Description
Education in the Global City examines education in Singapore through the critical lens of ‘manufacturing’. The book brings together two disparate fields which inform each other, education and the ‘global city’; and the book’s contributors analyse and critique the manufacturing of Singapore education and Singapore’s global city formation. The collection covers vocational education, language policies, Higher Education, English education, critical thinking, sex education, creativity, and critical feminist scholarship.
Collectively, the book pries open the ideology of the manufacturing education system, and points out the tension between the nation and its ideologies, and the ‘global city’ aspirations. It also asks how education contributes to, and is shaped by, the market realities of Singapore’s global city ambitions – which are at odds with the nationalistic local agenda and priorities of nation-building.
In interrupting and speaking against the prevailing (and narrow) manufacturing of education for a teleological end, in spite of Singapore’s successful nation-building, this book is an important contribution to critical education scholarship.This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.
Table of Contents
1. Education in the global city: the manufacturing of education in Singapore 2. Vocational education in Singapore: meritocracy and hidden narratives 3. Language politics and global city 4. Mobility and desire: international students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore 5. Toward a cosmopolitan vision of English education in Singapore 6. Critical thinking and the anti-liberal state: the politics of pedagogic recontextualization in Singapore 7. Sex (education) in the city: Singapore’s sexuality education curriculum 8. ‘Inculcating’ creativity: culture as public pedagogy in Singapore 9. Doing ‘‘critical’’ in a postfeminist era: reviving critical consciousness through peer dialog
