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Does Singapore have a world-class education system? Its top rankings in the PISA and TIMSS student achievement tests certainly suggest so. Such results and much foreign praise have given Singapore a global reputation for education excellence. Many in the education field believe Singapore provides an education model for the world. Others would disagree. Singapore's Education System, Myth and Reality probes the city-state's claims to educational excellence. It questions the accuracy of the PISA and TIMSS tests and considers how well Singapore's elitist pressure-cooker education system serves the national interest. How well does this system advance the country's founding principles of meritocracy and equality of opportunity? The book also compares the scholastic performance of Singapore and Finland, another high-regarded education super-star. It shows how both countries are pawns in a global contest between the corporate-driven education reform movement and those who oppose it. The book concludes by assessing Singapore's Boston-of-the-East ambitions and its strategy to become a world education hub by attracting foreign universities, academics and students. Questions of academic freedom are considered. Th e controversial decision by Yale to establish a college with the National University of Singapore is also discussed.
This is the second edition of the highly successful book first published in 1989. However, it has been extensively revised in content and updated: Eight out of 14 chapters are new including chapters such as The Constitutional Framework of Powers, Alternative Dispute Resolution, and The Singapore Legal System and International Law; and the law on all subjects has been updated.
A critique of Singapore's claims to having a world-class education system.
Singapore under the ruling People’s Action Party government has been categorized as a developmental state which has utilized education as an instrument of its economic policies and nation-building agenda. However, contrary to accepted assumptions, the use of education by the state to promote economic growth did not begin with the coming to power of the People’s Action Party in 1959. In Singapore, the colonial state had been using education to meet the demands of its colonial economy well before the rise of the post-independence developmental state. Education, Industrialization and the End of Empire in Singapore examines how the state’s use of education as an instrument of economic policy had its origins in the colonial economy and intensified during the process of decolonization. By covering this process the history of vocational and technical education and its relationship with the economy is traced from the colonial era through to decolonization and into the early postcolonial period.
Not much has been written about the private education sector in Singapore despite the fact that the sector houses about 300 private education institutions (PEIs) and enrolls about 150,000 students. Private Education in Singapore: Contemporary Issues and Challenges is an exciting book that aims to fill a gap in the literature. In the book, the author offers an extensive discussion on (i) the key elements of the sector — types and features of the PEIs, (ii) the regulatory framework for private education, (iii) students' aspiration and the impact of the ASPIRE report on PEIs, and (iv) the provision of external degree programme through transnational partnership. The book also tackles the hotly debated discussion in relation to academic quality and standard of PEI courses. The author identifies the reasons — some of them have more characteristics of a myth — and suggests a number of ways to overcome the issues and challenges.
This volume presents how high performing education systems over the world are constantly innovating their educational policies to nurture their citizens for the challenges of the future economy and the anticipation of the unknown. This volume includes a state-of-the-art review of the literature in this field, several commissioned focal chapters focusing on the distinctive case of Singapore and internationally commissioned chapters of several other accomplished education systems around the world. A comparative study of Singapore against other high performing education systems is included to provide greater insights to the possible applications to other education systems.
School improvement that is reliant on accountability is a myth based upon falsehoods and wrong assumptions. Public educations' increased dependence on this foundation for school reform and change has failed both students and teachers. The fact remains that people who create education policy do not understand what is best for individual students and classrooms. Their devised curriculum standards are, in actuality, curriculum limits that prevent students from creating successful personal and academic futures because they thwart any natural learning exploration. As such, these market-inspired, externally-motivated standards limit higher-level learning. Instead of treating students and teachers as subjects to be actively engaged in learning, accountability systems treat students and teachers like objects to be manipulated by training. By presenting the lead-teach-learn triad, Eric Glover's The Myth of Accountability discusses the pitfalls of accountability systems in schools, while also investigating how schools have somehow managed to improve in spite of their negative influences. In order to evolve school reform, Glover introduces the concept of developmental empowerment in order to frame how school participants must view themselves as perpetually changing learners and systematically update school reform. Through open inquiry, Glover encourages educators to challenge the standardization and accountability practices that limit children's futures.
