Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Education is a subject of immense interest to many Singaporeans.

In a meritocracy, it is an important tool for social mobility. Education is also the passport by which every child has a shot at maximising his potential. Education shapes our society-to-be. And it usually even takes the biggest blame whenever our young do not meet our expectations. It is no wonder that education occupies one of the top three spots in the allocation of our national budget.

Someone once said that "we can only connect the dots that we collect"; these dots in life come in the form of inputs, observations and experiences one encounter. For today's motion of "Educating our Young for the 21st Century", I wish to first acknowledge the persons from whom I have collected many important "dots": (a) the activists and women MPs from the PAP Women's Wing especially Dr Intan; (b) the Ministry of Education professionals and the Our Singapore Conversations (OSC) participants; and (c) other friends, young and old, who share a keen interest in educating our young for the future.

As I study the many developments in the education scene, I observe a series of dots that cluster around several themes. Let me first summarise these clusters of dots according to first, the Future; and then, the Current. I would then conclude with a Proposal for the Minister to consider.

The Future. When we think about educating our young for the future, we cannot ignore how Technology and especially the internet have opened up learning to the point where anyone can learn anything from anyone else at any time. Learners find at their disposal content that range from repositories, portals, open-courseware, free ware, e-books to online classes. Professor Clayton Christensen, author of "Disrupting Class" and one of the world's foremost experts on innovation and growth, insists that "technology is disrupting how people used to learn and teach".

And when traditional brick and mortar schools do not re-invent themselves, the rise and success of Online Academies may one day render them irrelevant. For instance, Khan Academy is a non-profit educational website that boasts an outreach of 10 million students per month and has delivered more than 200 million lessons. It has a personalised learning engine to help learners track their learning and chart their pathways. It boasts of a library of online learning videos of more than 4,500. Even Microsoft chief, Bill Gates, was reported to have said that he had used Khan Academy with his own kids. Mind you, there are other online academies like Khan Academy which may or may not be even more successful.

Indeed, in a country as highly wired as Singapore, students, young and old will find that they can learn anything, anywhere, any time. The rise of online education could effectively render weak teachers redundant, while making great educators more widely accessible, levelling the playing field of learners across the world. But we know that just because our young have access to their modern mobile devices, and use them for chats and all, does not mean that these devices are used for learning. There is still an important place for educators if they keep up with the times.

Sir, the Traditional Model of the Educator being the teacher and chief dispenser of knowledge; a mental model in which students are often one or many steps behind their teachers, is a model that will not stick in the digital age.

Teachers who express the desire to only teach will have to reflect on what that really means and how they might be even more relevant to teaching in the digital age.

Educators of the Future can take on one or more of the following four roles:

(a) As Content Curators - adding value by sifting and sorting through numerous repositories of content that is created every hour in cyberspace. They could suggest and guide their students in accessing those that are most relevant and most reliable.

 (b) Educators of the Future can be Lesson Designers – designing lessons using blended pedagogy that combines good quality online lectures with their own personal facilitation. Educators of the Future can also be Online Course Developers and Deliverers – learning how to teach online, producing and delivering high-quality online courses.

(d) But they can also be Life Coaches – guiding the young who, in spite of their impressive digital assets, may still need help in honing their characters and building their values; learning what Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi has taught us - that knowledge without character, freedom without responsibility and science without humanity are the deadly sins of the human soul.

The days of repeating lecture notes and power-points of yester-years are numbered.

Online academies, educators as content curators, designers, online learning developers and deliverers and life coaches! To be future-ready, we have to reckon with these developments and these future roles of educators. We need to rethink and even reform how we identify, select and develop skill sets of school leaders and educators for schools of the future.

About The Current. Sir, more than 20,000 educators, members of the public students and families, participated in the Our Singapore Conversations (OSC). It is lead by Minister himself. They were asked what they would like to see in Singapore schools in 2030. Their inputs can be clustered into several key focus areas: They are to do with:

(a) Concern over academic stress especially caused by high-stakes exams;

(b) Call for a broadened definition of success in schools;

(c) Call for more inclusive schools so that children of all backgrounds can grow up together; and a more level playing field so that at-risk children can start school from a more equal footing; and

(d) Stronger emphasis on character and values-driven education and future-ready skills.

