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  Teachers and older students were less sure. While many teachers approved of the philosophical underpinnings of yutori kyõiku, they worried about the effects it would have on students’ entrance exams. Some embraced it enthusiastically, while others did the bare minimum to meet the official requirements (I must admit I was guilty of the same with certain policies when I was teaching.) A Japanese friend of mine said of her school days in the early 2000s, ‘Even though you don’t officially have to go, schools make you go on Saturdays by giving lessons and stuff. They say it’s optional, but you know “optional”.’ And while Lily was officially a student of yutori kyõiku for her entire education, she still described high-school teachers as ‘trying to stuff a textbook down your throat’. The point being that while this was a ‘relaxed’ period compared to the previous state of Japanese education, if you were to transfer the same requirements onto children to England, they would not find it in the least bit relaxing.

  So what were the effects of this yutori kyõiku? Professor Kariya found that the average amount of time children spent working outside of school dropped between 1974 and 1997.101 This was a motivational issue rather than anything else – the proportion of children responding ‘yes’ to the statement ‘I’m fine if my grades are good enough not to fail’ rose too. Kariya doesn’t think that this motivational drop was solely due to the new ‘relaxed education’ – he suggests that a lack of employment opportunities due to the economic situation in the 1990s damaged students’ belief in the previously solid ‘fact of life’ that doing well at school led to good jobs. This hit young people from working-class backgrounds the hardest – explaining his second finding that the reduction in motivation was greatest amongst young people from poorer backgrounds. However, he found that in response to the ‘relaxed education’ reforms, this situation got even worse.

  According to Kariya, the relaxed education approach may have given working-class students a false sense of security, believing that academics didn’t matter, further disadvantaging them in the job market. Middle-class students were likely to be under no such illusion, thanks to their parents (though I’m sure no one was thanking their parents at the time). In addition, the Integrated Study Time (IST) was of more use to those who already had the academic skills to make the most of it. Professor Christopher Bjork, who visited schools at the time to evaluate the programme, said: ‘In all of the junior high schools I visited, intellectually-able, self-directed individuals usually developed thorough IST project plans, used their time wisely and produced impressive reports. As a result, they earned praise for their efforts. Students who were struggling academically, in contrast, tended to flounder. Lacking the organisational skills and/or the ability to synthesise information in insightful ways, they often used time allocated for IST to socialise, doodle or sleep.’102

  In 2004, when the 2003 PISA results were released and showed that Japan’s scores in reading had declined, there was an uproar. Fingers were pointed at the yutori kyõiku reforms, and the students of this era were labelled baka – stupid. Lily is one of this ‘stupid’ generation, but recalls this fact with amusement. In response to the criticism the government gradually began to increase the hours spent on maths and Japanese, and in 2011, many of the yutori kyõiku reforms were reversed. Textbooks were fattened, and the hours spent on ‘Integrated Studies’ were reduced to make way for other subjects.103

  In the frenzy that followed these PISA results, what is rarely considered is that Japanese international test results had been declining for some time, even before the introduction of the yutori kyõiku, and that the 2003 results were not a huge drop in comparison. More fundamentally, however, they seem to have forgotten what the reforms set out to do. Yutori kyõiku was not supposed to raise PISA results; it was supposed to relieve pressure on students and improve their creativity and problem-solving abilities. According to surveys which Japanese students filled out in 2000 and 2012, their satisfaction with school increased during this period more than in any other country in the world. And in the tests of problem-solving, Japanese students did better than almost all other countries, including PISA chart-topper, Shanghai. Looks to me like they achieved what they set out to achieve.

  Japan’s education system has always put them above most other countries in the PISA tests, perhaps due to the importance placed on education, the carefully-planned lessons and the cultural belief that all children can and ought to keep up with their mastery-based curriculum. Yet slipping just a few places made the government panic and reverse reforms that seemed to be effective – both in reducing the ‘examination hell’ lamented by the public and enabling students to be world-beaters at solving unseen problems. This highlights a values-based dilemma which is relevant to other countries too: to what extent are we willing to compromise on maths and reading results to secure other social and educational goods for our children? This question is not only asked by the government in Singapore – our next stop – but by Singaporean parents too.

  SINGAPORE

  Chapter 8: Dynamic Intelligence, Eugenics and Streaming in Singapore

  You marry a non-graduate, you’re going to have problems, some children bright, some not bright.

  Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore

  My first educational encounter in Singapore was with a small Muslim lady at passport control in the expansive and expensive Changi airport.

  ‘Why have you come to Singapore?’

  ‘I’m researching the world’s best education systems.’

  She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. ‘You think Singapore has the world’s best education system? No lah, we put too much pressure on kids too young.’

