18 Lubna Alsagoff
knowledge and use of English plus one other official language. In English-
medium schools, students took a second language that corresponded to
their ethnic group membership, while in the Asian-language medium
schools, English was the mandatory second language. In addition, as a
clear signal of the importance of English, science and mathematics were
also taught in English in all schools, whatever the language medium of
the school. The Goh Report, commissioned in 1979 to examine the issues
regarding the bilingual policy, echoed such a position, arguing that “as
Singapore industrializes, the English language becomes more important
relative to the other languages” (Goh et al. 1979, p. 4). The value of English
was also apparent to Singaporean parents who, as the “invisible language
planners” chose overwhelmingly to enrol their children in English-medium
schools (Pakir 1997, p. 61). Clearly, English afforded an advantage in
relation to social mobility and success as it did in the past (MacDougall
and Chew 1976).
In addition, English-medium schools also offered a healthy compromise
in mother tongue education through a generous 40 per cent of school
curriculum time. Not surprisingly, despite a concerted effort by the
Chinese-educated elites to reinvigorate the enrolment of students in the
Chinese-medium schools through a “Promote Mother Tongue Education”
month, the number of enrolments in such schools continued to fall (Suarez
2005; Tay 1983). Whereas around 50 per cent of children were registered
for English stream schools in 1959, the figure rose to 99 per cent in 1983.
The attrition in the number of students in the Chinese, Malay and Tamil
streams saw the Ministry of Education announce, in December 1983, that
the education system would be a single national stream where English
was taught as a first language.^1 By 1987, English became the sole medium
of instruction in all schools. At the tertiary level, English had also gained
ground. Nanyang University, founded in 1956, and a stronghold of
Chinese-medium education, began offering subjects in English in addition
to Mandarin in 1975 amid fears that it would close because of falling
student enrolments. Three years later, in 1978, courses common to Nanyang
University and the University of Singapore were combined and offered
at the Bukit Timah campus of the University of Singapore. Shortly after
that, in 1980, the two universities merged to form the English-medium
National University of Singapore.
Interestingly, as new generations of Singaporeans benefited from
successes of the bilingual education policy, there grew to be a distinct