NURTURE
Education
By Farhan Shah
is an Arms Race
Singapore’s education
system is under threat
and that threat could
possibly be you. We
chat with a National
Institute of Education
don who explains why
he is worried about the
direction that our system
is heading towards.
The different narratives of
Singapore’s success stories has
always had one consistent theme –
meritocracy, the foundation on which
everything is built on. You should be
familiar with it.
A small child, born to a cleaner
mother and a taxi driver father, grows
up in a one-room apartment with five
other siblings. The family survives on
the goodwill of relatives and subsidies
to put their children through school
while worrying about whether they
can have enough money to put the
next meal on the table. The child,
thanks to sheer determination, hard
work and a flickering candle he uses
when studying (because the electricity
has been cut off), manages to perform
exceptionally well in school and
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S T A R T
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Family & Life • Jun 2014
secures multiple scholarships that
help to pave his way to university
where he graduates with a medical
degree before going on to become a
well-paid surgeon. Finally, the child
has broken himself and his family
out of the vicious cycle of poverty and
his parents can live the rest of their
golden years in relative comfort.
It is the type of story that dominates
the news and influences dinnertime
conversations between parent and
child – “See boy, if you work and
study hard, you can just be like him!”
However, increasingly, the reality is
becoming murky and complicated,
with the ideals of meritocracy in our
country’s education system coming
under threat.
FROM EXCLUSIVITY TO THE MASSES
We tend to see education as an
inalienable right and the great social
leveller. However, not too long
ago in the early 1900s, elementary
schooling was merely just a means
of “instruction to meet the minimum
requirements perceived to be
necessary in order for the labouring
poor to fulfil their future roles in a
changing society”.
Outrageous? Yes. Practical? Not
at all. But, this was how the world
functioned; education was a domain
exclusively for the upper class as
a way for them to maintain their
stranglehold on society.
The “second wave”, a term coined
and extensively used by Professor
Phillip Brown, of education was the
shift from exclusivity to the masses,
or what we now call meritocracy,
about 50 years ago. The concept was
first ideated by British sociologist
Michael Young in an essay he wrote in
1958, where he envisioned a country
ruled by a government that favoured
intelligence and aptitude rather than
social connections and the luck of the
genetic draw.
The move was not because of an
appeal to social justice or a sudden