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Following multiple disruptions and crises, global education stakeholders grapple with the issue of how to prepare learners for a future wrought with uncertainty and unpredictability. During the COVID-19 pandemic that caused global school closures, disruptions to learning occurred in differing scopes and magnitudes across different countries. International organisations reported that some students have incurred a 1-to-3-year learning loss, which might have ramifications on their holistic development and, further down the line, their socioeconomic prospects. An equitable solution must be sought for the world to move beyond recovering to flourishing. This article attempts to elucidate the underlying principles of Singapore's education system through Dewey's concept of democracy and education, defined from an apolitical stance. For Singapore, democracy is also balanced with pragmatic meritocracy, which is upheld as a means to provide equal opportunities for all, regardless of socioeconomic background. This paper describes Singapore's democratic and meritocratic society, setting the backdrop for an education system that seeks to develop its citizens into resilient, values-anchored, and lifelong learners ready to confront the challenges of the future.

The 2011 Singapore General Election (GE2011) has often been hailed as an ‘Internet Election’, highlighting the role of networked technologies in enabling democratization practices/processes for the unprecedented consolidation of oppositional politics in the city-state. Building on theorizations that broach the interface between social media and digital democracy, this paper critically examines Singaporeans’ myriad engagements with the internet during GE2011 in order to tease out the constructions of social and political debates within these online communities and the extent to which they facilitate democratic discussions. These computer-mediated colliding and emerging of perspectives related to Singapore’s (electoral) politics can in turn set the scene for the (re)production and negotiations of the multifarious meanings of democracy in place. Hence, in addressing these research inquiries, this paper goes beyond GE2011 to reflect on the ways in which web technologies and social media can make a difference to political debates, deliberation and representation in societies where there are limited public avenues for citizenry to articulate their voices/concerns. It also enables documentation of ordinary people’s aspirations and hopes for political change and the sort of democracy they want to see progressively initiated in the Singaporean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Political scientists have crafted intricate taxonomies to classify nations beyond liberal democracy, positioning these societies along an authoritarian continuum. Despite the pivotal role of journalists in accelerating political dynamics, there exists a lack of comparative research on media governance in these regimes. Consequently, this study scrutinizes the media governance ecosystems in Vietnam and Singapore. Vietnam is a one-party authoritarian state, whereas Singapore represents a hybrid political system. However, both countries exhibit a stable and uninterrupted rule by the respective ruling party. Our research uncovers the nuances of Singapore's media regulation, which embeds trusted stakeholders with financial interests in key press roles to reinforce the implicit political norms. Conversely, Vietnam employs a more direct, coercive, and state-centric approach. Media actors in both nations occasionally test the boundaries of acceptable discourses, with each government's responses being shaped by specific contexts and broader history. Reforms in Vietnam, embracing privatization and commercialization, mirror Singapore's integration of capitalism, public ownership, and commercial interests when governing media. These findings highlight diverse yet effective authoritarian media governance strategies, unique features, and commonalities in both systems. Overall, media structures in these Southeast Asian countries have undergone profound evolutions towards more sophisticated regulatory tools to manage societal and political transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the concept of state autonomy in the context of globalization. Earlier literature either considered state autonomy from the social forces in broad institutional and cultural terms or from the dominant classes in a restrictive sense. However, in either case the focus remained on domestic/national society, not the global society. The discussion of relative autonomy of the state began among the Marxists in the 1970s and then graduated into the mainstream social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s. In the upshot, the notions of developmental state and the embedded autonomy have significantly added to our knowledge of the role of the state. This paper broadens the idea of embedded autonomy by locating the sources of embeddedness in both local as well global institutions and norms. The paper uses the Singapore case to illustrate some of the possibilities and limitations of the reconfigured role of the state in the face of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to consider the use of new media technologies in the city-state of Singapore, widely acknowledged as one of the most technologically-advanced and networked societies in the world. Singapore is well-known as a politically censorious and highly-regulated society, which has been subjected to frequent and fierce insults and criticisms by those hailing from liberal democratic traditions. Indeed, much has been said about how the Singapore polity resonates with a climate of fear, which gives rise to the prevalent practice of self-censorship. This paper examines how certain groups in Singapore attempt to employ the Internet to find their voice and seek their desired social, cultural and political ends, and how the regulatory devices adopted by the highly pervasive People Action's Party (PAP) government respond to and set limits to these online ventures whilst concomitantly pursuing national technological cum economic development strategies. It concludes that the Internet in Singapore is a highly contested space where the art of governmentality, in the forms of information controls and 'automatic' modes of regulation, is tried, tested, and subsequently perfected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers understand and apply citizenship education differentially in traditional western democracies. But what of Asian countries where democracy is more recent and treated differently and where countries have traditions of highly controlled education systems? Do teachers have and demonstrate independence of thought in civic matters? This article reports on a study of social studies teachers' understandings of citizenship education, and how these understandings influence their teaching. We found that teacher understandings and practice of citizenship education were located in three distinct groupings, characterised as nationalistic, socially concerned and person oriented. This reflected a citizenship education landscape in Singapore that, despite tight controls, was not as rigid, prescriptive or homogenous as literature on the Asian region suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to flesh-out the conceptual and substantive difficulties and points to some opportunities where further democratization of Singapore may take place without social rupture. Contrary to the dismissal of some critics, it is argued that opportunities for democratization exist within Singapore's highly interventionalist single-party dominant polity. These opportunities arise from: the need to re-ignite public, especially middle class, interest in politics; the development of voluntary associations and their right to be consulted; the need for a more independent press; and the unavoidable political effects of the social inequalities of capitalist development. Substantively, the People's Action Party (PAP) government has opened up more space for their realization because of its desire to continue to govern. Currently, some 'independent' voices are heard in parliament; more dissenting views are published by the national newspaper in its letters-to-the-editor column and more distributive social welfare schemes are in place.