This article explores the different forms of professional guidance negotiated by mothers as they search for a primary school placement for their child diagnosed with autism. The intensely contested terrain of whether segregated or "regular" classrooms would be "better" for the child shapes the contours of both professional…

Current times are witnessing multiple challenges in the economic, political and social domain, which modern citizens and professionals are required to address with an enterprising mindset. Young people have not been left intact by the spirit of new capitalism. In the face of ongoing educational changes on a European level, being a student…

Drawing on post-structural perspectives and analysis of television programs on education, the article investigates the public educational discourse in Sweden. It shows how a dominant neoliberal educational discourse is articulated together with a discourse of equal education, where the two discourses influence and subvert each other so that…

In this article, we focus on the interaction in a Year 5 classroom where students fill in a "self-evaluation form" as a preparation for a forthcoming discussion on progress aiming at the production of an Individual Developmental Plan. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of fabrications and performativity, we understand this as an…

Globalisation is often referred to as being external to education--a state of affairs presenting the modern curriculum with numerous challenges. In this article, "globalisation" is examined as something that is internal to curriculum and analysed as a "problematisation" in a Foucaultian sense, that is, as a complex of…

Quality and equity are touchstones of education policy in the twenty-first century in a range of global contexts. On the surface, this seems fitting: after all, who could object to more quality and greater equity in education? Yet what do we mean by quality and equity, and how are they related? This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to…

This article is concerned with a dimension of young people's civic education beyond socialisation that is neither confined to the sphere of political decision-making, nor to the achievement of a particular civic identity. The two case studies emphasise the role and importance of significant others and of democratic and non-democratic…

This article provides a historical overview of civic educational policy and political discourse in Singapore from 1959 to 2011, focusing on changes in the role attributed to students in the education process. A review of educational programmes and analysis of political speeches reveals that an earlier transmissionist approach that focused on value…

The Singapore government has long relied on the inherent public pedagogical qualities of culture in the forms of official cultural and media policies and in the unscripted signifiers of cultural conduct, such as in the public's attitude towards the arts. The prime objective is to instrumentalise citizens on how they should become both…

English education has played a vital role in facilitating Singapore's global city ambitions since the country's independence. While the state has prioritized English education's cognitive objective emphasizing information processing and effective communication skills, it has given insufficient attention to the role of English in…

Higher education is playing an important role in Singapore's most recent cycle of modernization: to re-make itself into a global city through the continued accumulation of capital, "talent," and knowledge. This paper is a critical analysis of the accounts of a group of international students enrolled at the National University of…

The state in Singapore has long insisted that Singaporeans be bilingual in English and an officially assigned ethnic mother tongue. English is to serve as the inter-ethnic lingua franca and facilitate economic competitiveness. The official mother tongue (Mandarin for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians) is to serve as a…

This paper offers a broad overview of vocational education in Singapore. Looking at vocational education from Independence, it argues that the development of a skilled labour force was not only crucial in the age of globalisation and the dominance of multinational companies, but also an empirical litmus test of the newly elected post-colonial…

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…

This paper examines the Singapore Ministry of Education's sexuality education curriculum in relation to two leading approaches to sex education, namely, abstinence-only-until-marriage education (AOUME) and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). Based on competing cultural, political, and religious beliefs, the arguments between the…