Numerous studies have highlighted a clear civic achievement gap between students from different ethnic and economic backgrounds in countries such as Singapore and the United States. Concurrently, researchers from both countries have noted that access to government and civics classes and curricula differs considerably across and within schools and…

Meritocracy functions in Singapore as the key principle of governance and educational distribution. However, the concept of meritocracy itself contains a number of inherent contradictions, most evidently witnessed in the tension between its egalitarian and elitist strands. This tension is documented in the recommendations of Singapore's recent…

Using Singapore as a case study, this paper examines how the discourses of democratic elitism and meritocracy help allocate different citizen roles to students and define the nature of the social studies citizenship education programmes for different educational tracks. While the Singapore education system is not unique in its stratification of…