-independence developmental state. Education, Industrialization and the End of Empire in Singapore examines how the state's use of education as an instrument of economic policy had its origins in the colonial economy and intensified during the process of decolonization. By covering this process the history of vocational and technical education and its relationship with the economy is traced from the colonial era through to decolonization and into the early postcolonial period.

1 The ‘education–economy’ nexus and colonial Singapore (1819–1900)

How well did the British colonial administration provide an educational system to match the colonial economy before the coming to power of the People’s Action Party in 1959? Mickey Chiang in his commissioned official history of vocational and technical education in Singapore delivered a harsh judgement when answering this question. He attacked the colonial administration for not training the colonial population with the skills required in the colonial economy and presiding over an economy that he called an ‘economic debacle’. Chiang blamed the British for many members of the colonial population being underskilled and ending up as ‘poorly paid unskilled workers and labourers, lorry drivers, taxi drivers, taxi dancers in cabarets, drivers of illegal taxis called pao hon chiahs, unlicensed hawkers and hawkers’ assistants, and gangsters in the violent triad secret societies’. He condemned this situation as ‘a tremendous wastage of manpower’, which, according to him, ‘the British had lived with this for many years and it had apparently not bothered them too much’. Chiang contrasted this wilful neglect of the colonial authorities with the policies of the People’s Action Party, which when it ‘grasped the reins of self-government in 1959 could not afford to adopt such an attitude’.¹ Were the colonial economy and the colonial educational system as mismatched as what Chiang suggests? This chapter offers a long view of education in colonial Singapore during its first century and what it reveals about the ‘education–economy’ nexus. Chapters 2 and 3 will continue the investigation of this connection throughout the colonial period of the twentieth century up to 1959.

Raffles’ ideas of spreading the enlightenment through commerce and education

At Singapore’s inception as a British trading post, education was intertwined with the conception of the port as a centre of commerce and free trade. Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore as a trading station under the administration of the Governor-General and the Court of Directors of the East India Company, who governed British India. Raffles was enthused with the ideas of the European Enlightenment. In May 1823, when writing a memorandum to the Court of Directors and Governor-General Lord Amherst in Calcutta, Raffles declared: ‘Commerce is universally allowed to bring many benefits in its train, and in particular to be favourable to civilization and general improvement.’² He made the argument that another key expression of the Enlightenment’s ideas of freeing and uplifting the individual and advancing civilization was modern education. Raffles told the Court of Directors of the East India Company that he envisaged Singapore as not only what he called a ‘great emporium’ of free trade: ‘Education must keep pace with commerce to ensure its benefits and avoid its evils.’³ In his 1823 memorandum, or minute, to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, he waxed lyrical: ‘How noble the object, how beneficial the effects, to carry with our commerce the lights of instructional and moral improvement.’⁴ Education was to be used ‘for the moral and intellectual improvement of the Archipelago and the surrounding countries’.⁵ Raffles hoped that the benefits of the spread of modern education would include the abolition of customs and practices in Southeast Asia that he regarded as inhumane and degraded humanity, such as slavery, which was deeply entrenched in both tradition and in law. He envisaged establishing a grand educational institution when founding Singapore in 1819, which he called the Singapore Institution. It was not an afterthought. In a letter to his cousin, Reverend Dr Raffles, on 9 November 1819, Raffles proclaimed that after establishing Singapore as a free port, ‘if I am able to carry out my plan for the establishment of a native college at Singapore, the system will be complete’.⁶ Thus, for Raffles, free trade and modern education were both aimed at spreading the ideals of the European Enlightenment.

However, the Singapore Institution was not meant to provide education for the masses. Raffles argued that the Institution was aimed at ‘affording to the higher classes a participation in the general progress of improvement, to raise them in a corresponding degree’ so that the ‘natural effect must be the improvement of their condition, and a consequent advancement in civilization and happiness.’⁷ Raffles aimed ‘to educate the sons of the higher order of natives’, namely the local rulers and elites.⁸ The sons of the local rulers were to be taught by a college of professors the literature of their own languages, such as Malay, Bugis, Thai, Javanese, Burmese and Chinese. In addition, they would learn English and science. By using experiments, they were to learn ‘the principles of the Newtonian system of astronomy; the mechanical and chemical properties of matter’ as well as ‘zoology, botany and mineralogy’.⁹

Raffles assumed that education would over time trickle down to the masses:

In every country the lights of knowledge and improvement have commenced with the higher orders of society, and have been diffused from thence downwards. No plan can be expected to succeed which shall reverse this order, and attempt to propagate them in the opposite direction; and more especially in countries where the influence of the Chiefs, from the nature of the government, must be considerable.¹⁰

He advocated what he called a Lancasterian plan for education in Southeast Asia in which the elite students who attended the Singapore Institution would return to their own communities and establish schools to pass on their knowledge.¹¹ Raffles wrote:

One single family of rank raised into importance and energy by means of the proposed Institution, may abundantly repay our labour by the establishment of a better order of society in its neighbourhood, by the example it may set, and by the resources of the country it may develop.¹²

In September 1819, when writing to William Wilberforce, his friend and fellow humanitarian who abolished slavery in the British Empire, Raffles proclaimed that ‘the effect of this institution is intended to be felt among a population of not less than thirty millions … all those countries lying to the east and south of the Ganges.’¹³

Raffles was above all an imperialist of his times, who justified British imperialism in terms of its capacity to bring civilization and enlightenment. He ended his original September 1819 memorandum on education and the Singapore Institution with the following flowery exhortation: ‘Let the Sun of Britain arise on these islands’ so its ‘mild and benignant influence is hailed and blessed by all who feel its beams.’ He urged:

Let it be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light; let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolation, but as a gale of spring reviving seeds of mind, and calling them to life from the winter of ignorance and oppression.¹⁴

Raffles’ high-blown rhetoric scarcely indicates a deliberate desire to neglect education. For him, education was central in his farsighted plans. However, ‘the founder’s vision’, as it came to be known by Raffles’ successors in Singapore, was never realized.

Education in a transient immigrant society

Raffles’ grand conception of commerce and education working hand-in-hand to achieve the ideals of the European Enlightenment under the sun of the British Empire proved inappropriate for what Singapore historical demographer Saw Swee Hock has called ‘an immigrant transient community’ that Singapore was throughout much of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ Singapore was essentially a society of transient adult male migrants. Most of these migrants wanted to make money and return home. The population increased rapidly from the estimated original 150 villagers living on the island as migrants arrived from China, the Malay Archipelago and India. Table 1.1, compiled from regular censuses, demonstrates that the Chinese made up the most of the increase in the population as Singapore grew during the nineteenth century.

Who were these Chinese migrants? The labour intensive colonial economy relied heavily on importing large numbers of transient single Chinese males who were mostly uneducated coolies labouring, doing work that requir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 The ‘education–economy’ nexus and colonial Singapore (1819–1900)
• 2 Vocational and technical education and the colonial administration (1901–1941)
• 3 Decolonization, education and the Singapore economy (1942–1959)
• 4 Using education to create an industrial workforce (1959–1990s)
• Conclusion
• Index