The feedback from the ground did not go unheard. They in fact validated, I notice, the annual work plan assumptions of the Ministry of Education of recent years. The inputs supported and strengthened the Education Minister's resolve to promote an even more student-centred and values-driven education system. Several measures were already introduced under Minister's leadership:

(a) For example, to reduce the competitiveness of high-stake exams such as PSLE, banding instead of T-scores will be introduced. School rankings removed; so is public comparison of PSLE scores.

(b) And to ensure schools are more inclusive, Minister has ensured that P1 places are reserved to ensure that those without the alumni network are able to get into popular schools.

(c) To provide alternates to academic-based entries to secondary schools, the Direct School Admissions (DSA) criteria were broadened to include special qualities such as character, resilience, drive and leadership, expanding the criteria beyond sporting, artistic talents and academics, of course.

(d) There is now greater flexibility for Normal Stream students to take higher-level subjects according to their strengths.

(e) The Citizenship and Character Education syllabi were reviewed and recently re-introduced and launched.

(f) MOE has also started to directly run several kindergartens using an approach that is based on play and also ensuring that these kindergartens take in children of all socio-economic backgrounds.

All these changes are testament to the Ministry's commitment to provide a broad and deeper foundation for a lifelong learning for our young.

Connecting the Dots: A Proposal. Sir, up to this point, I have been describing the dots that I have observed in the education landscape, future and the current. Thanks to the steadfast leadership of our Education Minister and his team, some of the dots are already connected. I shared just now. But even these changes cannot be introduced without challenges. Many of these changes involve the detoxification of the mind and weaning of habits that would take years and some say generations to complete.

For instance, for the longest time, the most prominent KPI of whether a school is admired is its academic performance in high stakes-exams. It is a mindset that is entrenched not only in many parents but also in many educators and employers, in public and private service. It will take a long time to switch to a mindset that values and celebrates other forms of intelligences.

Tuition too is the elephant in the room that we cannot ignore. The thriving tuition industry has become a security blanket for many. Now, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is a triennial global survey that evaluates education systems worldwide amongst 15-year-olds. According to the latest PISA report, which sees, of course, Singapore doing very well academically, Singapore has the highest number of students who had one-on-one private tuition. It is understandable when academically weaker students seek extra help through tuition. But when it is reported that even some of our top students from top schools regularly attend tuition classes either on their own accord or encouraged, or arranged by their parents, then there is a big cause for concern. The longer we ignore the root causes; the longer we delay in working out a multiple of solutions, and thereby allow this thriving shadow education industry to keep growing, the harder it will be for us to trim this elephant to size.

Then there are those of us who remain uneasy with the highly efficient way of sorting students with learning profiles and backgrounds in geographically separate schools. Granted, we all learn differently, with different strengths, learning styles and pace for learning. But the solution need not come in the form of physically separating students in different locations all the time in the form of gifted schools, normal-technical schools and special schools. The solution can come in the form of scalable and quality programmes and learning support that can penetrate all schools. After all, as one OSC participant puts it, "Inclusive societies must start with inclusive schools."

Another Current Dot. The Direct School Admission (DSA) scheme may also run the risk of another form of competition amongst school leaders to admit yet another superior pool of students of another profile - those who are very proficient in, perform very well in music, arts, sports and now in leadership, perseverance and character.

And what of the many who are later developers, the late bloomers but who are sorted much earlier in life into the express, normal academic, normal technical, IP and SAP learning tracks – with little chances of interacting with each other regularly in their school years?

Chasing the academics excessively, tuition, excesses of DSA, late developers, segregating versus inclusion – these are pervasive challenges that still dot the current landscape.

Now, Sir, I have full empathy that the Ministry has to tread carefully at a pace of change that is acceptable to its many stakeholders. And indeed, at the national level, treading at a realistic pace may be the way forward as there is frequently no one response that is supported by all the different stakeholders in the system. For everyone who prefers less formal exams and rankings, there are others who cannot imagine a world without exams, top schools and tuition. Had the system been drawn from scratch now, many senior educators have said they would have the liberty to design the system in a bolder manner. And hence, I understand the need to tread carefully and slowly.

