SkillsFuture, total education, and the colonization of everyday life in Singapore

• In Event: Affordances and Architectures: A Materialist Approach to Digital Design 2

Abstract

Singapore is a neoliberal developmental state that has viewed education as essential for nation building, social cohesion, and perpetual economic growth (Koh, 2007). SkillsFuture is a national program in Singapore designed to “empower every Singaporean to plan their education and training into their working life” (http://www.skillsfuture.sg/). The MySkillsFuture website is featured as a one-stop education, training and career guidance online portal. This paper analyses the MySkillsFuture portal as a digital object, and situates SkillsFuture in Singapore’s educational, historical, political, economic and ideological contexts. Following a postcolonial STS approach (Anderson & Adams, 2007; Suchman, 2011), we examine the portal not simply as a digital text or director of traffic, but as a site of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007), where online procedures are used persuasively to shape neoliberal subjectivities through everyday enactment and reiteration (Suchman, 2005). We consider the extent to which skills development, lifelong education and career development goals and initiatives constitute forms of governmentality (Ball, 2005) that create a disciplined society and workforce appealing to global capital, and through which subjects can carry out government policies and be governed (Foucault, 1991). We also examine what is excluded and invisibilized: skills to address pressing global issues (e.g. inequality, poverty or sustainability) or for understanding the world, others, power, etc., except perhaps as instrumental skills that support “industries” and economic growth. As such, the digital portal serves as a location of recontextualized colonial discourses (Philip, 2010, 2016).

Authors

• Mark Baildon, Nanyang Technological University

• Roberto de Roock, Nanyang Technological University