Still Eating Our Lunch
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Singapore

Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of online war games.

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us.

Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

As Low-Sim Ay Nar, principal of Xinmin Secondary School, explained to me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold. No one is going to outdrill her students. What it is now focusing on is how to develop more of America's strength: getting Singaporean students and teachers to be more innovative and creative. "Numerical skills are very important," she told me, but "I am now also encouraging my students to be creative - and empowering my teachers. ... We have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas."

She added, "We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content" on the principle that "knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn't just have to come from the teacher."

Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai, India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University.

With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math, wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That's HeyMath.

"No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the world are worried that their kids might be missing something," Mrs. Sankaran said. "For some it is the right rigor, for some it is creativity. There is no perfect system. ... What we have tried to do is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices for teaching math concepts. So a teacher might say: 'I have a problem teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in India or Shanghai?' "

Singaporean math textbooks are very good. My daughter's school already uses them in Maryland. But they are static and not illustrated or animated. "Our lessons contain animated visuals that remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a 'hands on' manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant," Mrs. Sankaran said.

HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google - to establish a Web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the "best teacher in the world" for every math concept and to also be able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.

The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath, which has been adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on homework.

Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today's world, and American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.

September 14, 2005
Singapore and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Singapore

There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down.

That is certainly the sense I got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone's college roommate.

Indeed, Singapore believes so strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line.

From Singapore's early years, good governance mattered because the ruling party was in a struggle for the people's hearts and minds with the Communists, who were perceived to be both noncorrupt and caring - so the state had to be the same and more.

Even after the Communists faded, Singapore maintained a tradition of good governance because as a country of only four million people with no natural resources, it had to live by its wits. It needed to run its economy and schools in a way that would extract the maximum from each citizen, which is how four million people built reserves of $100 billion.

"In the areas that are critical to our survival, like Defense, Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs, we look for the best talent," said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. "You lose New Orleans, and you have 100 other cities just like it. But we're a city-state. We lose Singapore and there is nothing else. ... [So] the standards of discipline are very high. There is a very high degree of accountability in Singapore."

When a subway tunnel under construction collapsed here in April 2004 and four workers were killed, a government inquiry concluded that top executives of the contracting company should be either fined or jailed.

The discipline that the cold war imposed on America, by contrast, seems to have faded. Last year, we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis.

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

BBC WORLD SERVICE: ANALYSIS (15 SEP 05)

Transcribed by Serene Ng

(??) …… word/s unsure [QL]

