This paper discusses how the elite schools in Singapore have been recontextualising their pedagogical programmes, as the public education system adjusts to the developmental state's balancing act to continue with nation building while remaking Singapore into a global city. The elite schools have been updating their pedagogical programmes to produce the new generation of national leaders and, at the same time, preserve the formally meritocratic system amidst the challenges of internationalisation and increasing inequalities as Singapore globalises. Sociological studies of the reproduction of elites in schools have largely taken their theoretical cues from Pierre Bourdieu. However, the focus on character building, symbolic capital and cultivation of "noblesse oblige" is not sufficient to account for the educational reproduction of elites in globalising societies, as least for the case of Singapore. Instead, I draw on the works of Basil Bernstein on pedagogic identities to look at the historical pedagogical realignments in four elite schools in Singapore and argue that the focus has shifted to personality cultivation, emotional control and worlding activism. The result is the shaping of affective identities that promise to empower students to navigate and move between the global and local and engage the class inequalities that they contribute to.