Knowledge, Control and Critical Thinking in Singapore

State ideology and the politics of pedagogic recontextualization

Leonel Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138887480
• eBook ISBN: 9781317499961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación comparada

This book examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of what the influential sociologist of education Basil Bernstein termed "pedagogic recontextualization". The ability of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society is problematized in Singapore's socio-political climate. By examining how such curricular discourses are taken up and enacted in the classrooms of two schools that cater to very different groups in society, the book foregrounds the role of traditional high-status knowledge in the elaboration of class formation and develops a critical understanding of post-developmental state initiatives linked to the parable of modernization in Singapore.

Knowledge, Control and Critical Thinking in Singapore offers chapters on:
• Critical Thinking and the Singapore State: Meritocracy, Illiberalism and Neoliberalism
• Sacred Knowledge and Elite Dispositions: Recontextualizing Critical Thinking in an Elite School
• Power, Knowledge and Symbolic Control: Official Pedagogic Identities and the Politics of Recontextualization

This book will appeal to scholars in comparative education studies, curriculum studies and education reform. It will also interest scholars engaged in Asian studies who are struggling to understand issues of education policy formation and implementation, particularly in the areas of critical thinking and other knowledge skills.

1 Beyond abstraction The social and political contexts of teaching critical thinking

DOI: 10.4324/9781315714097-2

It was a surprise to realize that after graduating from the local university with a degree in philosophy and deciding on becoming a teacher, my only option was to teach primary school students from grades one through six. Never mind that my degree was an Upper Honours. Never mind that I was on the Dean's List every other semester, or that I had received the book prize for philosophy every year in which it was awarded. Never mind that some of the bragging rights lauded upon us as freshly minted philosophy graduates were four years of rigorous training in analytical, critical thinking over some of the most complex and divided issues of our intellectual and social histories. Whereas majors in engineering or in the life sciences had the expanded choice of teaching at the secondary school and junior college levels (grades 7–10 and 11–12 respectively) specializing in the teaching of mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, etc., the application form before me remained grudgingly unequivocal about the options available to graduates in fields of study that were “non-teaching” subjects.¹ Thus began my four years of teaching in a primary school in Singapore, where, as is usually the case elsewhere, I found myself juggling between teaching English language, mathematics, science, social studies, physical education, civic education, home economics, computer literacy, music appreciation, art and craft. . .

Lest I get ahead of myself, let me state at the outset that my reason in rehearsing this personal vignette is not to voice my dissatisfaction with my teaching responsibilities at the primary level. On the contrary, the school at which I taught always seemed to enroll more than its fair share of students from the low-income families that populated the majority rental apartments in the neighborhood, and it was the daily struggles with these young children (and their families), in their very difficult presents and often eclipsed futures, that formed my views on education and the politics of the curriculum in very real and powerful ways. For me, it demonstrated only too vividly the covert connections between the differentiation of knowledge, on the one hand, and the differentiation of power on the other, and opened up the opportunity to understand how curricular euphemisms such as “differentiated instruction” in reality all too often sanctioned the delivery of a set of knowledge (and consciousnesses) that served to further entrench existing social inequalities.

Nor do I wish to suggest that only philosophy graduates are bona fide critical thinkers, or that philosophy and its ascetics occupy a moral high ground in areas of the public sphere that require sustained deliberation and reasoned persuasion. While I have much to say later on about the categories and identities invoked by the subject of philosophy, what needs to be clarified now is that the very notion of critical thinking and the critical thinker stands in need of democratization. Even though, in the course of their studies, philosophy graduates typically become well-versed in explicating and evaluating the inferences embedded within arguments, and even as university philosophy departments often seek to recruit the most pensive of freshmen by promising the opportunity to live an examined, worthwhile life, by no means does it therefore imply that other academic – as well as non-academic – ways of being, understanding, and problematizing the world should or could be glossed over (Langer, 1951; Toulmin, 2001).

Finally, the story with which I began this chapter is not positioned as a prelude to a commentary of my experiences teaching at a primary school, or as a prolegomena to an account of some of the very contested efforts undertaken by several colleagues and me at teaching critical thinking to the academically weakest students. While teacher-led classroom descriptions of how critical thinking instruction can and actually do immensely benefit students for whom all other forms of remediation seem futile are few and far between, and while such additions would go a long way in providing all teachers – not just those with the “brightest” students – with the strategies and resources to promote critical thinking in their classrooms, my intentions here are of a different order. And I want to work the story to a different tack.

A great deal has been written on the subject of critical thinking. While a detailed consideration of this literature lies later in the chapter, it is worth foreshadowing the analysis by noting here that much of this has tended to take the form of narcissistic expositions that have primarily served to anchor if not reify the subject's presence in the curriculum. For example, some areas that have consistently received the most attention include the composition and standards of critical thought (Bailin & Siegel, 2002; Ennis, 1962, 1989; McPeck, 1990; T. Moore, 2004); how schools and teachers can better develop and implement critical thinking curricula both within and across school subjects (Fisher, 2004; Kuhn, Amsel & O'Loughlin, 1988; Lipman, 2003; McPeck, 1990; Paul & Elder, 2005; Swartz & Parks, 1994); and how critical thinking instruction augments students’ test scores and content mastery (Moore & Stanley, 2010; Swartz, et al., 2010). These accounts have clearly contributed to a richer set of understandings of the subject and have charted the directions for curricula that take much more seriously the development of students’ rational capacities. Yet by limiting the discussion to an almost exclusive focus upon the contents of critical thinking and its efficacy in promoting a list of taken-for-granted educational objectives, what the literature on the whole yields is a clinical and instrumental conception of the subject. That is, in failing to situate the subject in its necessarily social and political environments, the literature at best succeeds in providing a set of abstract formulations of a set of abstract skills, vainly ignoring the fact that all curricular discourses – indeed, especially those on the subject of thinking – both constitute and are constituted by deeply embedded social and political theses about the rational actor and his/her often raced, gendered and classed position in society (Levinson & Holland, 1996; Schrag, 1988).

