1. Raffles Girls School (RGS) was founded in 1844 with 11 students, as a shelter for poor girls. It has undergone many vicissitudes since. During the Japanese Occupation, the school premises at Queen Street were converted into barracks, prisons, and torture chambers. It functioned as the headquarters of the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police. Many of the teachers and staff were interned there or in Changi Prison. By the time the Japanese surrendered, the school facilities had been damaged beyond use. It is testimony to the resilience of the teachers and students that RGS resumed classes in October 1945, only two months after the Japanese surrender.

2. To young people growing up in Singapore today, these facts about the past may appear quaint and distant. You have lived all your lives amidst peace and plenty, undisturbed by political and economic upheaval. Nobody worries about a roof over your head, or where your next meal is coming from. Nobody has to leave school in order to work to support her family.

3. Your school facilities are equal to the best in the world. You have computer laboratories, tennis and squash courts, an amphitheatre, a dance studio. You attend speech and drama classes, organise arts festivals, go on study tours and immersion programmes to neighbouring countries.

4. I once visited Cuba, where I saw a school which had a roof but no walls, so poor was the country and the people. If any of those Cuban students were to visit RGS, they would not recognise that this was a school.

5. Not every secondary school in Singapore is yet as well equipped and up to date as RGS. But we are systematically upgrading and rebuilding the older schools, so that over time all Singapore students will enjoy the same headstart in life.

6. When you go to university, if you are a good student, you will find many scholarships chasing you. There are PSC scholarships, EDB scholarships, MAS scholarships, SPH scholarships, and company scholarships. There are SAF scholarships, even for women. (This year we awarded the SAF Merit Scholarship to two very good recipients.) Plus, for those who prefer not to be tied down by a bond after graduation and want to keep their options open, there are in extremis father-mother scholarships, for with rising incomes, nearly every family can afford to pay tuition fees in NUS or NTU. In any case, NUS and NTU now have a "needs blind" admission policy, so any student who wins a place will be able to fund his studies through scholarships, bursaries, loans or paid work.

7. And when you graduate and start working, unless something has gone seriously wrong with the economy, you will have no difficulty finding a job. Indeed some companies have complained that at job interviews, it is not the company interviewing the applicant, but the "applicants" interviewing the company – What are the fringe benefits? How much leave can I get? How soon can I get promoted? When can I get a company car?

8. For your generation, life has been an upward-moving escalator, a steady, orderly progression from one level to the next, with new vistas opening up at each stage. Your school motto Filiae Melioris Aevi – Daughters of a Better Age – has never rung more true.

9. As a nation we have spent heavily on education. You have received the best education that money can buy. But compared to your parents’ generation, and still more your grandparents’, you have missed out on the education that money cannot buy – learning in the university of life. You have not lived and experienced the tumult, upheaval, uncertainty, and danger that has been far more typical of South East Asia than the last few decades of tranquillity and stability. There is no better way to understand the realities of the world around us.

10. Those who lived through the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation know what brutality, degradation and deprivation means. Those who participated in the struggle for independence in the 1950s have seen how different Singapore could be. Those who witnessed the birth of our nation in the 1960s realise deeply that we must bond together as one nation.

11. We have tried to make good this lack, by teaching you the history of Singapore and the countries around us, by taking you to visit the Battlebox at Fort Canning, the SAFTI Military Institute, the PUB water treatment works, or the port. This National Education is important, and our schools and teachers are trying their best to teach it. But multimedia and videos can at best simulate the past. They cannot fully recreate it.

12. Raising funds for natural disasters abroad is very different from surviving and recovering after an earthquake or a typhoon. Reading the most vivid accounts of riots and wars conveys perhaps 1% of the real experience of the terror and misery of being caught in one. And even visiting a country on a study trip, staying in hotels and riding around in tour coaches, is quite different from living there, struggling to make a living day after day.

13. If the rest of your life continues to be lived out in the peace and plenty of the past 16 years, this may not matter. Your exposure and education will be enough to see you through life. But you are most unlikely to have such a placid existence. The world is changing rapidly. The pace is speeding up, not slowing down. Computers and technology are changing the way business is done and wealth is created. Asia is making dramatic progress, much faster than the developed countries or the rest of the world. These are major changes in the world order and the global economy. They will have far reaching consequences, which we can only glimpse at.

