Racialised Education in Singapore Introduction Singapore's National

Educational Research for Policy and Practice (2006) 5:15–31 © Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10671-005-5692-8

Michael D. Barr School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia QLD 4072, Australia E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

The Singapore education system plays a central role in the mythology of the young country’s nation building project. The education system is portrayed as the cradle of Singapore’s multiracialism, fostering racial harmony and understanding. Yet this historical study of primary school English textbooks from the 1970s to the present reveals that since the beginning of the 1980s they have been systemically designed in such a way that they evoke high levels of racial consciousness, and at their worst have displayed a pro-Chinese bias that has deprived non-Chinese children of inspiring role models. This study helps to explain the results of recent sociological research that has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Singapore education system as an instrument for promoting racial harmony.

Key Words: English textbooks, ethnicity, multiracialism, pedagogy, primary school, race, racism, Singapore, stereotyping, teaching English

Introduction

Singapore’s national ideology is based on a small collection of central con- ceptual elements. Two of these are meritocratic elitism and multiracialism. The myths of meritocracy and multiracialism enjoy a truly symbiotic rela- tionship, between them emphasising the ‘fairness’ of the Singapore system and ‘explaining’ the subordinate role of the non-Chinese minority races (Barr & Low, 2005; Moore, 2000; Rahim, 1998). At the same time they claim to guarantee to the minorities that they enjoy full status as members of the nation-building project (Teo, 2001; Yaacob, 2003). Such myths are very important in a society where people’s ethnic identity is a central element of identity, and where large ethnic minorities (mainly Malays and Indians) make up 23% of the population (Singapore Infomap, 2005), and lag behind the majority Chinese in all areas of life: politics, income, education and language dominance. 16 MICHAEL D. BARR Worrying Outcomes of Schooling The education system is supposed to be one of the government’s main instruments in effecting multiracialism, by encouraging inter-racial harmony, understanding, social interaction and friendships. Yet recent schol- arship has cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of this strategy. In about 2003 Angeline Khoo and Lim Kam Ming of Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) engaged in a sociological survey in which they ques- tioned 348 trainee teachers. Except for the possibility of a few mid-career entrants being amongst the sample, they would all have been recent prod- ucts of the Singapore school system and as a group they displayed strong evidence of racial stereotyping. To take just one aspect of their results, the Chinese trainee teachers viewed other Chinese as “industrious, practi- cal and ambitious,” but they thought of Malays as being “happy-go-lucky and lazy.” Indians were regarded as being “loud, argumentative and talka- tive” (Khoo & Lim, 2004: 201, 207, 208). Moving away from the question of stereotyping, another recent study of 263 English-speaking women of all ages found that the more recently they had passed through the school system, the more conscious they were of their own and others’ ethnicity, and that they were commensurately less inclined to mix socially with members of other races (Goby, 2004). Turning to the children themselves, another NIE study has revealed that the overwhelming majority (up to 80% of some samples) of Singaporean school children socialise exclusively with members of their own race, lead- ing to the predominance of racial clustering in the playground (Lee et al., 2004). The same study also found that skin colour is a major racial identifier, with dark skin colour being a particularly strong and negative racial indicator. Being dark-skinned in a Singapore playground is to invite deri- sive nicknames like “Black Coffee” and “Blackie,” together with racist remarks about the alleged personal characteristics of Indians or Malays as the case may be (Lee et al., 2004: 128–130). The odd thing about this being a major identifier is that the difference between the skin colours is not a very reliable indicator of race because there are many tanned Chinese, fair- skinned Indians, and Malays who look Chinese or Indian. Yet my study of English textbooks used in Singaporean primary schools reveals that this is the racial characteristic that is portrayed there most prominently. At this point we can also note that the trainee teachers mentioned above are also reflecting prejudices that were rife in the society of their childhood, and which was reflected faithfully in their textbooks when most of them were in primary school in the 1980s. These two pieces of evidence suggest that the school system may not have only failed to avert this racism, but may have contributed to generating it. RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 17 This Study My study covers a substantial sample of all the textbooks used to teach Singaporean primary school children English over the last 35 years (see References), and it reveals that throughout this period these textbooks have played a significant role in perpetuating, if not generating racial consciousness by the constant portrayal of characters in their overtly ethnic and racial identities. Cornell and Hartmann (1998: 20) have argued that ethnicity itself can only be defined in terms of difference: “To claim an ethnic identity is to distinguish ourselves from others, it is to draw a bound- ary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ ...” My study suggests that since the 1980s the Singapore education system has been providing children with de facto training in identifying the ‘other’ and encouragement to think of themselves and others through the prism of ethnicity-cum-race. It was at its worst from 1980 to the mid-1990s, during which time the textbooks actively propagated racial stereotypes that bolstered the self-image of the Chinese majority and denigrated the ethnic minorities. This coincided with a period in which society as a whole was becoming more racially conscious and in which Chinese racism was being given freer expression in society. The textbooks were both an indicator of broader racism in the community and a driver that propagated stereotypes to a new generation.

