National Education and ‘Active Citizenship’: Implications for Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Singapore

Abstract

Citizenship and values education in one form or other has existed in Singapore since it acquired self‐government in 1959. Much has been written about the different forms that this education has taken over the years. In recent years, there have been efforts at describing and analyzing aspects of National Education, which was introduced in 1997. At the same time, a number of books and papers have been written examining the concept of citizenship in Singapore, which cover the period between the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. In the last five years leading to the millennium, there have been two major sets of changes in Singapore that have had implications for the conception of citizenship and for citizenship education. The first is to do with the introduction of National Education; the second, with the notion of active citizenship. This article describes these recent changes, and discuss their implications for the concept of citizenship and for citizenship education in Singapore.