Critical thinking and the anti-liberal state: the politics of pedagogic recontextualization in Singapore

In concert with Singapore's ambitions of a global city well engineered to the human capital needs of the transnational knowledge economy, its schools in recent years have emphasized the teaching of critical thinking. Such efforts, however, are not without tensions and contradictions. Given that such a curricular ideal is underpinned by liberal discourses of democracy and autonomy, what form does it assume in a dominant one-party state with a deliberately weak and underdeveloped language of individual rights? In a "meritocratic" and highly stratified education system, what are the tensions involved in teaching all students what has traditionally been classified as "high-status" knowledge? This article draws upon Basil Bernstein's writings on pedagogic recontextualization and the relations between knowledge, curricular form, and ideology to examine the politics of teaching critical thinking in Singapore. Specifically, using ethnographic classroom data from a public secondary school, it details the processes involved in delocating critical thinking from its liberal underpinnings and relocating it as instrumental knowledge, the modes of pedagogic communication involved in the recontextualization, as well as how teachers and students negotiate and even resist these meanings. The article concludes with a number of observations on the politics of curriculum change in anti-liberal states.