Ideas about merit and the associated notion of a meritocracy have long been drawn upon to frame and understand a range of issues central to education policy. Little attention, however, is given to how in practice and through the workings of policy, meritocracy functions as an ideology that is struggled over by various social groups and pedagogic…

In concert with Singapore's ambitions of a global city well engineered to the human capital needs of the transnational knowledge economy, its schools in recent years have emphasized the teaching of critical thinking. Such efforts, however, are not without tensions and contradictions. Given that such a curricular ideal is underpinned by liberal…

Meritocracy functions in Singapore as the key principle of governance and educational distribution. However, the concept of meritocracy itself contains a number of inherent contradictions, most evidently witnessed in the tension between its egalitarian and elitist strands. This tension is documented in the recommendations of Singapore's recent…

In this article I first discuss how in Singapore the concept of meritocracy captures both elitist and egalitarian aspirations, and the ways in which its education policies have for a long time vacillated between these conflicting dimensions. I then argue that critical studies of meritocracy need to go beyond an understanding of the term as an…

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the professed aims and objectives of one of the most influential curricula in the teaching of thinking, this article foregrounds issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality. Specifically, it documents the subtle but powerful ways in which political and class…

This article undertakes a critique of the aims and objectives of "Thinking Skills", one of the most widely and internationally used curricula in the teaching of thinking, offered by the University of Cambridge International Examinations. By engaging in a critical discourse analysis of how political and class biases are (re-)produced in the forms…