Tan, Jason

Over the last two decades, the range of curricular offerings in Singapore has diversified almost beyond the ability of teacher preparation systems to cope. Teacher training has evolved from informal to formal, and from multiple 'providers' to a single institution responsible for pre-service teacher education. Teacher Preparation in Singapore is a non-celebratory and non-institution-based account of teacher preparation written with a critical academic lens. Contributing to the historiography of Singapore, as well as to the general history of teacher education, this book discusses the history of teacher preparation in Singapore from the colonial era, when Singapore was the centre of British Malaya, to the present day. It includes the pre-professional era of an informal approach to teacher education before the establishment of formal teacher training, the role of the colonial state and post-colonial state in the provision of teacher education, and issues such as policy borrowing, diffusion of educational philosophies, and developments paralleling those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This is a relevant and important book for researchers of education history, comparative and international education, and teacher education in Singapore.

As Hong Kong approached its hand-over to Chinese sovereignty, it has been instructive to compare its experience with that in other former British colonies. This article focuses on how education policies in areas such as the medium of instruction nd curriculum changed as Singapore moved towards self-government and independence in the 1950s and 1960s. It also ompares the changes that took place in Singapore with those currently occurring in Hong Kong. Observations will be made about the likelihood of the 'one country, two systems' concept working in Hong Kong after 1997.

Purpose This paper aims to trace the evolution of two initiatives – the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative – their genesis, rationale, current form and take‐up rate. It also analyses them as education reforms in terms of policymaking dynamics. The very notion of the term “privatization” will be examined. Design/methodology/approach The article examines the two school privatization schemes in Hong Kong and Singapore, by putting into perspective a discussion of their policy implications, thereby reflecting on their similarities and differences in their agenda, implementation and implications. Findings The findings indicate that the DSS and independent school schemes in both Hong Kong and Singapore are in line with the global trends of privatization. It is suggested that the governments of the two places have adopted different approaches in the implementations of their schemes. Originality/value The paper shows how the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative represent attempts over the past two decades by the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively to promote school privatization.

Singapore's university system has expanded over the past three decades and has been transformed from an elite system into a mass system, in which over 40% of the age cohort is enrolled in one of the six publicly funded autonomous universities. This chapter illustrates a strong government role in terms of provision, financing, and regulation. In the year 2000, the Ministry of Education began granting greater operating autonomy to publicly funded universities while retaining centralized control over the overall policy direction for the university sector. A decade later, the Ministry introduced new regulations governing the provision of private higher education institutions in response to growing public concerns over the quality of these providers. While Singapore has broadened access to public universities, its government has had to tread a delicate balance between its desire to recruit more international students and faculty and public concern over the perceived competition that this policy poses to locally born students and faculty. Over the past decade, the government has attempted to recast university education as being one step in a process of lifelong learning and to popularize the idea of accessing a university education after individuals have entered the workforce.

Purpose With the advancement of novel forms of text mining techniques, new possibilities have opened up to conduct large-scale content analysis of educational research from an international and comparative perspective. Since educational research tends to convey great variation based on country-specific circumstances it constitutes a good testbed for context-rich depictions of the knowledge formation within a given research field. Design/methodology/approach In this article, the authors compare the educational research that has been produced by scholars in Singapore and Sweden. The article begins by providing a rich overview of what has characterised the formation and institutionalization of educational research in public policy. After this background they map the knowledge formation of education by means of a comparative bibliometric approach using words from abstracts, titles and keywords published in 9017 peer-reviewed articles between 2000 and 2020. First, the authors describe the dominant topics in each country using topic modelling techniques. Secondly, the authors identify the most distinguishing discourses when comparing the two countries. Findings The findings illustrate two ideal-types for conducting educational research: Singapore being more centralised, practically-oriented, quantitative and uncritical, whereas Sweden is decentralised, pluralistic, qualitative and critical in orientation. After having mapped out the prevailing topics among researchers working in these locations, the authors connect these findings to larger debates on rivalling knowledge traditions in educational scholarship, the role of the state and the degree of autonomy within higher education. Originality/value Through large scale text mining techniques, researchers have begun to explore the semantic composition of various research fields such as higher education research, research on lifelong learning, or social science studies. However, the bibliometric method has also been criticised for creating “mega-national comparisons” that suffer from a lack of understanding of the national ramifications of various research pursuits. The authors’ study addresses these shortcomings and provides a rich depiction of educational research in Singapore and Sweden. It zooms in on the relationship between each country's institutional histories, research priorities and semantic output.

This book, which represents the author’s doctoral dissertation findings at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, promises a great deal to readers. It examines how the teaching of critical thinking in Singapore is regulated by the Ministry of Education through what prominent educational sociologist Basil Bernstein termed the process of “pedagogic recontextualization.” Lim problematizes the underlying philosophies and assumptions regarding critical thinking within the Singaporean socio-political context. His book explores the enactment of critical thinking in two secondary schools – one elite and the other non-elite – in order better to inform the state of knowledge with regard to issues of power, knowledge and control.