Singapore National Education Essay

History, or the study of history, is to study the past as viewed and documented by historians. As mentioned by Michael Crichton, “If you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a part of a leaf that didn’t know it was a part of a tree”.

Initially, Singapore did not believe in the relevancy of using history as a form of National Education. After separating with Malaysia in 1965, the main priority was to ensure that Singapore and her economy would be viable and thus, there was seemingly no immediate need for citizens to learn about the nation’s past. However, as Singapore started to develop rapidly, our leaders feared that our citizens would lose track of what it meant to be a Singaporean. Hence, as a countermeasure, National Education was introduced in May 1997. From that point on, Singapore has been using history to fulfil its National Education objectives. These objectives include building a sense of identity, ensuring the Singapore story and the difficulties she faced are known and to impart important core values to citizens and the future generation.

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For the case of Singapore, some information has been deemed to be too sensitive to be made known to the public. Hence, the government has decided to withhold disclosure of said information till a later date, or in some cases never at all. When such information are eventually released to the public, there is often a renewed interest in the Singapore story due to the controversy that these topics tend to spark. An example of this would be the time period right after Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, “The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew” was published. The volatile nature of history, or its content at least, would help maintain our citizen’s interest in the past affairs of the country, in a way no other subject would be able to replicate