By José Mármol.
The Singaporeans tied their economic and social development strategy to the achievement of a public and private education of excellent quality.
In an article written by the awarded Nobel Prize Mario Vargas Llosa (El País, November 12, 2016), published before announcing the results of the 2015 edition of PISA which took place on December 6, the writer comments on the achievements of this small island of Asia, warned on his second visit.
He sustains that the Singaporean “miracle” was due, rather than to its privileged geographic location, which facilitated trade with India and China in the nineteenth century, to efficient government policies which eliminated poverty, unemployment, housing deficit and corruption, as well as a fair public education of the highest technical and professional level, which still absorbs one third of the nation’s budget, its most expensive social objectives.
During the six days he spent there, “I asked all the people I was with to take me to see the poorest neighborhood in this city-state. And that miracle, which I have seen with my own eyes, is true: here there is no misery, no crowding, no shacks, and yes, instead, a health system, education and work opportunities available to the whole world; also a controlled immigration that benefits the country and the foreigners who come to work in it “.
This achievement was due, to a great extent, to his Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, between 1959 and 1990, the leader of a socialist vision, although of authoritarian practice with democratic ideas.
In a great book titled “Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny” (2007), The Nobel Prize-winning economist, born in India, Amartya Sen, among other innovative truths that overturn the assumption of intellectual, technological and cultural superiority of the West over the Orient, as well as the deceptive nature of the Cultural destiny and the apocalyptic “clash of civilizations” by Samuel Huntington, states that the attention that Buddhism gives to enlightenment or knowledge (in fact, Buddha means enlightened) “and the priority given to reading texts, instead of leaving it in the hands of the priests, can encourage the expansion of education, “as has happened in Korea, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Burma (Myanmar).
When the book “Diamond Sutra” is translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in 402 AD and printed in 868, it advocated universal free distribution. Although it is a moot idea, because Islam also literates its children with the verses of the Koran, not always reaching high levels of education due to sectarianism, the fact is that, for example, in Japan, inspiring country of the so-called East Asian miracle, the Fundamental Code of Education of 1872 declared war on illiteracy, and by 1868 that nation had a higher literacy rate than Europe.
The leader Kido Takayoshi argued that the central issue in development was education or the lack of it. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Japan allocated 43 percent of its budget to education, and by 1910, primary education had become universal.
Staying away from the English and Japanese dominions and being expelled from the Federation of Malaya, Singapore became independent in 1965. Today it draws the attention of the world for its common socioeconomic progress and because its children reach the highest places of excellence in mathematics, science and language in PISA. It’s the education, silly..
