ABSTRACT
How well did the British colonial administration provide an educational system to match the colonial economy before the coming to power of the People’s Action Party in 1959? Mickey Chiang in his commissioned official history of vocational and technical education in Singapore delivered a harsh judgement when answering this question. He attacked the colonial administration for not training the colonial population with the skills required in the colonial economy and presiding over an economy that he called an ‘economic debacle’. Chiang blamed the British for many members of the colonial population being underskilled and ending up as ‘poorly paid unskilled workers and labourers, lorry drivers, taxi drivers, taxi dancers in cabarets, drivers of illegal taxis called pao hon chiahs, unlicensed hawkers and hawkers’ assistants, and gangsters in the violent triad secret societies’. He condemned this situation as ‘a tremendous wastage of manpower’, which, according to him, ‘the British had lived with this for many years and it had apparently not bothered them too much’. Chiang contrasted this wilful neglect of the colonial authorities with the policies of the People’s Action Party, which when it ‘grasped the reins of self-government in 1959 could not afford to adopt such an attitude’.1 Were the colonial economy and the colonial educational system as mismatched as what Chiang suggests? This chapter offers a long view of education in colonial Singapore during its first century and what it reveals about the ‘education-economy’ nexus. Chapters 2 and 3 will continue the investigation of this connection throughout the colonial period of the twentieth century up to 1959.
