The narrative of Singapore education
A case study on why the stories we tell ourselves can be gravely dangerous.
I find myself thinking about narratives a lot. It’s a rather amorphous word, but I use it to mean a specific set of underlying justifications, assumptions, and stories. If you subscribe to a narrative, it means you have internalized the tale being told, its implicit logic, the moral that it leaves you with.
As an example, take the medieval geocentric narrative. With the Earth accepted to be the center of the universe, as was the consensus of the time, humanity is made to feel special. The world, after all, literally revolves around us. It’s an empowering narrative, to feel as if all of existence was created with you in mind.
The heliocentric counter-narrative, placing the Sun as the center of the solar system, has the completely opposite effect. Our home planet is placed as arbitrarily as can be, not even the closest planet to the sun, but third. Under heliocentrism, Earth, and by humanity, becomes relatively insignificant within the grand scheme of things. The universe is vast, unstructured, and uncaring. Nihilism feels appropriate.
The point is not to re-open the debate on whether the Earth is genuinely in the center of the universe or not, but to indicate how societally comfortable narratives may not necessarily align with the ‘objective’ truth. This applies on all scales, ranging from single individuals to entire cultures, societies, and nations. Indeed, even the very idea of nations at all is a particular narrative. Nation-states have no reason to exist beyond them presently existing and being recognized by many people to exist.
That being said, just because something is not strictly true does not mean it serves no purpose to believe in. Money may strictly be ‘just paper’ (or plastic, in some cases), but its use as a universal measure of value facilitates all forms of transactions, enabling human society to scale beyond mere barter.
For better or worse, the narratives we tell have the power to shape reality. Much of the strife of the modern world is a consequence of harmful narratives; after all, artificial divisions between groups are at the heart of all wars. It is thus worth examining whether the implicit assumptions we make about the world genuinely hold true, and whether they serve the common good.
To bring this concept from a rather abstract level to a more concrete one, let’s examine the narratives at the heart of the Singapore education system.
In Singapore, educational streaming can be thought to start before a student even enters school. Thanks to the Old Boy/Old Girl associations of various schools considered to be better than a mere ‘neighbourhood school’, students of good pedigree are more likely to end up in a better school.
If the streaming was subtle and implicit before school begins, it does not let up once starting school. Most schools begin sorting students into classes of varying abilities as soon as Primary 2, with the ‘better’ classes thought to generally be better taught.
Then it’s on to the PSLE, streaming students into secondary schools of varying prestige and quality based on their performance on one battery of multi-hour examinations taken before students have even hit puberty.
If that wasn’t enough streaming, there’s still more arising from the PSLE; students can look forward to going through one of the Normal Technical, Normal Academic, and Express streams.
Despite its name, the Express stream is often thought to be the expected stream in kiasu Singaporean circles, with those falling short of that being inferior or lacking in some way. This despite the alternative streams literally having “normal” in the name! But it’s also hard to blame them when the Express stream generally has more classes dedicated to it than the two Normal streams.
From there, through N-levels, O-levels, and A-levels, there is still further streaming still. Students enter polytechnics, junior colleges, or the much-dreaded Institute of Technical Education. Ad campaigns of inspirational quotes on MRT track barriers do no service to the reputation of ITE being “It’s The End”, seemingly an extended metaphor for the dead-end life that can be expected after graduation. If ending up in a ‘neighbourhood school’ was not a sufficient indicator of academic non-success, ITE is the final resting place of those scholastic hopes and dreams.
Contrast this to the experience of getting into the prestigious Raffles Institution, with its all-white uniforms as if to signify the virtue of the student wearing it. A student here has done academic battle for many years, and emerged victorious at the end of the day.
The narrative being imposed upon students, from a very young age, is that failure is unacceptable. Your academic results are paramount, and have significant consequences for your societal standing. Success is met with reward; failure, in kind, is met with punishment.
Not only this, but academic success is relative; thanks to grading on a curve, you must not just do well, but do better than your peers. The success of your classmates is to your detriment, as they will ‘wreck the curve’, thus bringing about the cut-throat competition on every front we have come to expect. The last inkling of cooperation remaining is the practical necessity of study groups, cooperation barely managing to provide a net benefit for all involved even here.
It takes no exceptional level of insight to realize that education, as construed in this way, is a zero-sum game. For every student who tops the class, there necessarily must be one, if not more, who has failed to measure up to the lofty standard.
Is it any surprise that this narrative drives students to the ends they do? We have all certainly heard stories of anxiety, depression, suicide, burnout, or imposter syndrome, but these are all just consequences of another affliction: a deep sense of self-loathing, growing with each and every failure.
Ultimately, while policies implemented with the goal of decreasing student stress are well-intentioned, they are insufficient to remedy the ails of the Singaporean education system. Fundamentally, the narrative we have forced upon our students is this:
Your scholastic success is fundamentally tied to your worth. If you are not successful in school, you will not be successful outside it.
This narrative is dangerously soul-crushing. Surely a different one would serve our students better.
I tried to go for a different writing style this week, I hope it turned out alright!
~ Kai
and the narrative reproduces itself when the System co-opts these top students into the hallowed halls of military and civilian leadership, where they have every reason to continue perpetuating the narrative - for their children and for themselves.