Constructing the cosmopolitan subject: teaching secondary school literature in Singapore

Abstract

This article discusses the ambitious educational reforms of the Singapore government in response to the challenges of globalization vis-à-vis the specific issues arising from the case of teaching Literature in secondary schools. It shows how the Singapore state is invested in a particular view of globalization and argues how recent scholarly moves to recuperate the notion of cosmopolitanism may provide an alternative view. Turning to cosmopolitanism as an intellectual and ethical goal when considering curricular changes to Literature may also help revitalize the subject and garner a more significant role for it in the scripting of Singapore as a nation and global city for the future.

Keywords:

• literature education
• secondary schools
• Singapore
• globalization
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

1. I capitalize the “l” in “Literature” when referring to it as a subject in Singapore schools.

2. It remains to be seen whether this recent move to include Singapore writing will eventually lead to a higher take-up rate for the subject.

3. Mission schools in Singapore traditionally refer to the missionary schools set up in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Christian missionaries representing the different Christian denominations. Today, these schools are part of the wider national school system; they are allowed to conduct prayers and provide religious instruction unlike other government schools which must be secular.

4. The English Language Syllabus 2010 may nevertheless have at least an indirect impact on literature education eventually as it makes a more explicit move to encourage the use of literary texts to impart language competency and fluency. Complementing the syllabus, the STELLAR (Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading) programme also seeks to broaden and intensify young students' experience of language by employing an array of reading material including more children's literature.

5. In Singapore's case, it is symptomatic of the peculiar invisibility that has dogged secondary school literature, that it is often not automatically seen as part of the Humanities. History and geography tend to assume the mantle of the Humanities more comfortably than literature, which sometimes falls through the gap between language and the Humanities, overlooked in subject descriptions and school department organizations – all bureaucratic arrangements which nevertheless reflect and perpetuate a particular compartmentalization of knowledge. I am grateful to my colleague, C.J. Wan-ling Wee, for highlighting this point.

6. Here is a sample of the Literature texts currently on the list: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Anita Desai's Games at twilight, Witi Ihimaera's Whale rider, Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird, Daren Shiau's Heartland, and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Note that the syllabus document does not spell out its principles of text selection.

7. Gunther Kress has also argued for an English curriculum that gives students “certain dispositions: confident in the face of difference – cultural, linguistic, ethnic, ethical – and confident in the everyday experience of change; able to see change and difference as entirely usual conditions of cultural and social life; and to see them as essential productive resources” (1995, p. 3).

8. Heartland is a Singaporean coming-of-age novel by Daren Shiau where the main protagonist, Wing, negotiates his emerging adult identity and sense of self in relation to the public housing or “heartland” neighbourhood of his childhood and a changing circle of friends.