Background to Racialisation A close consideration of why this racialisation became more intense and more pro-Chinese in the 1980s is beyond the scope of this article, but it has been considered in some detail elsewhere (Barr & Low, 2005). Very briefly, the period from 1978 saw heightened consciousness of race and ethnicity throughout Singaporean society in general because of a shift in the attitude of then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who suddenly stopped downplaying ethnic differences and began celebrating the alleged superiority of Chinese culture over those of the Indians and Malays. The early outward signs were the privileging of Chinese education, Chinese language and selectively cho- sen ‘Chinese’ values in an overt and successful effort to create a Mandarin- and-English-speaking elite that would dominate public life. A number of specific initiatives in education served to exacerbate consciousness of ‘race,’ heighten the social dominance of the Chinese, and reduce the imperatives for inter-ethnic socialising among school children. One of these features was the new emphasis on learning one’s state- assigned ‘mother tongue’ – Mandarin for Chinese; Tamil for Indians; and Malay for Malays. This language-based segregation was a de facto racial segregation, and the exigencies of timetabling an entire cohort of students so that each child could attend his or her mother tongue class produced 18 MICHAEL D. BARR a significant degree of “bunching” of children in classes through school according to their racial classification (Ooi, 2005: 117). Since 9/11 has there been recognition within the Ministry of Education that this has helped create insular communal enclaves and ghettos within schools, but in the 1980s and 1990s such clustering of students according to ‘mother tongue’ was routine. Another major initiative was the decision to preserve and foster a collection of elite Chinese-medium schools. These schools were explicitly designed “to have an essentially Chinese ambience, in both linguistic and cultural terms” (Vasil, 1995: 73). The textual symbolism of the nation-building project has become con- siderably less inclusive as these processes of racialisation and Sinicisation have progressed. Whereas in the 1960s the success of Singapore was cred- ited to the “industry of the various races,”1 today Lee Kuan Yew (prime minister from 1959 to 1990; then Senior Minister until 2004; now Minis- ter Mentor) routinely attributes the success of Singapore to the presence of Chinese values within society (Barr, 2000: 161).

1970s

Relative Racial Innocence At age seven a child in Singapore starts Primary 1. Since the beginning of the 1970s this has meant entry into a world of swotting and study, and – except for children attending a few Malay-dominated schools in the eastern part of the island – entry into a strongly Chinese environment. This is not a suggestion of an insidious agenda, but it is important to state it because it is a feature of which Chinese, as the majority race, are usually blissfully unconscious, but which members of minority races can never forget. Simply because the Chinese are the biggest ethnic group it is a nor- mal and unremarkable state of affairs, but from the early days of the Republic the already-dominant Chinese character of the Singapore school environment has been exaggerated by racial stereotyping portrayed in primary school English textbooks. For instance, primary school children in the 1970s saw through their textbooks that almost all school teachers are Chinese, with names like Mr Lim, Miss Lee, Miss Yong, Mrs Tay and Miss Chan.2 Yet it has to be said that beyond this probably unconscious dis- tortion, the 1970s English primary school textbooks contained little stereotyping according to race, and only incidental consciousness of race per se. The exceptions are notable for being so rare: in 1972 “Bad Dan” the bully and thief was depicted as being very dark-skinned, and in 1979 the darker skin of the Malays and Indians compared to the Chinese was exaggerated in the illustrations.3 Generally speaking, however, differences in skin colour RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 19 were either absent in textbook illustrations or portrayed with some subtlety throughout the 1970s. In fact the pedagogical methodology used in this period did not lend itself to racial stereotyping, because there were very few depictions of ordinary Singaporean life outside the classroom.

