2016
DOI: 10.1108/aeds-07-2015-0033
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Building a democratic society: exploring Singapore students ' understandings of democracy

Abstract: Purpose – One would not commonly associate democracy with Singapore, instead scholars have often described Singapore as an illiberal democracy and an authoritarian state. At the same time, all Singaporean school students recite the national pledge of allegiance in school every morning, in which they pledge “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. What do students know about democracy? Are they able to distinguish the characteristics of democratic systems from non-democrati… Show more

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Cited by 11 publications
(5 citation statements)
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“…This is a worrying finding for Singapore's citizenship education, especially because the policies for citizenship education were seemingly aimed at generating more 'active' forms of citizenship but they had not materialised in practice. This finding about the absence of deeper knowledge in Singapore's civic learning affirms similar findings from another study, by Sim and Krishnasamy (2016), that Singaporean students lacked knowledge of democracy, had superficial understanding of citizenship and uncritically accepted political hierarchy as well as acceded to authority. This also confirms a growing body of research that is trying to determine what it would mean to develop thinking citizens in the soft authoritarian nation-state of Singapore, which does not suggest an optimistic outlook (Gopinathan & Chiong, 2018).…”
Section: Depth and Limits Of Citizenship Educationsupporting
confidence: 90%
See 3 more Smart Citations
“…This is a worrying finding for Singapore's citizenship education, especially because the policies for citizenship education were seemingly aimed at generating more 'active' forms of citizenship but they had not materialised in practice. This finding about the absence of deeper knowledge in Singapore's civic learning affirms similar findings from another study, by Sim and Krishnasamy (2016), that Singaporean students lacked knowledge of democracy, had superficial understanding of citizenship and uncritically accepted political hierarchy as well as acceded to authority. This also confirms a growing body of research that is trying to determine what it would mean to develop thinking citizens in the soft authoritarian nation-state of Singapore, which does not suggest an optimistic outlook (Gopinathan & Chiong, 2018).…”
Section: Depth and Limits Of Citizenship Educationsupporting
confidence: 90%
“…The government subscribes to a philosophy that citizens prefer "the right to a better life over political ideology" (Sim, 2011, p. 222). Thus, the government believes that limits to democracy are necessary to ensure the country's survival and economic prosperity, and assumes that citizens can and should sacrifice certain socio-political freedoms in exchange for this (Sim & Krishnasamy, 2016). Consequently, Singapore is a delimited civil society and the ways that citizens can participate in it are constrained and controlled by the government.…”
Section: The 'Singapore Story'mentioning
confidence: 99%
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“…Recent research on democracy has been taxonomic (Maleki y Hendriks, 2016), defining (Muñoz, 2016), reflections on the concept itself (Sim y Krishnasamy, 2016;Tebaldi y Calaresu, 2015) or reviews of specific political contexts (Christensen, 2019;Fuchs y Roller, 2018;Repak, 2016;Calvo y Campos, 2016). However, all of these studies identify the need for an accompanying citizen of public administration.…”
Section: Theoretical Foundation: Democracy Transparency and Communica...mentioning
confidence: 99%