Elite rationalities and curricular form: “Meritorious” class reproduction in the elite thinking curriculum in Singapore

Abstract

While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedagogic codes, this paper depicts how one of the most high-status forms of school knowledge – critical thinking – is taught in both an elite as well as a mainstream secondary school in Singapore. It argues that even as, or more accurately, precisely because the Singapore Ministry of Education emphasizes the teaching of critical thinking in all schools and to all students, how such knowledge is presented and performed in the school curriculum becomes crucial in differentiating elites from mainstream students. Findings suggest that whereas the pedagogic codes in the mainstream school remain oriented towards an instrumental rationality and the fulfillment of external and profane market exigencies, in the elite school they invoke a rationality that is inward-looking, personalized and that encourages the development of narcissistic, sacred identities. This paper concludes by considering how curricular form itself functions as a non-neutral mechanism for the transmission of educational knowledge, and the ways in which, in Singapore's highly stratified society where meritocracy functions as a key principle of governance, the elite identities that accrue from such a curricular form further entrench the political legitimacy of a “meritorious” class.

Keywords:

• elite schooling
• curriculum
• cultural reproduction
• knowledge
• Basil Bernstein
• Singapore

Notes

1. See also Durkheim (1915).

2. See, for example, the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Drucker, 2012; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2013).

3. That this is so cannot be further from the truth; recent research has revealed a “long tail” in Singapore's achievement indices (Teh, 2014).

4. The political rhetoric that accompanied the reduced curriculum was that the weakest students should be served “half a loaf [as] a whole loaf will choke” (Goh, 1979, p. 6).

5. About 60% of each cohort are tracked into the Express route, 30% into the Normal (Academic), and 10% into the Normal (Technical) (Ministry of Education, 2013a).

6. See, for example, Ministry of Education (2013b).

7. Indeed, it is worth stressing “apparent,” because in either case the concept of framing points to and provides an important index of the ever-present regulation of relations within contexts.

8. See Lim (2015) for a detailed discussion of the research methodology and data analysis.

9. Like almost all schools in Singapore, both Valley Point Secondary and Queen's High are public schools. This means that they are funded by the Singapore government and have their curricula and school activities closely monitored by the MOE. As we discuss later, however, Queen's High's special status as an independent school affords it relatively greater autonomy over a range of curricular and administrative matters.

10. Individual teachers in public schools are not in a position to give their consent to participate in research. Any request for research participants would have to be made through the school leaders, who would first decide on whether the school would be involved before deciding which teachers would be selected. Having said this, we are also acutely aware of the possibility that participants selected by their superiors may perceive the research collaboration as being imposed onto them. While there is no obvious way to circumvent this concern, we have sought to alleviate the risks to the participants involved by personally assuring them on the first meeting that their participation is entirely voluntary and that they will not be discriminated against if and when they should decide to opt out of the research. This was communicated both verbally as well as in writing in the participant consent forms, copies of which are retained by the participants themselves.

11. Teachers and schools retain some flexibility and autonomy in decisions over how the contents of the given syllabuses are to be taught, as well as in the design and development of curricular programs that would better enable students to achieve these standards. In saying this, however, it should also be noted that the intensifying focus on test scores brought about by the prevailing conditions of school marketization has greatly limited the ways in which such discretion is exercised by schools (see, for example, Lim & Tan, 1999).

12. As the head of the philosophy department acknowledges, these standards are drawn from the work of Paul and Elder (2005). While there are routine class tests and end-of-year grades are provided for philosophy, the subject does not feature on the national high stakes examinations.

13. This is adapted from Mathew Lipman's (2003) Philosophy for Children program.

14. At the upper secondary level (grades 9 and 10) this peer assessment is conducted up to four times a year.

15. For an overview of the literature on the infusion and immersion approaches, see Paul (2011); also Ennis (1989), McPeck (1992a, 1992b), Prawat (1991) and Scheffler (1973). In examining curricular form our focus in this article has been on what is sometimes referred to as the circuit of curriculum production (the processes through which the curriculum is conceptualized, developed and subsequently presented in classrooms), rather than its counterpart – that of curriculum reception (how students navigate, internalize, or resist the intended curriculum) (see, for example, Apple, 1986). While we have not presented data on the latter, our argument has been that the forms of the curriculum, themselves drawn from the institutional and ideological contexts of the respective schools, have already circumscribed the range of possibilities and positions from which students could relate to the curriculum. Curricular form thus constitutes the terra firma upon which we may begin to approach questions involving students’ reception of such curricula.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonel Lim

Leonel Lim is an assistant professor of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research focuses on curriculum theory and the politics of education, with specific interests in the relations between ideology and curriculum, the socio-political assumptions of critical thinking and rationality, elite schooling and the sociology of curriculum. He is the author of Knowledge, Control and Critical Thinking in Singapore (Routledge, 2015). Among his current projects include a forthcoming edited volume (with Michael W. Apple) titled The Strong State and Curriculum Reform (Routledge).

Michael W. Apple

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. A former primary and secondary school teacher and a past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educators, unions, dissident groups, and governments throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice. Among his many books are Ideology and Curriculum, Education and Power, Teachers and Texts, Official Knowledge, and The State and the Politics of Knowledge. He has been selected as one of the most influential writers on education in the 20th century, and Ideology and Curriculum has been voted as one of the top 20 books in the history of western education.