Nature, disappeared: anti-environmental values in Singapore’s history textbooks, 1984–2015

Abstract

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray humans in Singapore as isolated from, rather than depending on and entangled with, the environment. We describe and analyze two trends. First, narratives about the nonhuman environment are largely relegated to Singapore’s past and disappear almost entirely as textbook narratives approach the present. Second, history narratives represent narrowly utilitarian, negativistic, and dominionistic perspectives of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. We contextualize these results and discuss the implications of teaching such narrow and misleading conceptions of human–environment interactions in official history education.

Keywords:

• Singapore
• history narratives
• textbooks
• national education
• curriculum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their gratitude and acknowledge the generous assistance of Amiya Kalra, Choy Jiayu, Elwin Lim, Jay Wong, Jessica Hanser, Madeline Tan, Melody Tay, Michael Maniates, Rachel Chew, Rachel Ooi, Ruchika Goel, Ryan Yoong, and the anonymous referees.

Disclosure statement

No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Notes

1 The CPDD was formerly known as the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore (CDIS).

2 History education was not standardized until the 1980s. After independence, Singapore history was taught in only one segment of textbooks that covered world history and the history of larger nations and entities, and as an elective subject at the upper secondary level (Lee 2015, 138–9).

3 77% of species in Singapore are considered ‘threatened’, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (Brook, Sodhi, and Ng 2003, 422). Local marine biodiversity is also endangered by extensive and continuing land reclamation around Singapore’s coastline (Friess 2017, 285).

4 We count it as “one page” of environmental discussion when the human-environment interaction portrayed is among the salient points of a page. In concrete terms, these interactions were described with at least one sentence spanning two lines in a page, due to the typically large font sizes used in textbooks. Narratives in which the environment was present, but without humans, would also have counted as “environmental pages,” but none were found.

5 Phrases that helped us categorize each passage as a specific value are italicized.

6 The Orang Laut is a sea-faring proto-Malay group indigenous to Singapore and the Straits of Johor.

7 Attap houses refer to traditional housing found in the villages of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

8 “Kampong” means “village” in Malay.

9 “Kerbau” means “buffalo” in Malay.

10 Total environmental pages divided by total pages, by historical period.

11 Historians of Singapore tend to categorize the post-war years into pre-independence (1945–1965) and post-independence years (post-1965). However, given the sparse number of environmental pages in the pre-independence years, we decided that it did not warrant a periodization of its own and used a broader “post-war” periodization.

12 Readers might note an association of “environment-related” products and occupations with specific ethnic groups in colonial Singapore. The Chinese grew export-oriented crops, the Orang Laut gathered products from the sea, while the Malays did the “drudgery required to clear land.” Miles Powell (2016) cited the British writer T. Oxley and engineer J. Thomson who informed aspiring white farm owners that the Chinese were “the best field labourers,” while the Malays were naturally fitted for clearing forests. Powell found that colonists “constructed categories of Otherness,” with ideas concerning innate aptitudes, to justify pre-existing divisions of labor (464–467). This environment-related construction of ethnicity remains relevant, given the way Singapore’s historical multicultural communities are introduced by their occupations within history textbooks. For instance, Chinese agriculturalists continue to be seen as playing the greatest role in transforming Singapore’s environment.

13 Small-scale family farms that grew a variety of crops including sweet potato, plantain, corn, yam, cabbage, lettuce, and fruits were considered the “cornerstone of food security” in Singapore, which was “an important ideal in a rapidly decolonizing world.” Chou notes that family farms met 25% of the nation’s vegetable needs in 1984, before being phased out in the late 1980s (Chou 2014, 223, 227, 229, 233).

14 See, for example, Fu (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaoyun Neo

Xiaoyun Neo is a Singapore-based environmental advocate, a graduate of Yale-NUS College, and a policy officer with the Singapore civil service. She is the author of the title chapter in Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore (Ethos Books), and contributed a chapter on the ecological dimensions of fast fashion to Local Encounters in a Global City: Singapore Stories (Ethos Books).

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Humanities (Environmental Studies) at Yale-NUS College. He is the author of Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture (University of Chicago Press), co-editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press), and editor of Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore (Ethos Books).