Toward a cosmopolitan vision of English education in Singapore

Abstract

English education has played a vital role in facilitating Singapore's global city ambitions since the country's independence. While the state has prioritized English education's cognitive objective emphasizing information processing and effective communication skills, it has given insufficient attention to the role of English in equipping students with the necessary cosmopolitan capacities. The first part of this paper discusses the roots of a communicative cosmopolitan impulse in language through the works of key philosophers, namely Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. The second part analyzes English Language and Literature in English national syllabuses from the 1980s to the present to show how English education has been directed by strategic cosmopolitanism operating through selective governmental strategies of differentiation and prioritization. Given the realities of an increasingly networked world, I argue, in the third part, for a more holistic perspective of English education grounded on a communicative cosmopolitan intent.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• Emmanuel Levinas
• English education
• global education
• Jürgen Habermas
• Singapore

Notes

1. I capitalize the term Literature to refer to the subject Literature in English.

2. Elsewhere, I have provided a comprehensive critique of the hegemony of subjectivity and experience in reader response approaches to teaching literature. See Choo (2013).

3. In his distinction between and the “saying” and the “said,” Levinas (1974/1998) warns that language can be utilized as a means to objectify the other. The “said” refers to what has been socially and culturally determined through linguistic signs and symbols. Levinas describes the “saying” as that originary force in language that calls us to respond to the other out of ethical responsibility.

4. Among key scholars who have contributed to the development of a philosophy of aesthetic in the eighteenth century was Immanuel Kant (1790/1987) who, in his seminal work Critique of Judgement, made the claim that the “beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” (sec. 353, p. 228). Kant went on to argue that the beautiful in nature, art, and the sublime pushes the individual away from sensuous inclinations toward a contemplation of the super-sensible. For further discussion of the moral basis of aesthetic education, see Choo (in press).