As a consequence, much of this literature remains silent on a spectrum of issues regarding the socio-political contexts of critical thinking. Among others, these include crucial questions of how the ideological commitments of a society interact with and influence the ways in which critical thinking is conceptualized and taught – or not – in schools; how the institutionalization of critical thinking as both a form and a means of acquiring knowledge in the curriculum can potentially create tensions and contradictions within the established social and moral orders of schools and societies; for which students, and under what conditions, is critical thinking instruction and pedagogy included in the curriculum; and how and why do certain forms of thinking and rationality – and again, not others – become regulated, accepted and finally sanctioned as critical thought.²

By foregrounding the latent but always present ideological dimensions of a curricular discourse, these questions demand that we refocus our attention on the social and political processes through which the discourse becomes transformed into and legitimated as official knowledge. Such an approach to understanding the curriculum, as I shall detail later, is central to lines of inquiry that stress the symbolic nature of education and that see schools, through the forms of knowledge they consecrate and distribute, as powerful agencies of ideological socialization (Anyon, 2011; Apple, 2004, 2014; Bernstein, 1990; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Young, 1971, 2002). From these perspectives the curriculum, far from comprising a stable body of knowledge that merely awaits transmission and evaluation, really represents an arena of politics, conflict and struggle between and within various social groups as these seek to entrench or disrupt hegemonic power relations. Questions that problematize the ideological assumptions of critical thinking are thus crucial in reorienting the subject's hitherto sterile and self-contained literature. They thus figure essentially in connecting the subject to its necessarily complex, and at times even contradictory, social and political dimensions.

To see that these issues are more than a little evident in the workings of our schools and educational institutions, it is worth returning to the story with which I began. Prima facie, the paradox is difficult to miss. Schools are places that encourage rationality, learning, exploration and the acquisition of knowledge. However, at least in Singapore, philosophy graduates – graduates of a discipline that has built up a reputation as being one of the most rigorous and reflective fields of inquiry – have little chance of teaching beyond the primary school level. Understanding the positions of teachers as crucial intermediaries within the institutional gatekeeping of knowledge (Jackson, 1990; Thornton, 1991, 2005), it may not be unwarranted to surmise that the decision to close off philosophy graduates from teaching positions at the secondary and junior college levels is, in effect, to deliberately exclude from the curriculum the characteristics and dispositions that that discipline embodies.³ Indeed, this suggests that while, on the one hand, critical thinking capacities are prized as educational ideals for their ability to develop intellectual autonomy and rationality, on the other hand, the transformative potential of precisely these same qualities may be perceived by some societies (or some of its members) as threatening to the social order. Schools, to be sure, are complex places having to perform, to different extents, both regulatory and liberating functions. They not only initiate individuals into a given social order, but very often in that process – and in attempting to legitimize it⁴ – also inevitably find themselves equipping individuals with the capacities to transform that order (Apple, 1995, 2013; Bernstein, 2000; Kliebard, 2004).

Taking all these seriously means that decisions about how to include critical thinking in the curriculum are often never straightforward processes that regurgitate the abstract formulations found in the subject's literature. Especially in societies where for a range of historical, cultural and political reasons the regulatory function of schools carries relatively more exigence, the teaching of critical thinking will always be treated with some measure of apprehension: these discourses will need to be reframed and rearticulated, if not completely expunged. To begin to understand how the socio-political contexts of the teaching of critical thinking factor into just such a selective realization, it is, then, vital to pay attention not only to the forms of knowledge and thinking that are included in the curriculum, but also – and perhaps more importantly – to pay attention to those forms of knowledge that might be excluded from it, often by fiat, as “non-teaching” subjects.

Rethinking critical thinking

In all this I have been painting in broad strokes the central ideas that animate the chapters that follow, and I now want to bring these into sharper relief. I have suggested that there is a dearth of research that properly contextualizes critical thinking and examines how it is conceived and taught vis-à-vis the social and political conditions of its existence. I have also alluded to perspectives in educational and social theory that take seriously the covert, overt, but always contested ways in which power differentials in society work through the curriculum to relay a set of dominant ideologies and to socialize individ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Beyond abstraction The social and political contexts of teaching critical thinking
• 2 Competencies and consciousnesses Mapping the politics of the curriculum through the pedagogic device
• 3 The arbitrariness of knowledge fields Critical thinking and its social logic
• 4 Critical thinking and the Singapore state Meritocracy, illiberalism and neoliberalism
• 5 Profane knowledge and instrumental rationality Recontextualizing critical thinking in a mainstream school
• 6 Sacred knowledge and elite dispositions Recontextualizing critical thinking in an elite school
• 7 Power, knowledge and symbolic control Official pedagogic identities and the politics of recontextualization
• Index