Former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that Singapore’s insistence on bilingual education had been wrong. In 1965, Lee made the country strictly English-speaking but with the rise of China as a global power, Lee hoped to make the country bilingual, by having children educated in both English and Chinese from 1984. “Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you’re deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things,” Lee told Channel NewsAsia. “Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism.”