Are NUS/NTU graduates creative?

NUS and NTU are Singapore's leading Universities. Their graduates are locally very respected in Singapore. No doubt, they have studied long and hard. Yet, I have cause to wonder, are these graduates creative?

Recently, I had a conversation with an American who works in an American company working in a creative industry. It is a famous American company, so I shall have to leave clues out of this account, lest it be identified. Let it be said, however, that the work that this company does straddles a couple of major creative industries with global reach.

Now, this American was observing to me about hiring practices which puzzled him. You see, one of the senior managers in the local branch of this global company was a Singaporean graduate of NTU. It was part of this manager's job to choose whom to hire to do the creative jobs that they had vacant. What troubled my acquaintance was just who this Singaporean was hiring - and why. Every single time a creative job came up, this Singaporean NTU graduate manager would look through the pile of CVs he had in front of him and select the Singaporean NUS and NTU graduates who had the best academic records. He picked the ones whose grades glistened...whose resumes dripped with A grades. Now, if you are Singaporean you will probably be nodding at this point, thinking that this is the right thing to do and is only natural. However, my American's experience with the people that were hired in this way, says otherwise. You see, the problem with these NTU and NUS graduates is that THEY COULD NEVER DO THE JOBS.

If you are Singaporean, and conditioned to believe in grades as the be all and end all of education, you might be shocked at this. I shall explain for you. The problem was that these NTU and NUS graduates with the great grades were UNABLE TO BE CREATIVE. Their resumes looked wonderful. They had jumped successfully through every academic hoop along the way - but something was missing. They had learnt to pass exams and shine in that situation - but they had never learnt how to think creatively. They were, according to my American acquaintance, unable to do the job, in every single case. They were just not good employees of this creative company.

Interestingly, have a guess who WERE the most creative employees of this company? The Indonesians were. That is right, employees who had grown up and been educated in Indonesia were the best workers in creative jobs, at this American company. The second best were the Thais - my American contact remarked that they were creative and had a good work attitude, as well.

So, this problem with NTU and NUS graduates being uncreative, is not a problem that applies to all graduates, everywhere. It doesn't apply to the Indonesian graduates from overseas - nor to the Thais (or he noted the Vietnamese)...but it does apply to the Singaporean graduates of NTU and NUS.

This leads me to understand that the type of education being received by Singaporeans in Singapore is creating graduates who might be competent in an academic sense and able to handle known and familiar tasks, in structured environments (isn't the whole of Singapore one big structured environment?) - but they are not creative. At the end of their long and arduous education, there is little creativity left in them.

Now, this really didn't come as a surprise to me, having taught in the Singaporean system at all levels, and witnessed the dearth of creativity at close hand. What did surprise me, however, was that Indonesians (who are customarily looked down upon, by many Singaporeans, perhaps because their young women tend to be maids in Singaporean households), were the most creative of all the races (other than "Americans" was implicit in his observations) employed in this large, global American company.

Many Singaporeans clamour to get their child into NTU or NUS. Yet, do they understand what the results of such an education are? Do they really want those results? Do they want an academically competent, but creatively incompetent child? If so, NUS and NTU - and the whole Singaporean education system - are perfect. However, if you would like to have a creative child...perhaps it might be best to send them overseas to Indonesia or Thailand!

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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Career ambitions of Vietnamese students.

I am privy to an informal survey of the ambitions of Vietnamese students. They make curious reading.

Of a group of twenty young students aged from 12 to 17, a number of interesting career choices were made - and a couple of worrying omissions, too.

Two out of twenty wanted to be scientists, which is encouraging; three wanted to be business people (two boys, one girl); four wanted to be doctors, one wanted to be a lawyer (a girl), two wanted to be architects (a boy and a girl); two wanted to be inventors (both boys); one wanted to be President (a boy); one wanted to go into computers; one wanted to be in Public Relations (a girl); one wanted to be an artist (a girl) and one just wanted to sleep (a boy, usually sleeping in class, or trying to.)

The interesting omissions were that none of the twenty wanted to be a teacher - and none of them wanted to be an engineer, of any kind.

If these children are representative of the attitudes of Vietnamese youth, there is some hope - and some concerns. The hope is that quite a few of them chose creative professions: artist, architect, scientist and inventor - amounting to 35% of the class. The concern is that Vietnam might be a country with few teachers - or teachers who wished they were doing something else.

I don't know what role models they have for engineers in their society - but, since engineers create the structural backbone of a society that it is not among their aspirations is a worry, for Vietnam.

Amusingly, the boy who wanted to be President is the second laziest in class (second only to the one who likes to sleep): he also appears to be one of the least bright. He does, however, have big dreams and is quite clearly able to imagine himself in the role.

Interestingly, none of them would admit, at first, to being ambitious in any way: it seemed not the thing to aspire to. They would only answer when asked, more directly, what they wanted to do in their lives.

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