Towards a transnational model of critical values education: the case for literature education in Singapore

Abstract

Once regarded as the most essential subject in the national curriculum vital for civilizing the public, English Literature has now lost its place of prominence. In this paper, I focus on Singapore where the subject was a core aspect of the colonial curriculum and where it is currently facing declining enrolment at the national examinations. In the first part of the paper, I discuss how Literature initially functioned to propagate colonial values education in Singapore and how, following Singapore's independence, its goals were overtaken by a nation-state model of values education. Limitations of this model provide the grounds for a transnational model of critical values education that, as I argue in the second part, may be powerfully conveyed through Literature. It is Literature's capacity to facilitate transnational critical engagements with values and explorations of identity especially involving highly sensitive aspects related to gender, race, and religion that represents the strongest justification in the light of its present demise. What Literature offers is the possibility of engaging with values beyond the confines of Empire or nation by grappling with essential questions about what it means to be a cosmopolitan as opposed to a nationalistic citizen inhabiting the world.

Keywords::

• literature education
• globalization and English
• values education
• Singapore
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

^1. While Religious Studies was once an effective tool to pacify the masses, growing cynicism of the church and clergy meant that the state had to look for an alternative quasi-religious secular subject which was found in English Literature (Eagleton, 1996).

^2. Scholars have criticized Kachru's model for centring and hence reproducing the hegemony of inner circle “native English-speaking” countries thus discounting global and ideological forces driving normative conceptions of English (Graddol, 2006; Park & Wee, 2009; Pennycook, 2007).

^3. The 2012 figures cited refer to the percentage of students who took the GCE ‘O’ level and ‘N’ level Literature in English exams as full subjects. Additionally, 9% and 3.5% respectively took the exams as elective subjects (Heng, 2013). In the case of an elective subject, as opposed to a full subject, content is reduced by about half so that students are assessed on one Literature paper instead of two.

^4. Since 1959, there have been numerous experiments at designing an effective programme from an original Ethics course in 1959 which was then replaced by Civics in 1963. This was re-designed 10 years later into “Education for Living”, an interdisciplinary programme at the elementary school (Chew, 1998). Following the 1978 Goh report, another attempt was made to revamp the entire subject through two programmes – the “Good Citizen” programme taught in Chinese, Malay, and Tamil languages and the “Being and Becoming” programme taught in English and Chinese (Tan, 1994). These programmes were replaced by Religious Knowledge in 1984 and when Religious Knowledge was found to incite social divisiveness, the state reverted to a secular moral education programme.