It was reported recently that Singapore students outperformed many of their counterparts in mathematics in an international study called the Kassel Project. This announcement is indeed good news. But what does this mean?
Surely, the measure of the worth of a civilization, or a nation is not graded by its claim to top league tables. How long will the memories of being the country to have the highest number of 'A'-level passes in year 19XX or being the winner of best Airport last? The French are obsessively proud of their culture, the British will always remember the old glory of the Empire, and the Americans will boast of their current economic and military supremacy. What have Singaporeans to be proud of in fifty years time?
I do not think that there is anyone who will doubt that science and technology will be the main driving force of a modern economy in the coming century. For Singapore, it is crucial to its continual success to be able to successfully transform its economy into one that will be able to exploit the highest level of technology. The rapid economic development of neighbouring countries in the region will mean that Singapore will soon lose much of its attraction to foreign investors. This is especially so when many of our neighbours are much richer in terms of natural resources and have a potentially much larger consumer market. It is hard to imagine that these same countries will not invest their new found wealth in education as Singapore has. How Singapore will survive in the future will depend on whether we can carve a niche out for ourselves now with our current advantage in educational standards and wealth.
It is wishful thinking that a population with a high standard of technical education will necessarily spontaneously produce the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawkings. Creativity and innovation do not thrive in a vaccuum; individuals with ability need to be carefully nurtured and supported by the society. Scientific research is a social activity, and its nature and intrinsic worth should be recognized by the wider public. The creation of such an ideal environment where innovation and creative ideas flourish requires the active engagement of academics, the support of an enlightened government and the enthusiastic participation of the citizenry.
So what concrete steps should we undertake now to ensure that we maximize our potential in scientific innovation?
i) First of all, it is crucial that we admit honestly that we are basically a technologically backward nation compared to the more developed west and that there is much to learn.
ii) Secondly, we need to understand that only when local expertise is at least capable of understanding, retaining and duplicating imported technology then do we consider that technology is transferred. Buying state of the art computer systems and simply learning to operate them does not elevate the technological level of a society. It may seem that such an exercise might appear analogous to reinventing the wheel. Far from it, in the long run, such devotion would yield benefits far greater than mere superficial cosmetic improvements. If we fail to grasp this, we will be destined to be only consumers and servants of foreign technologies, forever condemned to be reliant on the generosity of our allies.
iii) Thirdly, there should be a conscious realignment of our collective effort to catch up with the more developed societies. That is, we should capitalize on our already impressive mathematical and scientific educational system to produce an army of engineers and research scientists suitably funded and devoted to transferring relevant technology and act as catalyst for local innovation and scientific initiatives. There is no point in requiring that any such government funding schemes be constrained by the definition of relevance of research by the probability of its economic profitability in 2 or 3 years. This merely creates a situation whereby scientists are under pressure to produce necessarily superficial developments of imported technology, and the temptation to simply buy and use foreign technology without investing the necessary time and effort to understand it fully.
iv) Lastly, we need to focus our scarce manpower resources onto a few areas of specialization. We are a small nation with little or no real industrial base. The most obvious candidates are higher technologies - Bio-technology, Computer Technology etc. We may not be able to be leaders in all fields, but we can excel in some of them.
To be technologically advanced is a dynamic and relative concept; technology becomes obsolete very quickly, and scientific knowledge is common property. A country cannot claim to have technological superiority simply because of a handful of scientific discoveries. To be technologically advanced means to have the proven ability to consistently originate new scientific ideas and the capability to exploit them. If we are to become a technological hub in Asia, we need to ensure that we have the unique capability in the region to generate new technology consistently. We have already taken the first tentative step to building such a society. Whether we can fully exploit our potential will depend on our will to make the necessary sacrifices and changes to become a technologically advanced nation.
Editor: T.W. Koh
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