1980s

Loss of Innocence It has already been mentioned that the racialisation of society in the 1980s was the cumulative result of many factors, some of which have been given scholarly attention already. In this paper I wish to focus on just one factor that has not yet been the focus of any study. I refer to a major shift in pedagogical methodology in the teaching of English language, whereby stories in textbooks were revised to place them in a local setting. Educationists were commissioned to produce English textbooks with which Singaporean children could easily identify because of their familiarity with the society and the places being depicted.4 With this initiative the presence of race in the classroom became ubiquitous overnight because the peculiarly Sin- gaporean worldview that sees society through the prism of race was given free rein. Suddenly the textbooks were ﬁlled with stories about Singaporean children and adults with names like Ali, Sumei and Ravi, accompanied by drawings of identiﬁably Malay, Chinese and Indian children playing, work- ing and living life.5 To help the children relate to the world being depicted in their new textbooks, they were even presented with little picture and reading lessons in English textbooks that were obviously designed to help children learn to identify people by race: “The Malay girl [pictured with dark skin] is Minah. She has [i.e., is the one holding] a doll. The Chinese girl [pictured with fair skin] is Sufen. She has [i.e., is the one holding] a kitten.”6 Judging from the teacher’s handbooks it seems that even in classroom exercises that are not drawn directly from the course books the teachers were led by suggestion to depict characters both racially and with a Chinese bias. Hence in one lesson, 4A Extended teachers were encouraged to draw faces on the blackboard of Mr Lu, Mr Fu, Mr Lee and Mr Chen, rather than generic cartoon faces, despite not a single one of these characters being named or their Chinese ethnicity being mentioned in the equiv- alent pages of the children’s textbook.7

Depictions of Non-Chinese It was also a direct but probably unintended consequence of this initiative that the English textbooks of the 1980s became major vehicles for 20 MICHAEL D. BARR transmitting and reinforcing racial stereotypes in Singapore’s primary school children. The New Course English textbooks went to considerable lengths to portray the life and work of Mohammed the Malay hotel porter, Cik Alimah the Malay domestic worker (Figure 1), Ahmad the Malay street sweeper, and Encik Samad, another Malay street sweeper.8 The PEP series taught children to expect that Malays and Indians would work predominantly in relatively menial jobs. Thus we see the Sikh policeman (Mr Singh),9 the Indian hawker stall holder,10 and the Indian and the Malay zookeepers (Muthu, Maniam and Hassan).11 A large proportion of the Indian and Malay characters were comical.12 The rival NESPE series faithfully reﬂected the tendency of Ma- lays and Indians to gravitate to less prestigious careers in the police force:

Figure 1. Malays portrayed as menial workers. See New Course English 6A/B. (1981, 1982), p. 63. RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 21

“Mr Bala is a policeman. His brother is a policeman too.” (Mr Ali is also a policeman, but Dr Chen is a doctor.)13 The night watchman (Mr Singh) is a Sikh.14 In one NESPE story about three lorry drivers, two of the three are non-Chinese: Hasli the Malay and Kumar the Indian. Furthermore they work for rival companies, both owned by Chinese (Wen Limited and Chang Brothers).15 Meanwhile Ramu the Indian Secondary 4 student has a burning ambition to become a zookeeper.16

