Teaching Young Children Values in a Multi-religious Secular Society

Abstract

Purpose: Singapore is a multi-religious society where the state is secular, and different religions coexist. Values are taught at home and in schools from young. The government has a set of national values that underpin the Character and Citizenship Education which begin from primary education. However, in early childhood education, the national frameworks do not explicitly articulate the values that should be cultivated in children below six years of age up till November 2022, when the revised Nurturing Early Learners Framework is launched and explicate values that should be cultivated at preschool level. Against this diverse sociocultural context, this paper seeks to unpack these values and find out current centre practices on the ground.
 Method: This paper uses data of a qualitative study where purposeful sampling is used to select research sites and participants according to the various types of operators in the early childhood education landscape. Semi-structured interviews are conducted for data collection and analysed using thematic analysis. The data presented in this paper offers insights to the perspectives of centre leaders who lead and manage centres run by different operator types in a diverse early childhood education landscape.
 Results: The findings reveal that centre leaders’ interpretations of the values are generally aligned with the framework’s descriptors and uncover the complexity of values as overlaps across values. The study provides insights to current centre practices on values education.
 Conclusion: The study indicates alignment between leaders’ definitions and understanding of values espoused in the NEL framework and that values education does take place across early childhood development centre types. With the four values explicated for the early childhood education landscape, there is greater clarity on the values that should be cultivated in young children from young.