This book is a welcome addition to recent critical scholarship on the Singapore state and particularly its incomplete and often one-sided version of history. In its detailing of Singapore’s education system over the past few decades, it provides a valuable record of key moments and changes, central logics and tensions.
This book is a welcome addition to recent critical scholarship on the Singapore state and particularly its incomplete and often one-sided version of history. In its detailing of Singapore’s education system over the past few decades, it provides a valuable record of key moments and changes, central logics and tensions. Most importantly, the authors maintain a sustained commitment to showing the institutionalization of inequalities. They paint a compelling image of what these patterns of segregation have meant for Singaporean Malays in particular, and for Singapore citizens more generally.
(A far lengthier extract is posted at http://www.niaspress.dk/blogs/gerald/blog/2011-november/beyond-defensiveness.)