Knowledge, Control and Critical Thinking in Singapore: State ideology and the politics of pedagogic recontextualization

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.

Leonel Lim is Assistant Professor at the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research focuses on the sociology of curriculum, the politics of education, state power, and elite schooling. In 2014 he was the recipient of the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award in curriculum studies. His current projects include an edited volume (with Michael W. Apple) on the politics of curriculum reform in strong states in Asia (Routledge).