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This is the final draft, after peer-review, of a manuscript published in Cambridge Journal of Education. The published version is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0305764X.2021.1910204

Empirical policy analyses have hitherto largely focused on how formal institutions and agents (such as schools and ministries) formulate and enact policy. Less considered is the role and perspectiv...

Ideas about merit and the associated notion of a meritocracy have long been drawn upon to frame and understand a range of issues central to education policy. Little attention, however, is given to ...

Drawing upon insights gained from the extant work on culture and pedagogy, this paper explores the ways in which, in an ostensibly meritocratic education system, ideas about students’ cultural back...

In recent decades, nations across Asia have gone through – indeed are going through – massive social, economic, and political transitions (Bell & Li, 2013; Chua, 2010; Lim & Apple, 2016). Governed ...

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundament...

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, transl...

In this article, I examine the extent to which, given how critical thinking has been most commonly conceptualised and taught in schools, the subject indeed develops modes of thinking, relating and reasoning that allow individuals to collectively work towards the appreciation and solution of social problems. In the first section, I outline a number of perspectives among social studies researchers and educators that demonstrate the importance of developing critical thinking capacities in students. This is followed by, in the next section, a close examination of two widely popular approaches through which critical thinking is taught – one in the general school curriculum and the other within social studies lessons. I argue that in their current forms and for a number of reasons these understandings of critical thinking fall short of developing the social and relational dimensions of thinking that are more than a little necessary in fulfilling the raison d’etre of the subject. Towards this end, the final sect...

This chapter first examines how the logic of meritocracy in Singapore vacillates between its elitist and egalitarian dimensions. Drawing upon ethnographic data from an elite and a mainstream school, it then develops an analysis of how one specific area of the curriculum – critical thinking – embodies this tension, specifying distinct knowledges and competencies for different students. The chapter argues that even as critical thinking is taught to all students, what often remains obfuscated are the ways through which the ideology of meritocracy acts to selectively recontextualize both the form and content of the subject in the process of its transmission.

Meritocracy functions in Singapore as the key principle of governance and educational distribution. However, the concept of meritocracy itself contains a number of inherent contradictions, most evidently witnessed in the tension between its egalitarian and elitist strands. This tension is documented in the recommendations of Singapore's recent primary education review, already accepted by the Ministry of Education and to be implemented in the coming years. This article considers these recommendations against the backdrop of a tentative movement towards egalitarianism in educational distribution. Specifically, it provides a preliminary and provisional assessment of how far they would go towards providing for greater educational equity and, therefore, in recovering the ideology of meritocracy in the nation-state.

This article undertakes a critique of the aims and objectives of Thinking Skills, one of the most widely and internationally used curricula in the teaching of thinking, offered by the University of Cambridge International Examinations. By engaging in a critical discourse analysis of how political and class biases are (re-)produced in the forms of thinking that are valued in the classroom, issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality are foregrounded. Specifically, it will be demonstrated that the text engages in the ideological project of shaping our commonsense understandings of what thinking and rationality is and should be, not only in instrumental forms that both connect to neoliberal commitments and privilege a particular fraction of the middle class, but also in ways that evacuate substantive notions of morality, social justice, and the common good from individuals’ deliberations. The article concludes by pointing to alternative conceptualizations of thinking curricula.

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the professed aims and objectives of one of the most influential curricula in the teaching of thinking, this article foregrounds issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality. Specifically, it documents the subtle but powerful ways in which political and class commitments are (re-)produced in the forms of thinking that are valued in schools and societies. Through a nuanced analysis of the language features of the text and the social and political ideologies that underpin it, the article argues that such curricula engage in shaping our common-sense understandings of what thinking and rationality is and should be in instrumental forms that both connect to neoliberal prerogatives and that facilitate the social reproduction of a particular fraction of the middle class.

