From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

10. Nurturing and Attracting Talent
On the night of 14 August 1983, I dropped a bombshell in my annual National
Day Rally address. Live on both our television channels, with maximum
viewership, I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and
less-intelligent wives if they wanted their children to do as well as they had
done. The press named it the “Great Marriage Debate”. As I had expected, the
speech stirred a hornet’s nest. My wife Choo had warned me there were many
more women with only O levels than women with university degrees. It caused a
drop of 12 percentage points in votes for the PAP in the election the following
year, more than I had anticipated.
It had taken me some time to see the obvious, that talent is a country’s most
precious asset. For a small resource-poor country like Singapore, with two
million people at independence in 1965, it is the defining factor. The Chinese
here were mostly the descendants of agricultural labourers from the southern
provinces of China, many brought in by labour contractors as indentured
workers to do heavy manual work such as loading and unloading cargo and
pulling rickshaws. Early Indian immigrants also came as indentured labourers to
work on rubber estates, build roads and dig trenches and drains. Most were from
the lower castes. There were small groups of Indian merchants and clerks. The
ablest were Sindhi merchants and Hindu Brahmins, in particular their priests.
Their descendants have high ability. Malays as a rule were better in the arts than
the sciences.
It was our good fortune that under the British Singapore had been the
regional centre for education, with good schools, training for teachers, King
Edward VII Medical College and Raffles College (teaching arts and science).
These two colleges, both of a high standard, were later merged to form the
University of Malaya in Singapore. The brightest of the English-educated
students in Malaya and the Borneo territories studied at Singapore institutions,
staying in boarding schools run by the Christian missions. The best students
trained in Singapore as doctors, teachers and administrators. They were the

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cream of some six million Chinese and Indians from Malaya, the Borneo
territories and even the Dutch East Indies, which later became Indonesia.
Singapore also had the best Chinese schools in the region, and successful
Chinese parents in the region sent their sons here for schooling and later to
Nanyang University, when it was teaching in Chinese. Until the Japanese
Occupation and the rise of independent governments after the war, the Chinese
moved freely between the countries of 
Nanyang
(South Seas or Southeast Asia).
Many stayed on for the better jobs. They added an extra layer of talent.
After several years in government I realised that the more talented people I
had as ministers, administrators and professionals, the more effective my
policies were, and the better the results. My mind flashed back to Prince
Sihanouk. He was talented. When he made his films, he had to be author,
scriptwriter, director, actor and producer. Cambodia did not have enough
educated and talented people and the few they had Pol Pot later killed. That was
one reason for the tragedy in Cambodia.
What decided me to make that Great Marriage Debate speech was a report
on my desk analysing the 1980 census figures. It showed that our brightest
women were not marrying and would not be represented in the next generation.
The implications were grave. Our best women were not reproducing themselves
because men who were their educational equals did not want to marry them.
About half of our university graduates were women; nearly two-thirds of them
were unmarried. The Asian man, whether Chinese, Indian or Malay, preferred to
have a wife with less education than himself. Only 38 per cent of graduate men
were married to graduate women in 1983.
This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to
remain unmentioned and unchecked. I decided to shock the young men out of
their stupid, old-fashioned and damaging prejudices. I quoted studies of identical
twins done in Minnesota in the 1980s which showed that these twins were
similar in so many respects. Although they had been brought up separately and
in different countries, about 80 per cent of their vocabulary, IQ, habits, likes and
dislikes in food and friends, and other character and personality traits were
identical. In other words, nearly 80 per cent of a person’s makeup was from
nature, and about 20 per cent the result of nurture.
The capabilities of most children were between those of their two parents,
with a few having lower or higher intelligence than either. Therefore male
graduates who married less-educated women were not maximising the chances
of having children who make it to university. I urged them to marry their

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educational equals, and encouraged educated women to have two or more
children.
Graduate women were upset that I had spotlighted their plight. Non-graduate
women and their parents were angry with me for dissuading graduate men from
marrying them. I was attacked in a flood of comments and letters to the press for
being an elitist because I believed intelligence was inherited and not the result of
education, food and training. A professional couple challenged my alleged
assumption that low-income families would produce less-brainy children. (I had
made no such claim.) “Look at Lee Pan Hon, the violinist. He came out of the
slums of Chinatown. If he hadn’t been given the opportunity, he would never
have developed his creativity.” (Lee Pan Hon was talent-spotted by Yehudi
Menuhin for his school in Britain. Later he became a first violinist in the
Manchester Orchestra.) “This whole thing smacks of elitism.” A woman wrote,
“I am an unmarried, successful professional woman aged 40. I have remained
single because I prefer it this way. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that
some miserable financial incentives will make me jump into bed with the first
attractive man I meet and proceed to produce a highly talented child for the sake
of Singapore’s future.” Even Toh Chin Chye, then a PAP backbencher, derided
my views, saying that his mother never went to school, his father was a clerk
with only secondary school education, and if he had to depend on his parents’
educational background, he would have had no chance.
I supported my views by releasing analyses of statistics for the past few
years of the educational background of parents of the top 10 per cent of our
students in examinations at ages 12, 16 and 18. These figures left little doubt that
the decisive factor for high performance was a pair of well-educated parents. I
also put out 1960 and 1970 data that showed most of our top students who won
scholarships for universities abroad had parents who were not well-educated:
storekeepers, hawkers, taxi-drivers and labourers. I compared them to the 1980
and 1990 data that revealed over 50 per cent of the best 100 scholarship winners
had at least one parent who was a professional or self-employed. The conclusion
was obvious, that the parents of these scholarship winners of the 1960s and ’70s
would have made it to university had they been born a generation later when
education was universal and scholarships, bursaries and study loans were freely
available to bright students.
This controversy was widely reported by the Western media. Liberal
Western writers and commentators mocked me for my ignorance and prejudice.
But one academic spoke up for me – R.H. Herrnstein, professor of psychology at

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Harvard. In an article, “IQ and Falling Birth Rates”, in the