However, Sir, there is a segment of Singaporeans (myself included) who believe that we should go beyond, we should be given the chance to go beyond the current trimming of the excesses of the system. We believe that we can move more boldly and swiftly to realise the aspirations of a segment of our population – a segment who wishes to help co-shape a system that addresses more aggressively the hot buttons of the day and also respond more expediently to the beckoning of the future.

I do not think it is necessary nor wise to copy wholesale admired education systems of others; bearing in mind that because we are different and also bearing in mind that even the much-lauded Finnish system is itself in need of change. According to Pasi Sahlberg, the renowned education ambassador from Finland, even the Finns need to connect their own dots better.

Sahlberg said this recently, "Ask Finns about how our system will look in 2030, and they will say it will look like it does now. We (the Finns) do not have many ideas about how to renew our system. We need less formal, class-based teaching, more personalised teaching, more focus on developing social and team skills." He said. And he said, "We (the Finns) are not talking about these things at all." - words from an education expert from Finland itself.

Indeed, Singapore should work towards creating our own brand of education to underpin the kind of country, the kind of society we want to sculpt. Let us not be overly concerned by our ranking in the systems constructed by other parties such as the PISA. Let us instead develop our own balanced scoreboard and measure what we, Singaporeans, aspire for Singapore.

In this regard, I would like to propose that MOE consider starting a Pilot Cluster of Schools (very much like how it is experimenting its MOE-run-kindergartens). A cluster of schools which attempts to connect the dots of the current and the future. I am proposing, Sir, schools that offer a straight 10-year quality through-train education without the need for a make or break high stake exam in Year 6 such as the PSLE.

I am proposing schools that while they maintain academic rigour, do not sort and stream students into Gifted, Express, Normal (Academic), Normal (Technical), as a result of their PSLE performance and thereby increasing the porosity for students to take a mix of different subjects at either the Foundation, Standard or Advanced levels, banded according to their abilities and interests.

I propose pilot schools that are inclusive and are a microcosm of our society, reflective of students of different socio-economic backgrounds, abilities, race and language, allowing them to interact daily in core non-academic activities, such as morning assemblies, dismissals, recess times, play times, PE, outings, so that our young will learn to live with, tolerate and value differences from a young age.

I propose pilot schools that do not physically segregate students at the extreme ends of the proverbial normal distribution into separate groups from the rest; but allow them to benefit from programmes that will suit their learning needs whichever end of the curve they are at.

I propose pilot schools that do not excessively assess their students through competitive tests but help students develop their own portfolios and use assessments and tests to self-drive their own learning as much as possible.

I propose schools led by future-ready leaders and fellow educators who themselves are lifelong learners and game to take on value-adding roles of being content curators, online learning developers and/or life coaches.

Schools where service to fellow school mates, the school and the nation is a daily exercise and not a subject or project to be graded. In a very progressive education village I visited several years ago, secondary level school students took turns each day to feed lunch to their severely disabled school mates who were also located in the same building – a vision I cannot forget till today

I propose a pilot of schools that recognise that, in life, one can only connect the dots that one collects; and, therefore, the need to make special efforts to level up their disadvantaged young, to give them additional dots so that they can collect from boarding schools to longer school days to the provision of computers, mobile devices and daily nutritious meals.

What would be the critical success factors of such a pilot?

The pilot will need to be co-shaped by a team that shares the same passion; and properly resourced in funding and other tangible needs. The pilot must allow for flexibility in the selection of like-minded board members, leaders and other team members, including the teachers and educators. It must allow for porosity to the rest of the current education system in two ways: one, use of resources that are currently available in schools that specialise in gifted, normal tech and special schools; and, two, movement of its students who choose to return to the current system.

I know that the proposed pilot will only address a segment of the learning journey of our students, but it is a good 10 years. In a separate future session, I look forward to an opportunity to discuss educating the young and old in the next 10s to come.

In conclusion, Sir, I wish to end with a statement that was made by ex-US President Abraham Lincoln in December 1862 in his annual State of the Union address. Of the immense challenges he was facing at the time in his political career, he said that "...the occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion."

Indeed, the occasion faced by the Ministry of Education is piled high with difficulty; but Minister, those of us who believe in the direction you have charted, want to rise to and with the occasion for just one reason – to powerfully connect the dots we have collected about the future and the current – and to help prepare our precious young well for a Singapore that will be both successful and significant

With that, I thank you.