Schooling and education for globalization in Singapore: Prescriptive experimentation in education policy

This paper presents an analytic account of how a small city-state, said to be the most globalized city in the world, experiment with globalization by looking to “education” as the resource to produce subject-citizens with the requisite skills for the global economy. My analysis focuses on the “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN) policy rolled out in 1997 and a few other important reforms that took place thereafter. I mobilize the term “prescriptive experimentation” to reveal the culture of education policy making in Singapore, and its politics.