ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|31 pages

Beyond abstraction

The social and political contexts of teaching critical thinking

chapter 2|28 pages

Competencies and consciousnesses

Mapping the politics of the curriculum through the pedagogic device

chapter 3|24 pages

The arbitrariness of knowledge fields

Critical thinking and its social logic

chapter 4|32 pages

Critical thinking and the Singapore state

Meritocracy, illiberalism and neoliberalism

chapter 5|24 pages

Profane knowledge and instrumental rationality

Recontextualizing critical thinking in a mainstream school

chapter 6|25 pages

Sacred knowledge and elite dispositions

Recontextualizing critical thinking in an elite school

chapter 7|25 pages

Power, knowledge and symbolic control

Official pedagogic identities and the politics of recontextualization