Madeleine Morris: Rahima Begum was born five years ago at the start
of the new millennium into extreme poverty. Her parents and three
siblings live in a hut made of plastic sheets, bamboo and tin in a
slum in southern India. She doesn't know it but her life is one
small measureable statistic in the race to achieve the promise the
United Nations made in the year of Rahima's birth … to lift people
like her and her family out of extreme poverty. The finish line is
2015 and the target, accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals.[QL]
[PARA]
""It is so decided.'' [QL]
[PARA]
In September 2000, world leaders gathered at the United Nations
in New York to sign the Millennium Declaration, a document that was
supposed to herald a new dawn in peace, security and prosperity.
Central to the Millennium Declaration were the Millennium
Development Goals, a list of eight specific aspirations to improve
the lot of the world's poor. They include commitments to reduce the
number of people living in extreme poverty by half, get all the
world's children to finish primary school, ensure equality between
women and men, reduce child deaths by two-thirds, reduce maternal
deaths by three-quarters, reverse the spread of Aids, malaria and
tuberculosis and half the number of people without clean drinking
water and sanitation; all this, by 2015. [PARA]
Kevin Watkins is author of the United Nations Human Development
Report. [QL]
[QL]
Kevin Watkins: The Millennium Development Goals were conceived
principally to establish concrete targets for reducing extreme
poverty and the underlying principle of the MDGs is a very simple
one, which is that broad aspirations that are not backed by concrete
time-bound goals really don't help anybody. You can't build a
development programme on broad commitments. You need the targets and
the MDGs provide the targets and these are the targets that the
entire international community has now united behind. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: It was a revolutionary moment in world development
politics when all 191 members of the United Nations agreed to focus
on specific development outcomes rather than measuring the flow of
money to fund aid projects, which was previously the norm. And most
agree it has proved to be a galvanising project for both donor and
recipient countries. [PARA]
But while 191 signed the document, not everyone has shown equal
commitment. John McArthur is the director of the United Nations
Millennium Project which produced the action plan to achieve the
goals. [QL]
[QL]
John McArthur: There's no question that not every country is abiding
to them and that there are always some parts of the world that for
whatever reason are on their own agenda and it might not be one we
would all support. But as a general principle, what we've seen
around these goals is perhaps the greatest ever sense of political
agreement and operational agreement that these are the goals that
are achieveable and that they need to be guiding our collective
efforts. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But while the goals may have provided a unified
focus, their outcome is far from assured. When world leaders meet to
review their progress this week in the United Nations, they'll be
looking at a very mixed picture. [PARA]
Kevin Watkins again. [QL]
[QL]
Kevin Watkins: If you take the goal of halving extreme income
poverty, the number of people living on less than $1 a day, at a
global level there's a very good prospect that that target will be
met principally because of the high growth and progress in China and
India which are big-population countries. [PARA]
If you look at the same goal on a country by country basis, you
find that the target is going to be missed by around 400 million
people. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But even within countries, progress is mixed.
India and China may well meet the goal of halving the numbers of
their people living in extreme poverty thanks to their recent strong
economic performance, but the goals which really affect quality of
life … reducing maternal and child deaths, getting children in
primary school and reversing the spread of Aids … are likely to be
missed by a wide margin. And inequality in both countries is
growing. As the middle class forges ahead, the poor are being left
behind. Nowhere is this more apparent than here in the slum of
Premnigar(??) which sits literally in the shadow of Hyderabad's
booming IT district. [QL]
[QL]
Amadi Begum (translated): My name is Amadi Begum. I'm 30 years old
and I have four children. We live in Premnigar. My husband sells
vegetables. We earn about 50 to 100 rupees a day, about $1 - $2.
Life is hard. We don't even have a ration card. Sometimes we don't
sell any vegetables and we have to borrow from our neighbours.
Nobody does anything for us. [PARA]
The United Nations? No, I've never heard of it. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: Amadi's life is unlikely to improve in time to be
counted as a success of the goals although she still holds out hope
for her five-year-old daughter, Rahima. [QL]
[QL]
Amadi Begum (translated): My daughter goes to school. She's studying
in class two. I want her to study so that she can grow up and be
something. Who can predict the future but maybe she'll become a
teacher one day. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But if India doesn't make progress soon on closing
the gap between rich and poor, Rahima's life may not be that much
better than her mother's. [PARA]
Africa too is lagging on all the goals and at its current rate is
likely to miss all of them. In fact, not one single region of the
world is on target to meet all the goals. Why are we so off track?
The reasons are complex and vary from country to country. But Todd
Moss, a research fellow at the Washington think tank the Center for
Global Development, believes the Millennium Development Goals were
ill-conceived from the outset. [QL]
[QL]
Todd Moss: Well, the problem is setting global universal targets
