Wu, Sandra Pinhui

Purpose: Singapore is a multi-religious society where the state is secular, and different religions coexist. Values are taught at home and in schools from young. The government has a set of national values that underpin the Character and Citizenship Education which begin from primary education. However, in early childhood education, the national frameworks do not explicitly articulate the values that should be cultivated in children below six years of age up till November 2022, when the revised Nurturing Early Learners Framework is launched and explicate values that should be cultivated at preschool level. Against this diverse sociocultural context, this paper seeks to unpack these values and find out current centre practices on the ground. Method: This paper uses data of a qualitative study where purposeful sampling is used to select research sites and participants according to the various types of operators in the early childhood education landscape. Semi-structured interviews are conducted for data collection and analysed using thematic analysis. The data presented in this paper offers insights to the perspectives of centre leaders who lead and manage centres run by different operator types in a diverse early childhood education landscape. Results: The findings reveal that centre leaders’ interpretations of the values are generally aligned with the framework’s descriptors and uncover the complexity of values as overlaps across values. The study provides insights to current centre practices on values education. Conclusion: The study indicates alignment between leaders’ definitions and understanding of values espoused in the NEL framework and that values education does take place across early childhood development centre types. With the four values explicated for the early childhood education landscape, there is greater clarity on the values that should be cultivated in young children from young.

Flourishing is an apt concept for a kindergarten (children’s garden) curriculum where children learn, grow and blossom. A key aspect of flourishing is values education. At pre-school level, Singapore’s Ministry of Education explicated four values (respect, responsibility, honesty and care) in the 2022 national curriculum framework for pre-school education. A qualitative study that sets out to unpack what these values mean in Singapore’s multicultural context revealed interpretations of values distilled to one commonality across religious and secular perspectives – personhood. The study involved semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with government officials, religious leaders, preschool leaders and teachers and the data were analysed thematically. The findings offered insights into the ways in which personhood can be cultivated in preschool settings.

In this article, we propose a neo-Confucian curriculum for preschool education based on the writings of the neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi. Against the contemporary backdrop of a narrow emphasis on the academic assessment of children, we argue for an alternative approach that revolves around jing: the inner mental attentiveness to be true to one’s good nature. We propose an adaption of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and Confucian hierarchy of cardinal relationships that progressively cultivate the good nature of children across the spheres of the self, family and community, country and the world. We further outline an integrated programme with corresponding developmental domains, types of relationships and Confucian virtues. The desired outcome is the manifestation of each child’s innate goodness through attentiveness to routines and the habituation of moral values. A neo-Confucian curriculum adds to the existing literature on preschool educational approaches that are experiential, values-centric, interpersonal and holistic.