So LKY admitted that the bilingual policy was a mistake. How did he find out it was a mistake? Only because, it seems, he learned from his daughter “late in [his] life” that “language ability and intelligence are two different things”.

So we can conclude that:

1. The early bilingual policy was made on the assumption that language ability and intelligence are the same thing.
2. This assumption was not questioned until the Dear Leader’s daughter informed the Dear Leader otherwise.

(2) is shocking. We seem to make major policy decisions without carefully verifying the empirical claims behind them. And we seem to judge that these are “mistakes” on the basis of what one influential neurologist tells her powerful dad.

In any case, I do not see what the mistake has got to do with whether intelligence and language ability are the same thing. Even if they are the same thing (whatever that means), there are still going to be people who are less intelligent and hence less able to learn languages, so despite the policy, not everyone is going to be bilingual. How does the fact that they are “different things” change this outcome?

Perhaps it’s not the policy of bilingual education per se that he’s saying is a mistake, but the practice of streaming by bilingual ability. In that case, the idea that they are “two different things” is relevant since it tells us we should not label people as lacking overall academic potential just because they do badly in languages. But LKY seems to be explicitly referring to the policy of bilingual education, and not that of streaming by bilingualism.