In a globalized world with increasing international migration and encounters of difference, education is presented with new challenges and opportunities regarding diversity, including "teacher diversity." This paper focuses on teachers with immigrant backgrounds and explores how they potentially add constructive diversity to the…

Purpose: An education system can only be successful if it can develop future-ready learners who can continue to learn after graduation, take on their future lifework and thrive in the future society and environment. This article examines the economic, social and environmental trajectories of Singapore and proposes that it is important for…

Values education in Asian societies is commonly underpinned by an ideology of communitarianism that seeks to promote the needs and interests of "others" over the "self." An example of an Asian country that promotes communitarian values through its values education curriculum is Singapore. By reviewing the moral and citizenship…

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 advocates of…

Since its independence in 1965, the Singapore government has been giving priority to preserve racial harmony and social stability. A wide range of policy initiatives, including conscription for national defence, ethnic integration policy for public housing, and the National Education (NE) programme in tandem with a strong emphasis on local history…

As a school subject, physical education (PE) in Singapore took on its own shape with the introduction of a conceptual games teaching approach in response to the national government's "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" policy of the late 1990s. With the recent media attention on hosting two main international events (Asian Youth Games…

In the face of the challenges of globalization, nation states try to reinvigorate their traditional or national values and local identities as a kind of counterbalance to globalizing influences. Hence, social and citizenship education across nations in Asia takes different forms with certain distinctive varieties in terms of policies, practices…

Across the educational systems of the world, few issues have received more attention in recent years than the problem of ensuring that elementary and secondary-school classrooms are all staffed with adequately qualified teachers. The objective of this report is to present the results from a collaborative, comparative study, that examined the…

This article examines moral education in the schools of Singapore, a highly complex society with considerable pluralism plus rapid urbanization and industrialization. Analysis of recent government reports indicates an inadequate response to moral education issues--concern for political stability and ethnic sensibilities promote generalizations…

This study aimed to find out whether Singaporean secondary social studies textbooks contain global themes, in which grade level those global themes are introduced, the percentage of global themes in each textbook, and which global themes are emphasized. A checklist consisting of four main global themes was developed. Those are (1) global systems…