Depictions of Chinese On the other hand we see rather more uplifting images of Chinese characters, such as the civic-minded Chinese leader in the housing estate (Mr Lin)17 and a plethora of Chinese doctors (such as Dr Wu, Dr Chen and Dr Li).18 The only “businessman” found in the whole sample is a Mr Chen: “Mr Chen is a busy businessman. He has no time to do some things himself. Look at the pictures and say what he does not do himself. (Answers: Type letters, make coffee, iron clothes, wash his car...)19 A particularly strong and consistent stereotype was the depiction of teachers as Chinese. In the New Course English textbooks all the teacher-characters found in my survey have Chinese names: Mrs Li and Miss Li.20 In the PEP series there are not only teachers called Mrs Li and Miss Li, but also Mrs Chan, Miss Chen, Mr Chen, Mr Shih, Miss Wu, Mrs Wu and Mr Wu.21 The school principal in this series is a Mr Chen and even the scout master is Chinese (Mr Ying).22 Children using the rival NESPE series of English textbooks faced similar stereotyping, with a plethora of Chinese teacher-characters: Mrs Li and Miss Li again, and also Mrs Huang, Miss Huang, Miss Si, Mrs Fu, Mr Han, Mrs Lin, Miss Lin, Mr Lin, Mr Chen, and – the most frequently recurring character in the whole series – Miss Chen.23 The ubiquitous Miss Chen even appears as a teacher in the class progress tests.24 We also see the Chinese school principal (Mr Li at one point; an unnamed Chinese woman at another).25 In the minds of Singaporean primary school children – and junior primary school children in particular – the teacher was and is a god-like being: a fount of authority and a dispenser of wisdom and knowledge. The ordinary tendency of little children to be in awe of teachers was and is exaggerated by the tra- ditional Chinese veneration of teachers. The characterisation of teachers as Chinese in these textbooks, therefore, must have been one of the most pow- erful positive images that the Chinese could have monopolised, subliminally telling both Chinese children and non-Chinese children that the Chinese have a natural place of authority and leadership in society.

Depictions of Prejudice This survey of 1980s textbooks uncovered only two definite mentions of non-Chinese teacher-characters. Mr Singh (a once-off text-and-illustration 22 MICHAEL D. BARR character), and Mrs Rama (a once-off text-only character).26 The near- omission of Indian teachers is particularly striking as Indians have always been well represented in the teaching profession in Singapore, confirming that the world being depicted in these textbooks is not a reflection of social reality but of Chinese prejudices. In fact the broader disconnect between reality and the English textbook depiction of reality has already been noted in Sng Siok Ai (1996). Sng undertook a statistical analysis of the depiction of the races in a sample of English and Chinese textbooks in and around 1974, 1984 and 1994. She compared the depiction of the races in differ- ent types of occupations and housing to a standard based on national sta- tistics. Her statistical survey shows clearly that the depiction of the races by occupation and housing type in the textbooks bore no resemblance to the real world, and that the textbooks consistently depicted Chinese in a favourable light. Yet it is far worse than a mere disjunction with reality. One could be forgiven for thinking the authors had gone out of their way to draw attention to the paucity of non-Chinese teachers in the world of their creation. See this dialogue about a Malay bus driver: Child 1: “He’s Mr Ahmed.” Child 2: “Is he a teacher?” Child 1: “No, he’s a bus driver.”27 This particular dialogue was intended to be acted out in class, with picture cards. The teacher was supposed to “talk about the pictures” that go with the dialogue and explain them.28 The pictures in the Course Book depict the two children as light-skinned Chinese girls in school uniform and Mr Ahmed as a dark-skinned man in a bus driver’s uniform, standing in front of a bus (Figure 2). It is difficult to believe that this consistent production of common stereotypes across three sets of textbooks written by three sets of authors was not deliberate, but bearing in mind that the three writing committees

Figure 2. Malays are not teachers. See NESPE Course Book 1A. (1981), p. 14. RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 23 contained no Malays and only two Indians between them, it is just possi- ble that this was an unconscious, rather than a deliberate reproduction of stereotypes.29 The relatively innocent presence of much milder stereotyping in the textbooks of the 1970s lends weight to this possibility, but it is still difficult to avoid the more damning conclusion that there was a conscious effort to present uplifting role models and self-images for the Chinese children – particularly the hegemonic image of the Chinese school teacher – and to deprive Malay and Indian children of such models, telling them that they should aspire to less lofty places in society. Beyond the depiction of adults in racially stereotypical occupations, there were also racial lessons to be drawn from the depiction of the children themselves in these textbooks. Indian children doing Primary 4 Extended using the PEP textbooks will see themselves depicted not once, but twice as being precocious, just as the stereotypical Singaporean Indian should be.30 In one lesson from 1981, Primary 1 children using the NESPE series were taught that Chinese children [personified by Suyin and Wieming writing and drawing on the blackboard] are studious while Malays and Indians [personified by Ali and Samy running and jumping in the classroom] engage in horseplay31 (Figure 3).

Racialisation of Children The cumulative effect of this and other racialising initiatives of the 1980s helps to explain why so many Singaporeans I have interviewed over the age of 40 identiﬁed the 1980s as a period of heightened racial consciousness.

