The Gifted Education Programme: Intellectual Meritocracy and Elitism in Singapore
"[Scholars] from any social class could be promoted to office by passing the Imperial examinations."
by Xu Weizhen
The Gifted Education Programme (GEP) was implemented in 1984 by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Modelled after similar programmes in the United States, the U.S.S.R and Israel, the aim of the GEP is to cater for the educational needs of students deemed to be "intellectually gifted" by educating them under a specially-tailored programme and giving them greater access to educational resources, thus "nurturing gifted individuals to their full potential for the fulfilment of self and the betterment of society" ("Gifted Education Programme"). But since its inception, the GEP has drawn a lot of flak from the general public, which perceives the programme to be elitist, privileging children from more educated families and creating a class of intellectual elites divorced from the realities of mainstream Singapore. In my essay, I examine the rationale behind Singapore's gifted education policies with respect to the Confucian ideal of intellectual meritocracy, one of the central guiding principles of policy formation in Singapore. In doing so, I aim to illustrate how the Singaporean system of intellectual meritocracy has departed from its egalitarian Confucianist roots, and also show how the government's heavy emphasis on meritocracy has conflicted with the original goals of gifted education and exacerbated the problem of the stratification of Singaporean society.
Ien Ang and Jon Stratton have explained that many of the Singapore government's policies are a result of "the translation of a Western idea in a Westernised non-Western context" (181). The idea of "gifted education" is a strategic example of this and, surprisingly enough, the concept of gifted education has been assimilated more readily into Singaporean culture than into Western culture. The gifted education movement began in the US in the 1920s with Lewis Terman's study on intellectually gifted children, which established that children possessing high IQs were more likely to succeed in their adult careers, provided that they were given the right opportunities in their childhood. Terman thus provided the rationale for the creation of specialised programmes for the intellectually gifted. However, there has been much opposition to the implementation of such programmes in the US, largely due to the fact that they go against the Western democratic ideals of egalitarianism, under which all children would be offered equal educational opportunities by the system (Tannenbaum 5-7).
On the other hand, the concept of gifted education has gained greater acceptance in Singapore due to its compatibility with the Confucian concept of intellectual meritocracy. Under the system of Confucian meritocracy, intellectual and moral "virtues" take precedence over heredity and social class, and these "virtues" should be rewarded by the system. The Imperial Examination system of ancient China was based upon this principle: scholars from any social class could be promoted to office by passing the Imperial examinations. Similarly, entry into the GEP is decided by means of educational testing and thus ostensibly egalitarian, as it is supposedly based on intellectual "virtue" and not wealth, family connections or similarly "unfair" criteria. Furthermore, meritocratic policies were already part and parcel of the Singapore education system before the inception of the GEP. A relevant example of this meritocratic approach to education would be the policy of streaming implemented in 1979, in which Primary 4 children are placed in different educational bands according to their Primary 3 academic results and then subjected to different academic programmes based on the stream they are in. The GEP could thus be regarded as an extension of educational streaming and hence incorporated rather smoothly into the educational system.
The principle of Confucian meritocracy is closely connected to the Singaporean government's principle of "instrumental rationality." The sociologist Chua Beng Huat states that "the single-minded pursuit of continuous economic growth has become the sole criterion for initiating and assessing all public policies" (185). Chua's statement is applicable to the GEP, which can be viewed as an example of "instrumental rationality." The MOE states that one of the main reasons for the implementation of the GEP is that "Singapore is a small nation with only human resources to rely on for its progress and prosperity. It is to the advantage of the nation that the gifted are helped and nurtured" ("Gifted Education Programme"). Economically speaking, the MOE views the gifted children as a more worthwhile "human resource" to invest in than the rest of the student population, because their allegedly greater potential for success justifies their being allocated a greater share of national resources. Such a capitalistic line of thinking risked being unpopular with the general Singaporean population whom it did not benefit. But by appealing to the traditional Chinese principle of Confucian meritocracy in which intellectual "virtue" is rewarded, the Singapore government has managed to sugar-coat the bitter pill of Western capitalism with wholesome Oriental values. The programme can thus be viewed as the translation of a Western concept of educational and economic progress into the Oriental context of Confucian meritocracy.
However, the cultural intricacies of Singaporean society prevent the programme from being truly meritocratic. In her 1989 commentary on the GEP, the programme director Dr Tan Bee Geok justified the meritocratic nature of the programme by stating that "selection is based purely on merit and pupils identified as gifted have been found to come from both sexes and from all socio-economic backgrounds and ethnic groups" (104). While this may be true, it is evident that she has conveniently left out the proportions of the various socio-economic groups constituting the GEP intake from her commentary, perhaps to mask the innate biases of the GEP selection system. According to the Gifted Education Programme website, the test is not a standardised IQ test; hence it is not specifically designed to eliminate any cultural bias. Rather it is a general test based on the child's proficiency in Mathematics, General Reasoning and the English Language.
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