  Stereotypes: 1

  Surprises: 0

  I didn’t have the time to ask her what she meant as there was a queue forming behind me, but it pretty quickly became clear. Students begin school the year they turn seven, in Primary 1 (P1). Within each school the classes are mixed-ability at this age, but different primary schools have different levels of prestige (Raffles Girls’ Primary School is de rigueur), and gaining admission to the top schools is the holy grail of parenting for mothers of tiny children, and a subject discussed with great urgency outside the preschool gates.

  First priority for admission to any primary school goes to those with a sibling currently at the school, followed by those whose parents or siblings are alumni. This helps community cohesion, but also ensures that if one of your parents was privileged with a prestigious education, you will be too. First dibs for any spaces left go to children whose parents have volunteered to help the school in some way for at least a year before primary registration, and who have committed at least 40 hours to traffic warden duties, school canteen assistance, librarian services, etc. Some schools even require parents to sit through interviews before they are accepted to be parent volunteers.

  ‘Why does it matter which primary school the children go to?’ you might be thinking. ‘Surely it’s not worth 40 hours of serving noodles?’ Well, it matters because the score you get in your Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) at age 12 has an enormous impact on the course of the rest of your life. It determines what school you go to, what exams you are able to take and what kind of job you will therefore end up doing. Getting children into the best primary schools in the first place is the job of the parents, but don’t assume this means that the children can relax for the first few years of primary school, safe in the knowledge that the PSLE is six years away. Even before children reach the age of 12 they are sorted into different classes, depending on their scholastic ability.

  The age at which primary school streaming begins has changed over the short course of Singapore’s history – in my opinion, in the right direction. To begin with, there was no streaming into different classes, but those who couldn’t cope with the level of the work were allowed, and then encouraged (when progression beyond P2 at age seven or eight became conditional on passing exams) to drop out of school altogether.104 One teacher I spoke to
recalled how, as a student, she used to help her teachers at the end of each year to sort all the students’ files into their new classes, and how every year there were a pile of folders that didn’t get put back. When she asked about them, she was told that they were the students who didn’t make it, and that they wouldn’t be coming back next year.

  Streaming at the end of P3 was therefore introduced in 1979 with the best of intentions; to deal with this problem of students dropping out by providing an easier curriculum for those who couldn’t keep up. Unfortunately though, this meant deciding at age nine whether students would follow an academic or vocational path. Until 2008, students were put into one pathway for all their subjects, and those in EM3 (the lowest) would rarely make it to a secondary stream where they could even take the exams that might qualify them for college, barring their path to university before they even understood what university was. The plight of these children inspired the film I Not Stupid by Singaporean film-maker Jack Neo, about the lives of three boys in this academically ‘inferior’ EM3 stream. The film depicts the boys being bullied for being in the ‘stupid’ stream, and when one gets caught cheating in an exam, he subsequently attempts suicide.

  The film was a big hit, and became the second highest-grossing film in Singapore at the time. Its criticism of the streaming system sparked national and parliamentary debate, and led to the abolition of streaming instead of setting. Now, children take tests that determine whether they will take individual subjects in their last two years of primary school at a higher, standard or foundation level, recognising that students may have strengths in different subjects.

  Students in different subject bands in Primary 6 will then take different papers for their Primary School Leaving Exams (PSLEs), which is taken into account in their final score. These exams are a BIG DEAL. Parents take ‘PSLE leave’ from work to help coach their children through them. The government still looks to PSLE scores as cut-offs when appointing adults to certain roles in the army (or so I am told by an ‘insider’ – this isn’t official policy). Although you can apply to six secondary schools of your choice, whether you get in or not will be almost entirely based on your PSLE results – all schools are selective.105 Your ‘PSLE T score’ – which is calculated relative to the performance of the rest of your year – is also used to determine which stream you enter in secondary school. There are five potential outcomes for you, based on this number, which are listed below next to the approximate proportion of pupils admitted to each programme.106

  Approximately 8% of students are admitted to the prestigious Integrated Programme. You won’t do O levels, instead you will work straight through to A levels, allowing more curricular flexibility.

  Approximately 60% enter the Express Stream, which sees you do your O levels after four years of secondary education. If you are then in the top 20 per cent of O level scorers, you can go onto junior college to take A levels in preparation for university if you so choose, otherwise you go to a polytechnic.

  Approximately 20% take the Normal Academic course, in which students do N levels (easier than O-levels) after four years, and then O-levels the year later. These students are likely to go on to polytechnic, or the Institute of Technical Education (ITE).

  Approximately 11% go to the Normal Technical stream, where they take a combination of academic and technical subjects, and take N-levels. If these students continue to post-secondary education, they will most likely go to ITE (sometimes unfairly referred to as ‘It’s The End’).

  Approximately 2.5% don’t pass the PSLE. They have the option of repeating the year and retaking the exam, or going to a technical school where they take only vocational qualifications.