The central place of ?text? as a means of organising language in order to construct what people come to think of as ?knowledge? is a phenomenon affecting all educators, students, and citizens of modern societies. This volume offers various voices and perspectives including those of Ron Carter and Michael Halliday on the role of text in education and society. The chapters on text in education explore some ways in which texts can create bonds or raise barriers between educational knowledge and common-sense knowledge, while the chapters on text in society focus on how personalities and societies are themselves constructed through texts. Learning to unpack texts, and to consider alternatives, is a crucial goal for education and growth, especially so in the context of fast-changing contemporary societies.This book should be of special interest to educators, students of language, and readers interested in the dynamic relationship between text, education and society.
Education has always been a key instrument of nation-building in new states. National education systems have typically been used to assimilate immigrants; to promote established religious doctrines; to spread the standard form of national languages; and to forge national identities and national cultures. They helped construct the very subjectivities of citizenship, justifying the ways of the state to the people and the duties of the people to the state. In this second edition of his seminal and widely-acclaimed book on the origins of public education in England, France, Prussia, and the USA, Andy Green shows how education has also been used as a tool of successful state formation in the developmental states of East Asia. While human capital theories have focused on how schools and colleges supply the skills for economic growth, Green shows how the forming of citizens and national identities through education has often provided the necessary condition for both economic and social development.
SINGAPORE AND EAST ASIA----CELEBRATING GLOBALIZATION AND EMERGENCE OF A POST-MODERN ASIAN CIVILIZATION The economic achievements of peoples bear a close relationship with their cultures and level of development of their civilization. Until the 16th century, the major world civilizations were similar in stage of development in being feudalistic, authoritarian and religious. Since then with the Enlightenment, the age of Reason and the control of nature through mastery of science, Western civilization has taken a quantum leap in creating the modern industrial world and achieved wealth through colonization and globalization. In stagnating for centuries, Asians paid dearly at the feet of Western hegemony. Nevertheless, through the embrace of techno-science whilst retaining traditional values, Asians are now catching up fast. East Asians have happily discovered that practicing their cultural heritage of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism has been to their advantage. This thesis has been reinforced by Communist Chinas phenomenal success in the global economy. At the same time East Asia has found cultural consonance with the philosophy of Constructive post-modernism. This has been a movement in the West which questions the precepts of modernism, its materialism and lack of spirituality, its failure to achieve harmony in society and amongst nations, and its excessive exploitation of Mother Nature. Constructive post-modernism movement has placed its biggest hope in the harmonious rise of Marxist China. An East Asian champion of globalization has been Singapore. Initially thought too small to exist as a country, Singapore has surprised in reaching the ranks of a global city well within a life span. SINGAPORE----Celebrating globalization and fusion of civilizations Singapore is currently ranked 7th in position as a global city, joining in wealth and influence New York, London and Tokyo. Caux Round Table, a global index of social capital in 2009 ranked Singapore 14th among 200 countries. Singapore was top in Asia and ahead of the United States and Britain. Singapores exciting fusion of Western and Asian civilizations started in 1819 when the British East India Company set up a trading post at the sparsely populated island off the Southern tip of Malaya at the strategic Straits of Malacca. When colonial initiatives made Malaya into the worlds biggest producer of rubber and tin, the port city grew into the New York of Malaya. Following the usual rhetoric of newly independent countries against colonial exploitation, the Republic of Singapore was pragmatic in remaining closely aligned to the Western world. The elevation of English to be the first language of instruction in all schools not only helped unify multi-lingual Singapore, but also facilitated linkage with the global economy and progress in techno-science. English speaking workers together with other positive factors such as hard work ethics, freedom from labor strikes and corruption attracted MNC investment. Since the 1960s Singapore has become the biggest MNC hub in the world. In 2007, over 7000 foreign companies account for $15 billion or 85% of fixed asset investment and 44.5% of the GDP. Besides MNCs, Western talents in top level management, finance, academia and research have all been recruited. International Advisory Panels (IAP) continue to assist Government and statutory bodies. Unlike much of Asia, a key element in Singapores success has been winning the war against corruption through political will, tough anti-corruption laws and paying ministers and civil servants well. Transparency International has consistently ranked island-State as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. The livability of Singapore has for past decades been significantly improved by clearance of slumps, clean tree-lined and crime-free streets, decent housing, and access to high quality education and healthcare. Architectural legacy