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Abstract
In this article I first discuss how in Singapore the concept of meritocracy captures both elitist and egalitarian aspirations, and the ways in which its education policies have for a long time vacillated between these conflicting dimensions. I then argue that critical studies of meritocracy need to go beyond an understanding of the term as an inherently unstable concept instantiated problematically in policy and practice. Rather, as I develop the argument further, the dynamics of meritocracy needs to be appreciated as an ideology that is negotiated by dominant social groups as these seek to legitimize particular distributions of social resources. Such dominant ideologies, however, are not only produced in the education system; they are also reproduced through it, often in far more complex ways. To see how these ideologies and their tensions animate the very mechanism that sits at the centre of the reproduction of (in)equality, viz. the curriculum, the rest of the article provides an account of how one particular subject area is differently taught in an elite and a mainstream school.
Notes
1. As Barr (Citation1999) notes, in Singapore the notion of IQ as a major determinant of ‘talent’ has been heavily influenced by its founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s views on eugenics.
2. Indeed, in a recent poll by a major local newspaper, 82% of students from these schools admitted to having no close friends of other races (Yong & Zaccheus, Citation2012).
3. Members of Lee Kuan Yew’s cabinet had since distanced themselves from these remarks, urging the public to put them ‘in perspective’ (Ibrahim, quoted in Hoe, Citation2011).
4. Although a separate gifted track was still in place at the primary level.
5. See, for example, Freire’s (Citation1970) writings on ‘false generosity’.
6. Pseudonyms are used for the names of both schools.
7. As the head of the philosophy department acknowledges, these standards are drawn from the work of Paul and Elder (Citation2005).
8. This is adapted from Mathew Lipman’s (Citation2003) Philosophy for Children program.
9. At the upper secondary level (grades 9 and 10), such peer assessments are conducted up to four times a year.
10. To be sure, the discussion presents how critical thinking – not discrete academic subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, social studies, etc. – is conceptualized and taught across the two schools. Insofar as such knowledge is differently organized between the schools, then this (classificatory) difference constitutes a crucial feature of the cases and deserves analysis. In my interviews with the philosophy teachers at Queen’s High, they talked about how the critical thinking skills established in the philosophy lessons were subsequently drawn upon by other academic subjects. But even if we were to suppose that critical thinking as taught in these subjects at Queen’s High were to go on in instrumental ways (similar to how it was taught at Valley Point Secondary), there remains an important point to be made. For if this were the case, then students at Queen’s High would have available to them two pedagogic codes related to critical thinking: a ‘sacred’ or autonomous form of critical thinking delivered through philosophy, and a ‘profane’ or instrumental conception used in the academic subjects. (Whereas students at Valley Point Secondary would only have access to one code.) Bernstein’s (Citation1990) discussion of the priority rules that identify which social and pedagogic interactions require which forms of critical thinking (as well as the privileges attached to these) becomes especially relevant here.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leonel Lim
Leonel Lim is 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).