Blast From The Past

On the management system in the Ministry of Education:

I found the professional officers to be generally hardworking and devoted to their profession as teachers. The standard of integrity was high. But the management system was dreadful - there is no other word for it.

There were two main areas of weakness in the style of management, or 'management culture' as the systems engineers call it. I will describe the first as the cult of obedience and the second as the cult of secrecy. I do not know for sure how and why these weaknesses arose.

In its crudest form, the cult of obedience expresses itself in giving unquestioning obedience to superiors and demanding the same of subordinates. Any departure from this conduct is regarded as tantamount to disloyalty.

Perhaps the cult of obedience comes naturally to teachers who are accustomed to obedience from their pupils. Perhaps under the stress of having to carry out many change in past years, the professionals had to suppress or ignore dissenting views of subordinates so that the work could be completed in time. Whatever the causes, the cult of obedience is bad management practice. It stifles initiative among subordinates, encourages servility, gives rise to the formation of cliques and promotes favouritism. Most damaging of all, it is impossible to attract talent to an organisation which engages in such practices or is believed to do so...

I now turn to the cult of secrecy. Its origin is even more difficult to explain than that of the other. Many instances have occurred of subordinate officers being denied access to documents on grounds of secrecy. In the cases I have examined, I could find no justification for the withholding of information...

In education what is the need for secrecy? I can't think of any, except in the area of staff personal records where confidentiality must be preserved for obvious reasons. As regards plans, policies, intentions, problems of implementation and thinking on these matters, the greater the volume of informed opinion the Ministry receives and the more aware people are of thinking in the Ministry, the more beneficial will be the outcome.

This is because all parties involved - ministry officials, school principals and teachers, parents and the objects of our endeavours - the pupils - are agreed on one objective. This is to give our schoolchildren the best education we can provide and they can acquire.

We may not be agreed on what is meant by 'best education'. Even if some kind of agreement is reached, we may still disagree on how to achieve it. But this is an argument in favour of open discussion, not of secrecy.

On 22 February 1981, Singapore's then Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister, Dr Goh Keng Swee inaugurated the Schools Council at the Singapore Conference Hall. What you have just read is an excerpt from his speech on that occasion, taken from Wealth of East Asian Nations: Speeches and Writings by Goh Keng Swee, Singapore: Federal Press (1995), 215-217.

I knew Dr Goh as a very intelligent man, though perhaps not always complete in his wisdom. I remember that when I was a little boy, he asked me, "So what do you want to be?" I told him, "A teacher." He laughed and said, "Not an easy job. Read a lot and think about what you read." I was later to discover, of course, that this was but the first part of it.

I ended up reading a lot more than I thought I would. In the course of my research more than thirty years after my first meeting with Dr Goh, I came across the paragraphs which form the first part of this post. They are much quoted by visionary leaders such as Mr Lim Siong Guan, a former head of Singapore's civil service. They are part of the corpus of the intellectual tradition of a young nation, and with other words of that benign and admonitory ilk, will stand the nation in good stead for years to come.

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Note: Dr Goh, the Gnome in these writings, died in May 2010. A longer excerpt from this speech can be found here.