Final
Report: 39th SEAMEO Council Conference
The Empire Hotel and Country Club, Jerudong
Negara Brunei Darussalam
1-4 March 2004
The Empire Hotel and Country Club, Jerudong
Negara Brunei Darussalam
1-4 March 2004
Proceedings
Contents |
| Proceedings |
| Appendices |
Statement
by H E Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam Minister for Education, Singapore |
Mr Chairman, Your Excellencies, Distinguished delegates, |
On
behalf of the Singapore delegation, first let me congratulate H
E Pehin Dato Haji Abdul Aziz Umar, Minister of Education, Brunei
Darussalam, on his election as President of SEAMEO Council and Chairman
of the 39th SEAMEO Council Conference. We also congratulate H E
Prof Dr Nguyen Minh Hien, Minister of Education and Training of
Vietnam, on being elected Vice Chairman of this Conference. We are
confident that under your able leadership, collaborations among
SEAMEO Countries will continue to grow and strengthen in the coming
year. |
We
also express our deep appreciation to H E Dr Edilberto de Jesus,
Secretary of Department of Education, Philippines, for his leadership,
energy and thoughtfulness as President of SEAMEO Council in the
last year. |
| Mr Chairman, |
SEAMEO
has evolved considerably in the last 39 years, with a wealth of
expertise and knowledge in its respective Centres. It has been an
asset to the region and will, we are sure, continue to be an asset
to the region as we enter a new phase in our development as individual
countries as well as a regional community. The fundamental factor
we are all grappling with is the fact that the world is now more
interconnected than ever before. This is in many ways a truism now.
I think we are in a new phase, regionally and globally, with new
challenges coming about from globalization that are quite different
from the challenges we faced even ten years ago. |
Some
things are brought on to us very obviously. The SARS crisis indicated
how quickly diseases could spread partly because of transport and
communication have been developed so far. Likewise, avian flu, which
is a global phenomenon now. And we should expect that in the future
years, this would be a recurrent trend. There would be new mutations,
new diseases that would affect us and we have to accept this as
part of the flora and fauna of the new regional global landscape.
Terrorism is the other fundamental fact that we are all confronted
with, which again has particularly affected our region, but essentially
a global phenomenon. |
In
the economic area, interconnectedness has picked up momentum in
the last four to five years. The challenges we now face arising
from economic inter-connectedness are of a different order from
what we had seen in the last ten, fifteen, twenty years. ASEAN has
gained tremendously in the economic field from greater cooperation
particularly in the last three to four years. I know Dr Adisai from
Thailand, former Minister of Commerce in Thailand, is deeply engaged
in this area. And all of us in our own countries are now looking
at ASEAN as a new community, a community trying much harder to tap
the economic complementarities that come about from building a common
market, from building linkages between our capital markets and from
building opportunities to strengthen skills of the region across
the different countries. |
The
big issue that we are all facing is that of China and India. China
is now already the centre of the Asian manufacturing supply chain,
and India is rapidly becoming the centre of the Asian services supply
chain. Our big issue is how do we, in ASEAN and SEAMEO countries,
compete with China and India and how do we complement China and
India. It’s a challenge all over the world from the US to
France, Germany and the UK, but it is especially a challenge for
us in Southeast Asia. And all SEAMEO countries regardless of our
level of development and the structure of our economies, have to
respond to this challenge and take advantage of the huge opportunities
that are coming about because of China’s ascendance and India’s
liberalization and rapid growth. There is tremendous opportunity
for us to build a new Asia in the next ten or fifteen years, coming
out of complementarities with China and India. And the key to these
complementarities, and the key to our future prosperity, is really
education. How we can allow our people to respond proactively, creatively,
and with perseverance to these opportunities ahead of us. What are
the skills and knowledge that we need to prepare for the young for
the future. It varies across countries depending on our level of
development, depending on the structure of our economies and societies.
But there are some principles which occur across countries. From
the statements this morning by my distinguished colleagues, it is
evident that we all share some common aspirations in education. |
Firstly,
I think it’s a realization that knowledge in pre-packaged
forms, while useful for basic training, is no longer adequate. Knowledge
in the form of pre-packaged understanding of history, geography,
physics, chemistry, all the different subjects, is useful up to
a point, but it is no longer the source of competitiveness. All
of us find the need to give our future generations the room to think
in more original ways, to think creatively, and to be willing to
do things that are out of the box, willing to make mistakes, willing
to experiment regardless whether you are a technician or an engineer,
or whether you are a government bureaucrat. This willingness to
experiment, to find new ways of doing things, to make mistakes along
the way, and to try and try again is something we are all trying
to nurture among our young. And I think there is tremendous scope
for us to exchange best practices as our education systems seek
to experiment with new approaches to build this new twenty first
century skills, the skills of innovations that we want amongst our
future generations. This challenge of best practices can be done
in many ways and SEAMEO has been instrumental in this exchange of
best practices. Going forward, I think there is more scope for exchange
and sharing amongst our teaching forces and our educational experts,
and we will have to increase the momentum of exchange amongst teachers. |
I
think there is also tremendous scope for us to have our students
themselves exchange experiences, visit each others’ countries,
go on adventure camps together, even sit in each others’ classes
for a few weeks, gain knowledge about each other in our different
cultures and also build friendships. My sense is that there are
some common areas which we can focus on as we go forward. One area
is the development of science and mathematics competencies amongst
our students. When we talk about the knowledge based industries
which are the most rapidly growing industries in the world, the
fact is that science and mathematics are the foundational skills
required for most of these knowledge based industries. And this
is an area where there is still scope for development in ASEAN,
particularly to allow us to catch up with what is taking place in
China and India. |
Secondly,
as has been mentioned by several of my distinguished colleagues,
we have to build up IT skills and more genuinely technical skills.
Many of the students who go on to become technicians in our economies
are not necessarily those who will go to universities, but those
who will go to technical institutes. And this is again an area which
is quite critical for ASEAN and Southeast Asia to retain its competitiveness
with China and India - the development of the substantial cohort
of students each year who come out of schools, come out of technical
institutes armed with technical skills and the ability to pick up
new technical skills as they go through the working career. |
Thirdly,
I think there is scope for further collaboration in the development
of a regional sensibility in the minds of our students, a sense
of regional community in the mind of every young student in Southeast
Asia as he grows up, the sense that he is part of not just his own
country but part of a complex and exciting region in Southeast Asia.
And that is why the sharing of experiences and experiential learning
for students, so they can appreciate the complexity and challenges
of the region, is very important going forward. |
I
am quite optimistic of what we can achieve through SEAMEO both at
the ministerial level as we meet each other informally and find
ways to cooperate bilaterally, trilaterally, or even within SEAMEO
as a whole, as well as through our fifteen institutions on the ground.
I am quite optimistic about us being able to take cooperation to
a new level to address this fundamental challenges and allow us
to secure prosperity for our people as we go forward. |
Finally,
let me, on behalf of the Singapore delegation, thank the SEAMEO
Secretariat for the excellent work preparing for this Conference.
I would like to thank the host of the 39th SEAMEO Council Conference,
the Government of Brunei Darussalam, the Ministry of Education of
Brunei, and H E Pehin Dato Haji Abdul Aziz Umar, for the very warm
hospitality extended to the Singapore delegation and for the excellent
organization of this Conference. |
| Thank you. |
