Digital transformation

There is something about October that excites me every year, and it always revolves around Penang Free School. When October comes around, there is usually the school's Speech Day, or Founder's Day, followed by the visit to Robert Sparke Hutchings' grave on the morning of the 21st of October. Then, in the evening, there is the annual dinner of The Old Frees' Association that I look forward to.

This year, Speech Day was brought forward to the first of October because of clashes with the examination dates. Last year, it was also held earlier, that time because of its proximity to Deepavali when the school took a break. And there have been quite a few such instances in the school's long history. So, while most Old Frees would probably like to see Speech Day held on the 21st of October every year, it is obviously not quite etched in stone.

I almost missed this year's Speech Day because I was given the impression that it would be open only to those who had contributed to the school's Digital Transformation Fund. But what the heck, I thought to myself. Nobody's going to stop this Old Free from attending Speech Day, fund or no fund. So there I was at 8am on the first of the month, walking into the school hall and immediately being greeted by familiar faces from The Old Frees' Association. I was right to attend after all. There was no such regulation.

One of the first people I bumped into was Danny Quah. I would consider him a cheen-lang, as his forefathers had migrated from the same locality in Amoy as my ancestors. Danny was there as the Old Free invited to address the school.

This was also the first time the new Penang Governor, Ramli Ngah Talib, attended Penang Free School Speech Day as Guest of Honour. Traditionally, the Governor attends the school's Speech Day every year, a tradition that goes back to the days before Independence when the Resident-Governor would attend the school's annual Speech Day.

This year's Speech Day was, of course, part of the celebrations for the school's 210th anniversary, and Ivan Ooi, president of the Penang Free School Foundation and organising chairman of the PFS 210 Years celebration committee, reminded Old Frees that an anniversary was not just about looking back. It was also about thinking about what we would leave behind for future generations.

While the traditions and character of the school must be preserved, he said, the school also has to prepare its students for a very different world shaped by artificial intelligence, robotics, data science and other digital technologies. That was where the Penang Free School Digital Transformation Fund came in. Supporting the fund, he said, was not simply about buying technology but about creating opportunities for the next generation of Frees. After all, the school had given us an education, friendships, discipline, confidence and character. Now it was our turn to give something back.

Danny's speech took a rather different tack. Having left Penang Free School in 1976, he began by calling himself a relic and reflected on how much the world had changed in those 50 years. His generation (and obviously mine too as we are only three of four years apart in age) had slide rules, black-and-white television, rotary phones, handwritten letters and examination papers passed down by seniors. We waited for buses, waited for replies to letters and quite often got lost. There was no mobile phone to keep track of where we were and much of our lives left no digital record. 

The 1976 Free lived with "unreachability, waiting, uncertainty, shared scarcity, and forgetting", while the 2026 Free lives with "instant knowledge, continuous connection, digital identity, machine intelligence, and collapsed distance". 

But Danny was not suggesting that life was better in our day. Today's young people may have more information than they know what to do with, but they also have to navigate deepfakes, misinformation and algorithmic feeds while dealing with much bigger problems such as climate change, geopolitical conflict and the uncertainties brought about by AI. 

Yet his message was ultimately an optimistic one. Today's Frees also have access to tools that our generation could never have imagined: almost unlimited knowledge, global communities and the ability to learn, create, publish and build things from almost anywhere. 

In other words, today's young people may have inherited bigger problems than we did, but they have also inherited much more powerful tools with which to tackle them. Fifty years ago, our generation walked out of Penang Free School into our world. Now it is the turn of today's Frees. "Go out and make your world a better world," was his parting advice.