Education
In 1956, with the help of his father's friends, Ong ventured abroad. Those years were to shape both his beliefs and passions. Ong studied architecture at the University of Adelaide in Australia along with his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Ling Siew May. Both Ong and Ling met each other during a Christmas party while they were still studying in secondary school. After graduation, Ong worked as an architect in Adelaide and married Ling in 1963. Ong and his wife occasionally recite Chinese poetry and verses which they learnt during their younger days.
In 1965, Ong received an Colombo Plan scholarship to pursue a master's degree in urban planning at the University of Liverpool and graduated in 1967. In the same year, he joined the Ministry of National Development as a town planner. After four years of civil service, Ong resigned from his government profession and started his own architectural firm, Ong & Ong Architects, with his wife.
Read more about this topic: Ong Teng Cheong
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)