where you have a country like China or Vietnam having the same
target in many cases as a country like Mali or Malawi and clearly it
doesn't make sense to have universal goals in lots of cases but for
political reasons, because this is the UN, every child has a right
to be in school, we set the same goal. In many cases, the goals are
way too ambitious for lots of poor countries. Lots of African
countries, for example, have primary school enrolment below 50 per
cent and they're now being asked to reach universal primary
completion by 2015. Now that's a transition that took about a
century in the rich countries and we're now asking African countries
to do this in a really short time period. And the risk is that
countries that make progress will still be deemed failures even if
they do great things just because the goal is overly ambitious. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But Todd Moss's view is not one that's widely
heard amongst the global development community, even though it may
in some cases be held privately. Rather, the prevailing view is that
lack of money is the main factor impeding the goals' achievement. [PARA]
John McArthur again from the United Nations Millennium Project. [QL]
[QL]
John McArthur: Probably the biggest issue on the table this year is
the question of resources and making resources available to fund the
basic investments needed to half poverty within the decade. There's
no question that money isn't the only thing that matters but there's
a simple reality that if we don't get the fertiliser in the ground
in Africa, we won't grow enough food. If we don't pay the salaries
for the nurses, they won't actually be able to staff the clinics and
if we don't pay for the basic medicines that dying and sick people
need, they will continue to be sick and indeed die in mass number. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: This is the point at which the global community
divides. The United States threw a spanner in the works when three
weeks ago it produced its own draft of the outcome document all
member states will sign at the end of this UN Summit. Where the
original draft document authored by General Assembly president Jean
Ping contained explicit commitments to the Millennium Development
Goals and urged donor countries to give 0.7 per cent of their gross
national income in aid, the American draft under the leadership of
its new and controversial UN ambassador John Bolton cast out all
mention of the Millennium Development Goals and their financing. [PARA]
Todd Moss again. [QL]
[QL]
Todd Moss: The issue is whether the US is going to make a commitment
to long-term aid targets and I think the answer to that is no. Even
if the administration wanted to do that, that would be
counterproductive with Congress and it's unlikely to happen and
that's what the administration is trying to avoid in New York. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: The United States argues that because Congress
controls its budget, it's unable to make financial commitments 10
years into the future. But there are deeper cultural differences at
work too. [QL]
[QL]
Todd Moss: The view in Europe that America hates foreign aid is not
really true. Americans are willing to finance foreign assistance but
the default position in the US is that you have to show me that this
money is going to be well-spent before we allocate it. And we're not
going to focus on the overall flows until we know what it's going to
be spent on and show that there are going to be results. Now in
Europe, I know the focus is very much on let's start with the bottom
line … how much do we need, how do we get the overall aid flows up …
and then we'll think about what are the best ways to spend this
effectively. So really it's kind of, it's the mirror image here. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: After two weeks of late night, high level
discussions, the draft document does commit to Millennium
Development Goals although in a much more watered down form than the
original. But the furore shows just how fragile the MDGs are. The UN
says $200 billion are needed in order to achieve the goals. Whatever
the disputes about whether such a large cash injection could be used
effectively to produce results, at present financial commitments for
aid are nowhere near that level. Only a third of their way into the
time frame, the consensus is that 2005 is the make or break year for
Millennium Development Goals, as Kevin Watkins from the United
Nations Human Development Report explains. [QL]
[QL]
Kevin Watkins: 2005 is a crossroads for development. If we don't
break now with the business-as-usual inert approach that we've seen
over the past five years, these goals will be missed, the promise
will be broken and the consequences of that broken promise will be
suffered above all by the people at the sharp end, by the kids who
don't go to school, by the children who die unnecessarily but it
would be folly, I think, for the citizens of rich countries to
imagine that mass poverty and the extremes of wealth inequality that
we see in the world today will not affect their own security and
prosperity in the long run. We're all in this together, we're a
global community, we do in a sense sink or swim together and now is
the time to start swimming and to use this summit to set a new
course. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But there are limits to what this summit can
actually achieve. Reiterating commitment to the goals is important
to their effectiveness as targets but whether they can be met hinges
on a variety of factors, many of which are beyond the scope of the
UN. The end result of the Doha round of trade talks of the World
Trade Organisation, the global oil price and internal factors like
corruption and even climate change are just as important to the
prospects of developing countries as aid, if not more so. [PARA]
While no one disputes the aim of eliminating poverty, the means
of getting there and the role of the Millennium Development Goals
are still not clear.

End