Education and state formation reconsidered: Chinese school identity in postwar Singapore

After WWII, Singapore launched decolonization and the state elites were under strong compulsion to blend the Chinese and other racial communities into a national whole. Chinese schools, equipping students with worldview and cultural-linguistic abilities very different from those at other schools, hindered the completion of this task. The state elites sought to resolve this problem by replacing Chinese schools, but this policy antagonized the Chinese and undermined the legitimacy of the ruling regime. To pacify the Chinese, they switched to uphold Chinese schools as an integral and distinct category in the education system. This strategy, nevertheless, kept Chinese schools culturally compartmentalized and sacrificed the objective of promoting interracial integration. To rectify this situation, the ruling authorities sought to blunt the cultural distinctiveness of Chinese schools by strengthening Chinese teaching in English schools. However, this policy was not very successful, because the Malays - the adversary of the Chinese - resented it. This study demonstrates that state formation is a complicated project containing conflicting tasks, it reminds us state hegemonic strategies always bring about contradictory results and the connection between education and state formation is always dialectical.