Singapore schools are increasingly taking up the challenge of developing curricula that would better respond to the needs and interests of their students (see, for example, Ratnam-Lim, Fernandez & Mardiana, 2014). To support this, the focus of a number of leadership and professional development courses has been introducing curriculum theories in equipping school leaders in these efforts. Through a close examination of two such theories and their assumptions of what schools do, this chapter discusses a number of their significant insights, as well as the extent to which they might also speak to different notions and constructions of schools, societies and the curriculum, bearing in mind that these curriculum theories were developed out of contexts in the US and elsewhere, and in response to local social and political conditions. In this chapter, we consider the potential contributions of these theories to curriculum making in Singapore and what practitioners in schools need to do in order to fully benefit from these theories in the context of the local school, drawing from lessons learnt from a case study of how schoolbased curriculum development (SBCD) is carried out in a Singapore school.

Few words in the English language are more complex than culture . Its history is interesting. It derives from “coulter,” a word originally used to name the blade of a plow. Thus, it has its roots literally in the concept of farming – or better yet, “cultivation” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 1). The great British cultural scholar Raymond Williams reminded us that “culture is ordinary.” By this, he meant that there was a danger that by restricting the idea of culture to intellectual life, the arts and “refinement,” we risk excluding the working class, the poor, the culturally disenfranchised, the racialized “Other” and diasporic populations from the category of cultured (Williams, 1958; see also Williams, 1976, 1982).

1.Acknowledgements 2.List of Contributors 3.Chapter 1: Introducing the Strong State and Curriculum Reform in Asia (Leonel Lim and Michael W. Apple) Section One: Ideology and the Strong State: The Tensions and Limits of State Curricular Control 4. Chapter 2: Global City, Illiberal Ideology: Curriculum Control and the Politics of Pedagogy in Singapore (Leonel Lim) 5. Chapter 3: Strong State Politics of the National History Curriculum and Struggles for Knowledge, Ideology, and Power in South Korea (Mi Ok Kang) 6. Chapter 4: Unintended Hegemonic Effects: Institutional Incorporation of Chinese Schools in Postwar Hong Kong (Ting-Hong Wong) Section Two: Praxis and Change: Teachers, Social Movements and Pedagogic Agents 7. Chapter 5: National Education in Hong Kong: Curriculum as a site of struggle between "One Country" and "Two Systems" (Sara G. Lam) 8. Chapter 6: Social Movements and Educational Change in China: The Case of Migrant Children Schools (Min Yu) 9. Chapter 7: The Struggles of Teachers Unions in South Korea and the Politics of Educational Change (Hee-Ryong Kang) Section Three: Globalizing Hegemony: Resisting and Recontextualizing International Reforms 10. Chapter 8: Teach For/Future China and the Politics of Alternative Teacher Certification Programs in China (Christopher B. Crowley) 11. Chapter 9: The Politics of Neoliberal Loanwords in South Korean Cross-National Policy Borrowing (Youl-Kwan Sung) 12. Chapter 10: Provincializing and Globalizing Critical Studies of School Knowledge: Insights from the Japanese History Textbook Controversy over "Comfort Women" (Keita Takayama) 13. Chapter 11: Afterword (Michael W. Apple & Leonel Lim)

It is widely held that, by teaching individuals how to reason through and analyse everyday problems, the teaching of critical thinking develops the deliberative capacities essential to the healthy functioning of democracy. Implicit in this view is the assumption that a certain commensurability exists between the problems presented in such curricula and those that occupy democratic deliberation. In examining one influential critical thinking curriculum, University of Cambridge International Examination’s Thinking Skills, however, this article reveals the contingency of the assumption. With its presentation of problems steeped in discourses of logic and argument analysis, and with little consideration of notions of rightness/wrongness, such a curriculum can only tend towards the development of an instrumental form of rationality that, being morally indifferent and emotionally apathetic, contributes instead to the depoliticization of democracy. Given that the nature of democratic deliberation does not only f...

The teaching of critical thinking has in recent years assumed a central focus across the educational and curricular discourses of developed countries around the world. This chapter examines how the curricular initiative of critical thinking is translated into curricular programmes in Singapore. It suggests that, while in many ways such a discourse embodies the aspirations of a young nation state eager to prepare its citizens for a global economy and a global workforce, its translation into concrete curricular programmes requires a further recontextualization that takes into account a complex set of socio-political ideologies that have for long characterized the nation’s consciousness.