Donald Frazier, Contributor
Eastern Exposure. Asian business, for the rest of the world.
This story appears in the current edition of Forbes Asia as a sidebar to the cover feature on Vincent Tan.
Vincent Tan’s battle to make the English language a path to success for ordinary Malaysians may be won far from the cities and universities, in a humble community center near the Pahang River at the country’s center.
That’s where one of his favorite projects, SOLS 24×7 (the name comes from the Science of Life, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week teaching philosophy), has set up an array of programs to help provide people from villages and the countryside—and sometimes even the jungle—with the skills likely needed to sustain a modern global economy. “It’s not all about venture capitalists and entrepreneurs,” says Raj Singh, the founder of a six-nation network of schools to train and support rural people, children at risk and refugees. “We will also need a strong infrastructure of competent, hardworking people, and we are building that here.”
One glimpse of the facility reveals plenty of English tutelage but not always in a classroom. Young people are learning how to use and repair computers, work together in groups, navigate a workplace or a modern city, and plan and schedule an urban life—all in voluble and enthusiastic, if not yet perfect, English.
Immersion is the key, says Singh. “We need to forge a connection between the mind, the heart and the hands.” A working command of English, he says, can be achieved in less than three months this way and fluency in less than a year.
Itland, a slight 22-year-old woman, feels it has transformed her life. “I used to feel frightened and confused in English-speaking situations,” she says of her first trips out of the jungle, where she was raised in a settlement of Orang Asli, a pre-Malay people who’ve been largely left out of the country’s economy. “Now my parents are proud of me and what I might achieve.”
The country has seven such schools with 500 students, part of the Kuala Lumpur-based network of 75 that stretches from Japan to East Timor. Tan has spent $350,000 on the schools so far, and, encouraged by the results, says he’s committed to spending an additional $3.2 million over the next five years to set up more such schools in Malaysia, some of them in urban centers. Singh plans to open nine more schools there, enrolling 1,500 to 2,000 students.