ABSTRACT
In the party’s 1959 election manifesto, The Tasks Ahead, the spokesman for education, Yong Nyuk Lin, told the voters that the colonial administration of the 1950s had no policy to either foster industry or make the education system more responsive to the economy’s need for technical and skilled labour and thus create new jobs for the colonial population. Yong ignored completely what had been happening in the 1950s and argued that ‘Singapore has never had a positive productive economic policy’, and that the colonial administration
has been contented all this time with trading so that it is not surprising that those who had been responsible for the education of our children
have been equally contented with merely providing them with a general education that will satisfy the demands of trading houses and shipping.3
