Information Literacy as a National Agenda: A Case Study of Singapore

Abstract

Singapore is a small country in South East Asia with a population of some 3.7 million. It achieved independence from Britain in 1965 and since then has made remarkable progress as a nation, so much so that other countries are now looking closely at its policies with a view to discovering its secrets of success. While the policies attracting attention range from Singapore's national pension scheme to the way in which traffic flow is controlled, the major area of interest here is to investigate the country's promotion of information literacy.

Singapore is largely devoid of natural resources, so there has always been an emphasis on seeing people as capital. As in many Asian countries, cheap labour was at first the basis for building strong manufacturing industries to earn revenue by exporting goods to richer nations. Economic growth would occur as long as inputs of labour and of capital investment went on growing, but eventually this would slow because the sources of these inputs are finite. Krugman (1994) described this as the "perspiration theory": success was based on working harder, not working smarter. Krugman's writings aroused hostile reaction in many Asian countries, but even he did not predict the extent of the economic crisis in the region during the late 1990's. By this time, though, Singapore's leaders were working on the problem and laying the foundations that would produce a workforce with something more to offer than perspiration.