Lifelong learning policies and practices in Singapore: Tensions and challenges

At a 1998 Singapore May Day rally, a speech by the then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong outlined a vision for lifelong learning that both cemented the hard-won lessons of the small and young nation's recent past and offered a hard but realisable road to the future: Looking beyond the immediate future we must focus on lifelong learning and employability in the long term. Our future prosperity will be built on a knowledge-based economy... The future economy will be driven by information technology, knowledge and global competition. The types of jobs change, and change rapidly. This means that workers must have broad basic skills and the capacity to learn new skills. Only then will they have employable skills throughout their working lives. So we must have Thinking workers and a Learning Workforce In fact, the whole country must become a Learning Nation. We must make learning a national culture. We will have to evolve a comprehensive national lifelong learning system that continually retrains our workforce, and encourages every individual to learn all the time as a matter of necessity. (Goh, in Kumar 2006 , p. 501) PM Goh's appeal to collective commitment in the face of potential external threats, whether to national security or the national economy, forms part of what has been referred to by founding Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew as 'the Singapore Story' (Lee 1998 ). Part reality, part myth, the Singapore Story is a pragmatic representation of Singapore's 'can do' reputation embedded deep in the national psyche, though not without a degree of contestation (Tan 2011 ). Drawing freely from global discourses privileging human capital investment and institutional managerialist solutions to complex social and economic challenges, the Singapore Story flows widely and deeply through all levels of national education policy.