Globalization, the strong state and education policy: the politics of policy in Asia

Abstract

Much of the scholarship around the workings of education policy has focused on the global West and has taken for granted the state’s limited abilities in the control of policies as both text and discourse. Drawing upon policy texts from the Singapore Ministry of Education and ethnographic data collected in a Singapore school, this paper explores the enlarged but by no means unproblematic role of strong states and their provision and regulation of education policy in Asia. The paper begins by providing an overview of the major emphases and research trajectories taken up by the field of education policy. This is followed by an elaborated account of the nature and politics of the strong state in Asia in general and particularly in Singapore. These theoretical and contextual remarks then pave the way for a closer look at how the Singapore state functions as a major mediator and recontextualizing agent of education policy. The discussion foregrounds the enlarged role of the state in prescribing, translating, and regulating how a national curriculum policy on critical thinking finds its way into the practice of local schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with a number of remarks on the deparochialization of research and how recent work on ‘Asia as method’ may provide a fortuitous approach to critiquing hegemonic systems of knowledge production.

Keywords:

• Bernstein
• globalization
• policy sociology
• Singapore
• state

Notes

1. See Angus (2015), Apple (2006), Au (2016), Rowe and Windle (2012), and others for discussions of how in the US and Australia the federal control of new nation-wide assessments, funding policies, and/or new national curriculums have assumed such neoliberal forms.

2. See for example, Mulcahy’s (2015, 2016) work utilizing the analytic of ‘assemblage’ to understand how schools in Victoria, Australia are enacting – often in seemingly paradoxical ways – state policies that call for ‘flexible’ and ‘open’ learning spaces and facilities.

3. There are of course considerable ideological differences within the liberal camp; yet in committing themselves to various interpretations of these central tenets, the discourse and rhetoric of the vast number of liberal positions constitute a significant counterpoint to the political ideology in many parts of Asia.

4. For an extended account of how the Mandarin notion of guomin connects to the Japanese notion of kokumin and is used in both Chinese nationalist discourse and Korean and Japanese political circles, see Chen (2010, 283, fn.14).

5. http://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore, accessed 20 January 2016.

6. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/nus-retains-top-spot-ntu/1903968.html, accessed 20 January 2016.

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

8. It should also be recognized that insofar as the account of rationality presented here centers on abstraction, logic, and argument analysis, it has not gone uncontested. Among others, feminists theorists have sought to demonstrate a gender bias in thinking so conceived, charging that it privileges logic over intuition and empathy; it deals with abstract, intellectual principles while neglecting or downplaying the emotions; and it is aggressive and confrontational rather than collegial and collaborative (Hooks 2010; Martin 1992; Noddings 1984; Thayer-Bacon 2010). As the charge continues, such notions of rationality are rooted in a Western European version of masculinity, one that assumes the potential of humans to create a social order based on abstract, formal principles (Pateman 1988). For further discussions see Lim (2011, 2014b), Arnot & Dillabough (1999) and Yuval-Davis (1997).

9. 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 US, 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, 12).

10. 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.

11. http://www.moe.gov.sg/about/org-structure/cpdd/. Accessed 20 January 2016.

12. See George (2012), for example, who considers the most widely circulated English newspaper in Singapore, The Straits Times, to be state-controlled.