Critical thinking and the anti-liberal state: the politics of pedagogic recontextualization in Singapore

Abstract

In concert with Singapore's ambitions of a global city well engineered to the human capital needs of the transnational knowledge economy, its schools in recent years have 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 dominant 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 teaching all students what has traditionally been classified as “high-status” knowledge? This article draws upon Basil Bernstein's writings on pedagogic recontextualization and the relations between knowledge, curricular form, and ideology to examine the politics of teaching critical thinking in Singapore. Specifically, using ethnographic classroom data from a public secondary school, it details the processes involved in delocating critical thinking from its liberal underpinnings and relocating it as instrumental knowledge, the modes of pedagogic communication involved in the recontextualization, as well as how teachers and students negotiate and even resist these meanings. The article concludes with a number of observations on the politics of curriculum change in anti-liberal states.

Keywords:

• politics of curriculum
• Singapore
• anti-liberalism
• critical thinking
• curriculum change

Notes

1. Earlier iterations of such an ideal are found in the 1997 Thinking Schools, Learning Nation initiative (Lim, 2013a).

2. http://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore, accessed 1 May 2014.

3. http://www.edb.gov.sg/content/edb/en/why-singapore/about-singapore/facts-and-rankings/rankings.html, accessed 1 May, 2014.

4. See, for example, the recent data on the program for International Student Assessment and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

5. In connection with such a reading of “rights,” the government has emphasized the equality of (racial) groups over the equality of individuals. One notes as well that the notion and category of each group is also politically and discursively constructed.

6. Fraser's (1987) insights into the politics of needs and needs interpretation are crucial here in understanding how dominant groups often play upon the good sense of dominated groups by meting out the safest reforms.

7. See Young (2009) for a restatement of esoteric/mundane knowledge as powerful knowledge/knowledge of the powerful.

8. In saying this, it should not be romanticized that liberal states are necessarily wedded to the ideal of critical thinking. As a recent and interesting case in point drawn from the USA, the Republican Party of Texas declared in their 2012 political platform their party's opposition to the teaching of critical thinking in all schools in the state – a subject that they claim carries the “purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority” (Republican Party of Texas, 2012, p. 12).

9. These refer to the relations between ruler and ruled, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, and between friends. Both the order in which these relations are listed and the gender specificity of their referents are not inconsequential.

10. Indeed, it is worth stressing “apparent” because in either case, the concept of framing points to an important index of the ever-present regulation of relations within contexts.

11. The following discussion reports from a larger set of data collected over the months of June–September 2011 on how critical thinking is taught and conceptualized in Singapore schools. In the case of Valley Point Secondary, whereupon this discussion is based, this involved interviews and observations of lessons with five teachers in the school. The data was analyzed and coded using prefigured codes drawn from Bernstein's (1990, 2000) conceptual framework of classification and frames. For a more detailed discussion see Lim (2013c).

12. Depending on their academic track, students enroll into either a four-year program culminating in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) “Ordinary” Level examinations or a five-year program that leads to the GCE “Normal” Level examinations. See later discussion.

13. The most widely circulated newspaper in Singapore, The Straits Times has been considered by some observers to be state-controlled (George, 2012).

14. For a further treatment of this, see Lim and Apple (forthcoming).