  Figure 3: The Structure of the Singaporean Education System

  The path you end up taking, at this early stage and then later on if you take further exams, affects the rest of your life – your peer group, your post-secondary education, your job prospects, even your marriage prospects. Moving ‘upstream’ is possible if you score high enough in regular exams during the first few years of secondary school, but it is unusual, to the extent that those who manage often make the news.107 It seems extreme, so why separate students out into different life paths so early?

  Eugenics and Population Control

  Let me take you back to the 1980s, shortly after the introduction of streaming in Singaporean schools. Michelle, 31, a graduate with good genes and a job in the civil service, has the day off today (at the government’s expense) to begin her subsidised leisure cruise to the Maldives. Peter, 34, an engineer with a top degree from the National University of Singapore, is also about to leave for the boat, and is anxiously flattening his unruly hair in the mirror. Both hope that they might meet the partner of their dreams on this cruise, the one that will put light in their life and fire in their loins. The government hopes so too; this cruise was organised by the Social Development Unit (SDU)108 – an organisation established in 1984 with the purpose of matching up graduate singles in Singapore in the hope that they would reproduce and have intelligent babies.

  At the time this wasn’t in response to a decline in population, but rather, the wrong type of people having children. At the National Day Rally in 1983, the late Lee Kuan Yew – then prime minister and founding father of modern Singapore – lamented publically that there were too many unmarried female graduates. Graduate men were choosing to marry less-educated women, and this was a big concern: ‘If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society… So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.’

  Lee Kuan Yew believed that intelligence was innate and inherited, and that eugenics programmes – such as incentives for the sterilisation of mothers without O levels and tax rebates for graduate mothers – were therefore justified by the future economic success they were sure to bring to the country, by virtue of having a more intelligent workforce. Having a talented workforce (whatever your beliefs on the origins of talent) was and is more important for Singapore than for most other countries. Singapore is a city state; an island of only 5.3 million people and no natural resources. When it got kicked out of the Malaysian Federation in 1965 after a falling out between Lee Kuan Yew’s party (the People’s Action Party) and the central Malaysian government, Lee cried on national television. It did seem hopeless – Singapore relied on imports, and didn’t even have its own water supply. The only hope Singapore had of succeeding economically was to develop the country’s human resources through education, and produce a literate and technically-skilled workforce that would allow Singapore to become a centre of industry, and later, business.

  They did this remarkably successfully, as indicated by the fact that they now have the third highest GDP per capita in the world, and a top-performing education system by many measures. Since Singapore’s independence, the education system has been carefully designed and adapted to meet the changing needs of the country’s economy. As in any economy, there are many different roles to fill, with different levels and types of education required for each role. Some people are needed to strategically design the ‘Mozzie wipe-out’ campaign to prevent Dengue fever, others are needed to spray the bushes with anti-mosquito spray (this I am told is what the men with gas masks and spray guns are doing at the side of the roads – they look like lost ‘Stormtroopers’).

  Now imagine that you are Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. You need a system that educates citizens for different roles to support the economy, and you believe that talent is inherited and stable – in other words, you’re either born clever or you’re not, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. What kind of education system would you design? I don’t know about you, but I would design a system which identified talent as early as possible, so I didn’t waste resources trying to educate the ‘ungifted’ in topics they couldn’t handle. I would separate children of different abilities into different groups,
and teach them different things, according to their abilities and the needs of the workforce, so that everyone had the skills to fulfil a useful role. As we’ve seen, that’s exactly what they did.

  So what’s the problem? Well there are several, but let’s start with the most fundamental: that this model of education is based on an outdated and inaccurate understanding of intelligence. Back in 1965 when Lee Kuan Yew was Premier of the newly independent Singapore, the research on intelligence was still in its infancy, and due to an unfortunate sequence of events in the field of education psychology, it was actually rather misleading.109 What is more, Singapore was not the only country to have an education system designed around these now outmoded ideas.

  A Brief Foray into the History of Intelligence

  The first man to develop a modern intelligence test was Alfred Binet: a Frenchman and a bit of a loner. His work in the early 1900s was light years ahead of its time, but he was not very good at communicating it to others. As developmental psychologist Robert Siegler puts it, ‘Binet’s product was strong, but his marketing was weak.’ This shortcoming, combined with others’ wilful misinterpretation of his work, actually led to a major misrepresentation of the nature of intelligence; a misrepresentation that persists to this day.

  Binet developed an intelligence test with Théodore Simon – a young physician pursuing a doctorate – in order to help identify children in need of alternative educational provision in France. Having come up with a number of questions to test current cognitive development, they reasoned that those in need of extra help would be those who scored poorly on the test compared to peers of their own age – in other words, children whose development was retarded (in the original sense of the word).110 They made their test available for this use with some very clear caveats.