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Straits Times 5 Nov 04 Two adventure centres to open By Goh Chin Lian They will help to meet demand for more facilities to toughen up kids THE first of two new adventure centres to cater to the adventurous teen opens today at the foothill of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, with Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Education and Manpower Hawazi Daipi doing the honours. The other, by the seafront at Changi Coast Walk, is expected to be ready by July next year, and will have facilities for kayaking, windsurfing and other sea sports. Increasing demand from schools for camping and adventure facilities to toughen up students has prompted the Education Ministry (MOE) to provide these set-ups. They are costing the ministry a total of $5.7 million, outdoor education specialist Susanna Ho said. At these facilities, students will be able to camp, abseil, leap for a trapeze and generally take that frightening step into the dark in a number of different ways. These activities are seen as helping to build resilience and daring in students. The ministry believes that such people are risk-takers, willing to explore new options, have a can-do spirit, and 'comfortable with ambiguity'. The centres are also part of an effort to address the view that Singapore youth have become a namby-pamby lot, a situation which Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam described as a bigger challenge for the country than the economic one. An MOE study, done in 1999, determined that to allow every child in secondary school to have one such experience, four more adventure centres would be needed. What exists now - the Outward Bound Singapore on Pulau Ubin run by the People's Association and campsites run by uniformed groups - is not enough and going overseas costs too much. The ministry has three centres. A major one is an 18-year-old facility at Jalan Bahtera in Lim Chu Kang which was renovated last year. Two schools at Pasir Panjang Road and May Road have been converted into temporary facilities in the last four years. The new facility, called the Dairy Farm Adventure Centre, occupies a 1.3ha disused construction site along Dairy Farm Road. It is expected to receive its first batch of students in January. The centre has an eight-station rope course, where students have to cross from one vertical pole to another several storeys above the ground; walls for abseiling and climbing, and a shed for 50 mountain bikes. Nearby are trails for biking and trekking into the nature reserve. The centre also has dormitories for 300, where campers bed down in sleeping bags. The ministry is now looking for an operator to run the place and its programmes. It will be available for corporations when schools are not using it. Schools will pay $2 a day for each of its students to use the centres, and $1 a day for the two temporary facilities. An inaugural two-day conference for teachers on outdoor education, organised by MOE, starts today at the Dairy Farm centre. Four specialists from Britain and Australia will be speaking on topics ranging from the rationale for outdoor education to fostering psychological resilience. links Related articles on Re-creation in our wild places |
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