Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

conflict resolution, reconciliation and mediation seems peculiar (though it is
possible that such missing concepts are discussed in the curricula of other grade
levels not analysed in this study).
Within Southeast Asia perhaps exists the supreme exemplar globally of state
deployment of education for explicitly instrumentalist purposes: Singapore.
Although it did not prove possible to code Singapore’s current policy and
curricular documents for this study, the relationship between education and
the Singaporean ‘developmental state’ is widely acknowledged and debated
(Gopinathan, 2015; Green et al., 2007; Lim, 2016). Singapore’s extraordinary growth
since the 1960s has been attributed to its success in producing ‘human capital’,
and in ‘scaling up’ its quantity and quality to match the needs of an increasingly
sophisticated economy. But this has been accompanied by levels of social
inequality significantly higher than in the developed economies of Northeast Asia
(Japan, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan) — due in part to the highly stratified
and elitist nature of the schooling system. And despite hopes expressed in the
mid-1990s for a more ‘open, participative and consensual’ model of governance
in the post-Lee Kuan Yew era (Gopinathan, 2015,
p. 19), this has yet to materialise. The adoption of
a ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ agenda in
the late 1990s was paralleled by the espousal of
an ideology of ‘Total National Defence’. ‘Skills’ of
creativity or analysis were thus envisaged not as
giving rein to free-wheeling critical debate, but as
competencies to be exercised within state-defined
parameters, for the purposes of maintaining and
reinforcing national strength (Han, 2009). As by
far the most prosperous society in the region,
Singapore has been an influential exemplar of a
highly statist, instrumentalist and economistic
model of educational development.
Singapore’s
extraordinary growth
since the 1960s has
been attributed to its
success in producing
‘human capital’, and in
‘scaling up’ its quantity
and quality to match the
needs of an increasingly
sophisticated economy
Developmental statism of the Singaporean model can be seen as a more
successful, market-oriented variant of the similarly centralised, human capitalfocused
and instrumentalist vision classically associated with Communism. In
the context of its doi moi programme of economic liberalisation (begun in 1986),
the education system of Communist Viet Nam has maintained a strong focus on
chuyen (expertise). The government substantially supports education, allocating
to it a fifth of the national budget in 2010. While the Education Law underlines the
importance of a holistic education, the Education Strategic Development Plan
(ESDP) 2011-2020 looks to ‘achieve rapid and sustainable economic development
associated with transforming the growth model and restructuring the economy
towards higher quality, effectiveness and competitiveness’ (Prime Minister of
the National Assembly of Viet Nam, 2012).
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Chapter 4: Southeast Asia