Meritocracy in Singaporean Educational System: Inequality in Admission to Secondary Schools

Journal: Journal of Higher Education Research DOI: 10.32629/jher.v2i5.506

Fangyao Zhang

Department of Education, The University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia

Abstract

This paper explores the fairness of meritocracy concerning admission to secondary schools based on the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) in Singapore. The Ministry of Education has consistently adopted the ideology of meritocracy as so to select talented students, stimulate effort, and optimize the allocation of rewards. The PSLE results can largely determine students’ educational tracks and even career orientation in Singapore. The paper shows how the principle of meritocracy works and how the government uses meritocratic belief in the education system. The paper argues that meritocracy has posed a threat to equality in admission to secondary schools in Singapore. The findings indicate that the meritocratic policy does not recognize both the importance of family SES and the gap between elite schools and neighbourhood schools in the Singapore education system. Students with wealthy and well-educated parents and students in elite schools are more likely to acquire better educational attainment, since they tend to gain more cultural capital from family and social capital from school. The principle of meritocracy fails to allocate opportunities fairly to students and can lead to inequality in education and exacerbate educational stratification.

Keywords

meritocracy, admission to secondary schools, social capital, cultural capital, inequality

Full Text

PDF - Viewed/Downloaded: 7 Times

Indexation

Download Index Record

References

References
[1] Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. London: Tavistock, 178, 71-112.
[2] Debs, M., & Cheung, H. S. (2020). Structure-reinforced privilege: Educational inequality in the Singaporean primary school choice system [Preprint]. EdArXiv.
[3] Dufur, M. J., Parcel, T. L., & Troutman, K. P. (2013). Does capital at home matter more than capital at school? Social capital effects on academic achievement. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 31, 1–21.
[4] Elford, G. (2016). Social class, merit and equality of opportunity in education. Res Publica, 22(3), 267–284.
[5] Ho, L.-C. (2012). Sorting citizens: Differentiated citizenship education in Singapore. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(3), 403–428.
[6] Ho, L.-C. (2020). ‘Our students do not get that equal chance’: Teachers’ perspectives of meritocracy. Cambridge Journal of Education, 1–2
[7] Koh, A. (2014). Doing class analysis in Singapore’s elite education: Unravelling the smokescreen of ‘meritocratic talk.’ Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12(2), 196–210.
[8] Lim, L., & Tan, M. (2020). Meritocracy, policy and pedagogy: Culture and the politics of recognition and redistribution in Singapore. Critical Studies in Education, 61(3), 279–295.
[9] Mathews, M., Lim, L., & Teng, S. (2017). Parents’ perceptions of the Singapore primary school system. 27, 55.
[10] Ministry of Education. (2021, March 04). Education Statistics Digest 2020. Available from: https://www.moe.moe.gov.sg/about-us/publications/education-statistics-digest
[11] Mijs, J. J. B. (2016). The unfulfillable promise of meritocracy: Three lessons and their implications for justice in education. Social Justice Research, 29(1), 14–34.
[12] Sullivan, A. (2021). Cultural capital and educational attainment. Sociology, 35(4), 893-912.
[13] Tan, C. (2017). Private supplementary tutoring and parentocracy in Singapore. Interchange, 48(4), 315–329.

Citing this article:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License