Opposition leader Chee Soon Juan had words to say after Education Minister Chan Chun Sing announced in Parliament on Monday (March 7) that from 2024 onwards, streaming in secondary schools would be removed.
Dr Chee, who heads the Singapore Democratic Party, wrote in a March 10 Facebook post that he has been “calling out the harm that streaming does to children and education system” for many years now.
His exposure to the dangers of streaming began from “even before I had entered politics when I was still teaching at NUS,” he wrote.
The SDP chief said that his party has repeatedly called for streaming to be scrapped, adding that its education plan had said that “students entering secondary school will not be streamed.”
And now, “30 years later, the PAP finally has its eureka! moment,” he wrote.
However, he acknowledged that in 2019, then-Education Minister Ong Ye Kung had already announced this.
But Dr Chee underlined that “The point is that they’ve repeatedly played catch-up in policy formulation that would prepare Singapore for the future.
Intellectual heft among its leaders? Not much there.
The one thing that the PAP govt has going for it is enormous state resources that it taps into to propagate the myth that it is a party of the future.
Don’t fall for this, Singapore.”
Dr Chee had written about the dangers of streaming in his 1994 book, Dare To Change: An Alternative Vision for Singapore.
“A major problem of streaming is something called labelling. This perverse effect of self-fulfilling prophecy is even more evident in children… It is not difficult for children [in lower streams] to feel less valued as well as for others to feel similarly towards them.”
And when Mr Ong said in 2019 that streaming was coming to an end, SDP said in a statement then that the PAP first criticises its policy proposals but later adopts them.
The party cited many examples of this occurring, on matters such as taxes, minimum wages, the hiring of Singaporeans first, and other issues.
After his book was published in 1994, it was criticised by then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
“Dare to Change is a rehash of some old Western Liberal ideas which have failed, and Chee Soon Juan packages them together, calls it a book,” Mr Lee had said.
But when Mr Ong had announced an end to streaming, he said something every similar to Dr Chee’s words in 1994.
“Entering a stream that is considered ‘lower’ can carry a certain stigma or be self-limiting…. It becomes self-fulfilling,” Mr Ong had said in 2019. /TISG
Chee Soon Juan: ‘PAP will criticise our ideas only to adopt them eventually’