Workers’ Party Member of Parliament Associate Professor Jamus Lim has described the recent pledge by new Education Minister Desmond Lee to recruit 1,000 more teachers each year as a potentially positive step, if it truly lightens teacher workloads and strengthens foundational learning for younger students.
In a Facebook post on 12 July 2025, Lim, who represents Sengkang GRC and serves as the party’s deputy head of policy research, said the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) decision marks movement in the right direction.
Lim explained that more educators could help reduce individual teacher burdens, enabling them to deliver quality, patient instruction — especially vital for young children.
“The way I see it, for most kids, there really isn’t a good substitute for step-by-step nurturing from a human educator,” Lim wrote.
“If we truly wish for teachers to succeed in uplifting the next generation, we need to limit their student load.”
A longstanding call for smaller classes
On 9 July 2025, Minister Desmond Lee announced that Singapore will increase its teacher recruitment numbers from about 700 new hires annually to more than 1,000 over the coming years.
According to an MOE statement released the same day, the move aims to strengthen long-term workforce sustainability, secure teaching talent for the future, and respond to anticipated retirements as the teaching cohort ages.
Lim used his post to revisit the Workers’ Party’s repeated advocacy for smaller class sizes, a position debated extensively in Parliament over the years.
He noted that the issue dates back centuries, referencing Plato’s Academy, which blended large lectures with small-group tutoring — an early example of the trade-off between scale and personalised instruction.
In modern times, Lim argued that Singapore’s education system has prioritised speed and affordability, often at the expense of smaller classes.
He cautioned that while adding teachers is a welcome development, it must be paired with policies to reduce class sizes meaningfully.
Teacher quality concerns
The debate around class sizes has divided policymakers in recent years.
Former Education Minister Chan Chun Sing had previously warned Parliament that simply hiring more teachers to shrink classes might affect teacher quality.
During a September 2024 sitting, Chan rejected WP MPs’ calls to cap class sizes further, insisting that quality and support for educators were more important than raw numbers.
In a January 2025 interview with The Straits Times, Chan repeated his view that teacher quality is the decisive factor for learning outcomes, arguing that unrestrained expansion of teaching posts could risk lowering recruitment standards.
Statistics illustrate the challenges facing the profession. MOE figures show that the number of teachers fell from 33,378 in 2016 to 30,396 in 2023 due to a slowdown in hiring.
Although the number of students per teacher in primary schools did decrease slightly — from 16.5 in 2014 to 15.2 in 2023 — Lim suggested that more aggressive efforts are needed to push the ratio lower.
Human touch still essential
Lim also criticised an over-reliance on technology, especially artificial intelligence, to solve what he called the ‘trilemma’ of scale, speed, and affordability in education.
He acknowledged that AI tools can support learning, especially for older students who have developed good study habits and motivation.
However, he insisted that AI cannot replace the patient, human connection that young children require when grasping basic skills such as reading, writing, and reasoning.
“Anyone who’s had a young child knows that we need a boatload of gentle handholding, patient explanation, varied angles, and (perhaps even) outright coercion to get our kids to pick up new ideas at an early age,” Lim wrote.
For Lim, the job of building foundational skills remains fundamentally human.
“Sure, artificial intelligence can make the job of educators easier, especially at higher levels. But when we’re teaching young children, we’re not imparting cutting-edge knowledge. We’re going over well-trodden ground, building core skills that shape future learning,” he said.
Learning from Laozi
Lim drew on ancient Chinese thought to underline his argument for human-centred teaching.
He pointed to Confucius’ belief that an ideal teacher guides rather than drags students forward and quoted Laozi’s saying that “the teacher appears when the student is ready”.
He argued that these ideas remind us that teaching is not about force-feeding information but about patient, attentive nurturing.
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