Aaron Koh

Cultivating national leaders in an elite school: deploying the transnational in the national interest

This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the school is involved in a form of tactical globalisation which matches neatly that of the state itself. We situate this study in the sociology of elite education with a view to contributing to two new lines of inquiry: the first about elite schools in Asia and the second about elite schools and globalisation. In so doing, we deploy a Bourdieusian perspective while also asking how successfully his concepts travel to the Singaporean context. The paper draws on a larger multinational, multi-sited ethnographic study of elite schools and globalisation.

The elite school as ‘cognitive machine’ and ‘social paradise’: Developing transnational capitals for the national ‘field of power’

In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a ‘field of power’ and the formation of Singapore’s ‘state nobility’ through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore’s geo-political history and its strategic positioning with regard to what it calls its ‘global hinterland’. We work with Bourdieu’s notions of ‘social alchemy’, ‘cognitive machine’ and ‘social paradise’ to illuminate how an elite school in Singapore carefully and successfully grooms the future state nobility for Singapore’s field of power, in part through the development of students’ transnational capitals. We show, however, that Bourdieu’s conceptual resources are not fully portable and point to their merits and limitations in explaining the workings of power in Singapore and in relation to one of its most elite schools.

Doing class analysis in Singapore's elite education: unravelling the smokescreen of ‘meritocratic talk’

This paper examines the specificity of the education–class nexus in an elite independent school in Singapore. It seeks to unravel the puzzle that meritocracy is dogmatically believed in Singapore in spite of evidences that point to the contrary. The paper draws on discursive (analysis of media materials) and institutional (analysis of interview conducted in Clarence High school) processes to mount the argument that doing class analysis in Singapores elite education is couched in a peculiarity, where meritocratic principles override all criticisms and contentions of the reproduction of educational privileges and advantages. The analysis of the overriding ‘meritocratic talk’ in the interviews conducted will show how the national doxa of meritocracy creates the belief environment that leads to institutional practices that echoes the dogma of meritocracy.

Sociological silhouettes of elite schooling

ISSN: 0142-5692 (Print) 1465-3346 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbse20 Sociological silhouettes of elite schooling Jane Kenway & Aaron Koh To cite this article: Jane Kenway & Aaron Koh (2015) Sociological silhouettes of elite schooling, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36:1, 1-10, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2015.977557 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.977557

The Libidinal Economy of the Globalising Elite School Market

Elite schools are banks of emotion where the individuals and social classes that they serve deposit their desires and gain social dividends. They are also registers of social recognition and serve as spaces of collective capacity for their privileged clients. Elite schools have long been sites for the exercise of a form of affective agency by the wealthy and socially powerful. Many such people and groups have heavy emotional investments in the schools that their families have attended over several generations. Habitual use of such schools, over extended time, signifies their enduring social stature. Other wealthy parents, those without such cross-generational attachments to a particular school but with ardent social aspirations, search relentlessly for an elite school that matches their desires and assures their children’s educational and social ascendency.

Singapore's ‘global assemblage’: digging into the culture of education policy making

As a meta-concept, ‘globalization’ has the tendency to create master categories such as an emergent global/izing education policy. This paper critiques the thinking and assumptions that underpin a global education policy. The paper proposes that ‘global assemblage’ is a more helpful conceptual thinking about the way education policy works in globalizing circumstances. Conceptually, the notion of an assemblage helps us to re-conceive global forms not as a totalizing external force but as an element that works in combination with other heterogeneous elements in local situations and contexts. Aspects of Singapores education policy landscape are analyzed as part of Singapores ‘global assemblage’ to reveal a culture of education policy making that is constituted by heterogeneous elements such as global techniques, situated politics and ethics.

Working against globalisation: the role of the media and national education in Singapore

This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of ‘reassemblage’, when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced to Singapore schools is one example of ‘reassemblage’, which aims to reinvent subject‐citizens who are perceived as lacking cultural mooring and a national identity. I argue that in the context of globalisation, this cultural experimentation of constructing a national identity and creating a sense of belonging is fraught with ruptures, as ‘youthscapes’ and new communication technologies are potentially the liminal spaces where other sources of identities are up for grabs. These liminal spaces further allow youths to perform ‘elective belonging’ rather than a sense of belonging bound by the ‘national’ and ‘local’.

The Visualization of Education Policy: A Videological Analysis of "Learning Journeys".

The attention to the visualization of education policy is an area of study yet to be developed and explored. This paper extends the scholarship of ‘media‐ted education policy production’ by developing a visual methodology to analyse a visual education policy document that takes the form of a documentary titled Learning Journeys (2000), which documented an uptake of and for the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ policy in Singapore schools after this policy came into effect in 1997. My analysis specifically draws attention to the concept of ‘visual design’, which I argue works ideologically to constrain the semiotic meaning potential of visual texts to a preferred reading path, and that ‘design’ textually contributes to an ideological closure as opposed to an open, multiple or contradictory reading of the text. Any critical reading of visual policy texts, I argue, must understand that ‘design’ in visual policy texts is situated and intertwined in the complex interplay of institutional constraints, ideological underpinnings, political assumptions and priorities. My textual analysis of the design of Learning Journeys will show that the televisual images in the documentary are managed to prioritize the construction of preferred schooling identities and to build consensus of what schooling ought to be and why new imperatives of education change are necessary in changing global economic conditions.

Deparochializing Education: Globalization, regionalization, and the formation of an ASEAN education space1

Research on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hitherto attracted scholarly attention and debate by both regional and international scholars working in area studies, such as international relations and Asia-Pacific/Southeast Asia studies. Confined to area studies, scholarly research on ASEAN is limiting because the parameters of research are invariably locked into issues related to economics, politics, security, and trade development in and around the region. Notably, education has been an under-researched topic. On the cusp of its 40th anniversary ASEAN envisages the formation of an ASEAN identity and socio-cultural community. As a point of departure from area studies, this paper engages in “regionalist thinking” about ASEAN, education and identity making. This “regionalist thinking” is, however, only thinkable and imaginable with reference to the “global,” because as a region ASEAN, whether perceived in geographical or in spatial terms, is part of the global sphere in which it is embedded. I argue in this paper that while historically education and schooling are directly related to the imaginaries of nation building and national identity making, the call for the creation of an ASEAN identity and the formation of a socio-cultural community requires that nation states in the region deparochialize education and redesign pedagogies that “teach and learn beyond the nation.”

A Vision of Schooling for the Twenty-First Century: Thinking Schools and Learning Nation

This chapter aims to unpack the discourses in the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) education reform. To achieve this, I draw on two sets of toolkit, one conceptual and the other analytical. The conceptual section draws on Charles Taylor’s (Modern social imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004) notion of social imaginary to understand Singapore’s national imaginary and its perpetual renovation. This contextual understanding is necessary to make way for the argument that the TSLN policy is the embodiment of Singapore’s social imaginary used by the government to speak to its subjects about the need to usher in a new paradigm of educational imagining for Singapore at a time when “globalization” was an emerging discourse afloat in the global and local social imaginaries. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s (Language and power. London: Longman, 1989) model of critical discourse analysis, the second section proceeds to analyze the discourses used to construct preferred ways of schooling and subjectivities that speaks to its national imaginary.