On the right track with education

"Putting a lot of emphasis on education.

Right from the beginning, at my first National Day Rally, one of my themes was on the young.

We were talking about schools - teach less, learn more - and getting people to get the maximum out of their education.

We have followed through on that in many ways - investing in schools, Edusave, increasing resources for the principals, making sure every school is a good school, developing tertiary education, building up ITE (Institute of Technical Education).

So I think it is not a single decision but a continuing, consistent emphasis over a long period of time."

...AND ON HIS BIGGEST REGRET

"In retrospect, it is easy to say that we should have been building up our infrastructure a lot faster, that we should have got our trains running, we should have built more HDB flats.

At the time, we thought we were doing the right thing, pacing it, measuring it out, building it when we needed it and not spending resources until we needed to spend them.

It turned out that things did not pan out the way we expected.

I think that we have to plan in future less conservatively and try to be less precise in our prognostications."

This article was first published on January 17, 2015.
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