Critical Thinking and State Ideologies: The Politics of Pedagogic Recontextualization in Singapore

• In Event: 63.068 - Asia as Method: Interreferencing Discourses of Culture, Politics, and Hegemony in Asia

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
In concert with Singapore’s ambitions of a global city well-engineered to the human capital needs of the knowledge economy, its schools have recently emphasized the teaching of critical thinking. Such efforts, however, are not without tensions and contradictions. Given that such a curricular ideal is underpinned by liberal discourses of democracy and autonomy, what form does it assume in a one-party state with a deliberately weak and underdeveloped language of individual rights? In a “meritocratic” and highly stratified education system, what are the tensions involved in now teaching all students what has traditionally been classified as “high-status” knowledge? This paper explores how the teaching of critical thinking in Singapore is regulated by the twin state ideologies of anti-liberalism and meritocracy.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws upon Bernstein’s (1990) writings on pedagogic recontextualization and the relations between knowledge, curricular form and ideology. For Bernstein, the ways in which the curriculum is structured and presented are emblematic of particular visions of social order, particular identities and practices that are acceptable (or not), and particular agents who work at maintaining and legitimizing all this (Apple, 2014).

Methods of Analysis
Central to Bernstein’s framework are the analytic concepts of classification and frame. Classification refers to the construction and maintenance of boundaries between the categories of the curriculum. Frames refer to the degree of control teachers and pupils possess over the knowledge transmitted in the pedagogical relationship. These constructs are used to analyse and code how critical thinking is (i) conceptualized at the level of state policy by the Ministry of Education, and (ii) subsequently embodied in the curricula of an elite and a mainstream school. Fairclough’s (2001) insights on critical discourse analysis and how texts mediate and construct reality are complementary here.

Data Sources
More than 20 policy documents and press releases from the Ministry of Education over the last five years are analyzed. In addition, classroom observations of critical thinking lessons and interviews were conducted with teachers over a school term in two secondary schools.

Substantiated Conclusions
The paper argues that through a hegemonic climate of high-stakes examinations, the state discourse on critical thinking confines the subject to a set of skills narrowly rooted in an instrumental (means-end) rationality, so that Western/wider ideals of autonomy become evacuated. Furthermore, given Singapore’s highly stratified education system and society, the teaching of critical thinking involves distinct competencies and identities for its elite and mainstream students (Beck, 2002); the former are socialized into a “sacred” sense of thinking as noblesse oblige, while for the latter the subject remains closely tied to “profane” economic exigencies.

Significance
By shoring up how multiple axes of political ideology, national ambitions and history are complicit in an Asian nation’s recontextualization of an essentially Western educational ideal, this paper adds to the emerging – and increasingly inter-referencing (Chen, 2010) – literature from the global South and East on how education systems in these places are simultaneously embracing but also resisting globalizing pressures that seek to define what knowledge is of the most worth.

Author

• Leonel Tze-Wei Lim, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University