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Adopting the international language of business, diplomacy, and science and technology was about the only way this resource-less tiny island could guarantee its survival after losing its economic hinterland in Malaysia. Unemployment was at 14 per cent and rising.

Just as importantly, picking this race-neutral language demonstrated his government’s anti-communalistic stance, helping to keep the peace in a newborn nation made up of a polyglot-settler populace who had struggled for years with racial and religious strife.


For the sake of building “a community that feels together”, Lee pushed through the bilingualism policy in 1966. All students had to learn their “mother tongue”, Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, depending on their race, as a second language, and this became a compulsory and critical examination subject in 1969.

What is needed is a broad culture of innovation where diverse skills and dispositions merge to offer the best chance of a unique idea emerging and importantly making it to market. Significantly the definition of innovation very much includes the ability to deliver on the imaginative ideas Australians are known for but are presently handing off to international developers to capitalise on. For schools such a definition is useful as it encourages a shift away from vague conversations about creativity and imagination and looks at how these skills can be used in ways that bring about change

Innovation requires a pedagogy that values a student focused learning processes over teacher directed transfer of knowledge. Teaching for innovation is by nature messy and imprecise. In the short term results on traditional assessments may not be what we would expect from traditional methods but if we desire to produce innovators this needs to be accepted