14. Even if there is no upheaval, and everything goes well, you will have to adapt and readapt yourself as the world changes – the way you earn a living, the way you live, the way in time you bring up your own families. People write books about the 21^st century, but nobody can imagine what the future holds. We don’t know what Singapore will be like in 50 years’ time, when you will be in your 60s. But we know that it will be vastly different from today. It will either be much better, because we have continued to make progress; or much worse, because we have faltered and failed. It cannot be the same as today.

15. But during your lifetimes you may well see some upheaval, something totally beyond your experience up till then, and for which your education, despite our best efforts, has barely prepared you. Many things can go wrong with the optimistic scenario, where we expect progress and development year after year, and the only question is how fast things will get better. If something does go wrong in our part of the world, Singapore will be affected, even if the problem is not actually in Singapore.

16. In 1975, North Vietnamese troops overran South Vietnam and captured Saigon. South Vietnam fell to the Communists. It was the end of the Vietnam War, which had lasted for 30 years since World War II ended in 1945. Tens of thousands of refugees fled South Vietnam in boats, and headed south across the South China Sea. Thousands of these boat people soon reached Singapore. We could not take them into Singapore. If we did, thousands more would come, and we would have been swamped. We could not even let them land temporarily, because once they did they would never leave. We would have had enormous difficulty repatriating them, as you can see from the Vietnamese boat people now in Hong Kong.

17. So we had to cope with this fleet of rickety, unseaworthy boats, packed to the brim with refugees, men, women and children. Some were ill, some were armed and dangerous, all were desperate. A few deliberately sank their boats, to try to force us to rescue them out of the water, and take them into Singapore. We had to refuel them, provide them food and water, patch up their boats and engines as best we could, and send them back out to sea and along their way, to find some other country better able to take them in.

18. This difficult and dangerous task fell on the SAF, particularly the navy. Many of the soldiers and sailors who took part in it, and dealt face to face with the refugees, were shaken and chastened by the experience. But fortunately they rose to the occasion. As Minister of Defence, Dr Goh Keng Swee took charge of the operation. It was codenamed Operation Thunderstorm. He was assisted by Mr Wong Kan Seng, who was then Head of the Navy Personnel Department. Operation Thunderstorm was one of the early tests of the SAF.

19. Vietnam is a thousand miles away from Singapore. Yet an upheaval there in 1975 immediately caused us serious problems. If something worse ever happens in our region, or if something happens closer to home, Singapore will be under severe stress. And if we run into a problem ourselves, and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed, we may ourselves become boat people.

20. Some of the boat people were grateful for the fuel, food and water we gave them to help them on their way. Others were angry at us for not helping them more. The flow of boat people continued, several hundred a month, for years after Operation Thunderstorm. In 1978 RADM Teo Chee Hean was a navy officer commanding an RSN ship. He turned away a refugee boat after replenishing it. The leader of the refugee boat cursed him: "You’ll be in trouble one day, then I’ll see you in California".

21. Can anybody be sure that no such problem will come our way in the next 50 years, during your lifetimes?

22. Soldiers know that the real test of a new battalion comes when the unit goes into battle, and comes under real enemy fire for the first time. However thorough the training of the battalion has been, this is the moment of truth. Sometimes the battalion stands and fights, takes its casualties, and then emerges as a battle-tested, hardened unit. But sometimes despite all their training, the soldiers recoil at the shock of combat, their spirit is broken, and the battalion disintegrates.

23. There is no way to know for sure beforehand which battalions will make the grade in their first baptism of fire. Nor can we be certain, until a major crisis comes, how Singapore will measure up. But we must prepare ourselves to the best of our ability, to have the best chance of surmounting anything that the future may have in store for us. If we are lucky we will have some minor troubles, some false alarms, some tests of our cohesion and our will to survive, before encountering a big one. Each test we go through gives us more confidence that the next time, we will be more ready and it will be a little easier.

24. Your teachers and parents will do their best to prepare you for the future. But they have no fixed formula to offer you, no computer program on a CD-ROM, into which you can type in your problems and read out the answers. They will give you the basic knowledge, the essential skills to survive and learn for yourself, the upbringing and values to be your compass through life. Beyond that it is up to each generation to find your own way, define your own challenges, solve your own problems, and in time pass on the torch to your children.

25. In RGS, the hard work of generations of Raffles girls have built up the tradition and the excellence which contribute to your experience in the school. I hope that in turn you will build on this, in RGS and in Singapore.

26. For all the uncertainties about the future, the outlook is propitious. I have a favourite passage from Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea we are now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

27. The tide is at the flood. All our hopes ride with you. Take the tide, lead a full and satisfying life, and may your ventures prosper.