Education

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Summary

WHILE it is tempting to argue that the improvements in educational attainment following the implementation of the NES are entirely due to streaming, it would be simplistic to do so. The NES merely provided the system by which education could be made more effective. For the system to work, commitment, dedication, and professionalism are required of principals and teachers. In addition, it would have been impossible to implement the NES without appropriate curricula for the new courses being developed. Had the Ministry of Education implemented the NES without obtaining at the same time the commitment and dedication of the professionals, and without developing the necessary curricula and teaching materials, the NES wouid have met with little success.

It should be stressed that concomitant with the implementation of the NES was the expansion of the tertiary institutions as well as the various training institutions to cater to the educational and training needs of pupils leaving the school system at all levels. The provision of a wide range of educational and training opportunities outside the school system together with the provision of the range of differentiated curricula called for by the NES required tremendous additional resources. That these resources were made readily available could be seen from the rapid increase in public expenditure on education which rose from about $550 million in the financial year 1979/80 to about $1.8 billion in the financial year 1985/86. The high priority accorded to education emphasized the importance of education as an instrument for national development.

With the successful implementation of the NES, the Singapore education system has reached a new phase in its development. The Singapore education system, like the education system of any nation in a process of rapid development, had to cater to the demands of each stage of development. Thus, in resolving the problem of providing access to education to all children in the initial stage, the “double session” system of using one school building for two sets of pupils was introduced. The need to promote national cohesiveness in the mid-1950s gave birth to the 1957 Education Ordinance to enable the government to gain control over all schools, particularly the Chinese schools. The high education wastage experienced in the 1970s prompted the Goh Report which gave birth to the New Education System.

Summary

THE streaming of pupils into different courses evoked strong emotional response. This was not withstanding the fact that pupils were at the time already being streamed according to ability into different classes.

Two major arguments were advanced against streaming. First, pupils streamed to a lower course, say the Monolingual course, would have reduced access to higher education. This argument derived from an egalitarian philosophy which did not recognize differences in human ability, thereby equating “equality of opportunity” with “equality of outcome”. It had as its implicit assumption that opportunity lies in exposure to a given curriculum. Hence, the higher the curriculum made available to a particular child, the greater would be his opportunity. However, this ignored the fact that most of the pupils streamed to the lower course would have left school prematurely under a rigid education system which sought to impose a curriculum not appropriate to their needs. Greater equality of opportunity would, in fact, be accorded to these pupils if they were allowed to follow a course specially designed for them.

Second, as errors in streaming could not be avoided entirely, a child wrongly streamed to a lower course would, in addition to becoming demoralized, suffer from the social stigma associated with the lower course. The Goh Report had, in fact, recognized that for the NES to be implemented successfully, streaming had to be as accurate as possible. The Report had therefore recommended that the first streaming be undertaken only after three or four years of primary schooling, and that intelligence tests be developed to provide the opportunity for those with potential to prove themselves. In addition, there was to be provision for lateral transfers across courses to cater for late developers and to allow errors in streaming to be remedied. Where there were reasonable doubts as to the appropriate course for a particular child, his parents should be provided with the option to decide the course his child would be streamed to.

Hence, when the NES was implemented in the secondary schools, a fairly wide option band (about 10 per cent of those who passed the PSLE) was created. Pupils with PSLE results falling within this band could opt for either the Express course or the Normal course.

Summary

Primary Schools

THE New Education System (NES] was implemented in primary schools beginning with the 1979 Primary Three (P3) cohort. As recommended by the Goh Report, all pupils would follow a common curriculum (which would place emphasis on the learning of languages and mathematics) during their first three years of formal schooling, that is, from PI to P3. Pupils would be streamed at the end of P3 on the basis of their examination performances in P2 and P3. Tb avoid additional pressure through the introduction of a new national examination, the end-of-year P3 examination (sometimes referred to as the streaming examination) would be school-based. However, in order to ensure some uniformity of standards, this examination would be constructed from item banks to be maintained by the Ministry of Education. Pupils would be streamed on the following basis:

Summary

If N 1978, a study team led by Dr Goh Keng Swee (then A. Deputy Prime Minister) was appointed by the Prime Minister to study problems in the Ministry of Education, Singapore. The report submitted by the study team (often referred to as the Goh Report) analysed the weaknesses of the education system and recommended many major changes to it. These changes, particularly those related to the introduction of streaming, were controversial at the time and attracted much public debate. The education structure arising from the implementation of the Report's recommendations is usually referred to as the New Education System (NES).

Education and national development are closely related. Indeed, for many countries as for Singapore, social and economic changes often bring about substantial changes to the education system. To provide a better understanding of the impact of social and economic changes on the Singapore education system, this monograph first presents a brief history of the development of education in Singapore up to the release of the Goh Report. Bearing in mind that it was the perceived failure of the education system to meet the rapidly changing social and economic needs of the country that prompted its review, the problems facing the education system at the time are then discussed. This is followed by a description of the new education structure based on streaming according to ability, and the rationale for it. How the NES was actually implemented is discussed in Chapter 5. Public reaction to streaming and some of the subsequent refinements to the NES are outlined. The final chapters assess the impact of the NES in terms of the objectives spelt out for it in the Goh Report, concluding with a discussion of the possible future direction of the education system.

Hundreds of American Indian children attended schools run by the Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) during the nineteenth century. Yet these young Indians left little written evidence from which to reconstruct their responses to an alien educational experience. Presbyterian missionaries, on the other hand, sent detailed reports on the schools and pupils to headquarters in New York. If subjected to careful analysis, the admittedly partisan BFM writings are a rich source for discovering how Indian pupils responded to their teachers and to the whole BFM program.

Education

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IX - Conclusion

Summary

Contents

List of abstractors

Current research in Europe: Britain

VI - Public Reaction to Streaming

Summary

Frontmatter

New books

V - Implementation of the NES

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Language learning and teaching – theory and practice

LTA volume 21 issue 1 Cover and Cover and Back matter

Language and Literature

Bibliographies

Bibliography

Books received

I - Introduction

Summary

Research in the supporting sciences

language teaching

Subject and Author Indexes to Vol. 21, No 1

The Author

The Responses of American Indian Children to Presbyterian Schooling in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Missionary Sources

Education

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