Figure 3. Chinese are studious. Malays and Indians engage in horseplay. See NESPE Course Book 1 B. (1981), p. 36. 24 MICHAEL D. BARR

One Indian interviewee went overseas in the mid-1980s and upon his return in 1988 was shocked by the high level of racial consciousness displayed by his 10-year-old niece. Not only did she give a racial identification to each of her school friends as she spoke of them, but every one of her friends was a fellow Indian. There was no reason for her to even mention race because he had not referred to it at all. My informant had never seen even a hint of such racial consciousness when he grew through childhood in the same family during the 1960s. This anecdote is at odds with the official mythology of Singapore’s multiracialism, but it accords with the common experience of living in Singapore, where it is often difficult to avoid thinking in terms of racial identifiers.

1990s, 2000s

Mere Racialisation These stereotyping tendencies have become weaker as the textbooks became less parochial in the 1990s and 2000s – balancing stories about racially identifiable Singaporean children with both racially neutral characters and stories and myths about places, people and animals around the world.32 Although the NESPE textbooks from the 1980s were still in use and doing their damage as late as 1994, there was also a new series of English primary textbooks called Primary English Thematic Series (PETS). The racialisation of characters in PETS was still overt (using skin colour, clothes etc), but there were very few situational illustrations and stories that lent themselves to perpetuating stereotypes, and in those few that were present there seemed to have been some effort to provide characters who con- tradicted the prevailing stereotypes. One pair of pages of a Primary 1 text even depicts a Malay or Indian teacher alongside a Chinese gardener and a Chinese street sweeper, something that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. A 1996 6B textbook clearly depicts a female Malay teacher, complete with tudung, followed a few pages over by a picture of an Indian teacher (Ravi) in a wheelchair.33 It is hard to believe that this turnaround from the 1980s was not a deliberate effort to compensate for the ghastly damage that had been done to a generation of children during the 1980s. Since the final demise of the NESPE series some time in the mid-1990s Singapore’s primary English textbooks have been free of overt racial stereotyping, but the racialisation of the characters in theses textbooks has remained strong. In the PETS series of the 1990s, and the In Step, Celebrate English and the Treks series of the first half of the 2000s the racialisation of the drawings and characters was highly sophisticated, training children in the nuances of skin colouring, and the implications of ethnic markers like RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 25 names, dress, hair styles (more curly for Indians; straighter for Chinese) and religious markers (e.g., a bindhi for Indian girls).34 Although the overtly offensive stereotyping of the non-Chinese has been discontinued completely some of the series still retain subtle biases that favour Chinese and deprive Malays in particular of the chance to see themselves portrayed positively. Kwa Kok Beng has done a count of the mention of racial/ethnic characters in the Primary 1 In Step English textbooks in the 2000s, and she found that Malays are portrayed pictorially at half the rate suggested by their prevalence in the national population, while both Chinese and Indians are portrayed at rates higher than their national representation suggests as ‘fair’ (Kwa, 2004: 34, 128). Kwa (2004: 36, 37, 41, 42) has also found that the illustrations of Chinese characters in this series are consistently portrayed in dominant, proactive postures, address- ing the reader or the other characters in a friendly, smiling fashion, while the illustrations of Indian and Malay characters are consistently portrayed in passive, non-speaking roles, looking away from the reader and more rarely smiling in a friendly fashion. Kwa (2004: 77) identified one page in which Malay and Chinese children are portrayed as happy while the clearly identifiable Indian is drawn as stereotypically angry (with steam coming out of her ears). Furthermore the focus groups that Kwa (2004: 50, 51) conducted with pupils using the series revealed that illustrated characters without overt racial markers are commonly assumed to be Chinese, which both exaggerates the Chinese ethnic hegemony in the series and confirms the hypothesis that the children were being taught to think of all people through the prism of ethnicity-cum-race – even characters deliberately constructed to be free of ethnic markers. While the racialisation of the textbooks shows no signs of waning, it is at least fortunate that MOE seems to have made a qualitative break- through in banishing the racial stereotyping. All the textbooks of the 2000s have successfully avoided or minimised stereotyping. There seem to have been two keys to their technique. First, they minimised the inclusion of stories with local Singaporean characters and settings – especially those that place racialised characters in the workplace – and replaced them with stories about anthropomorphised and natural animals, historical figures, myths, legends and literary characters from around the world (which served to open children’s minds as well as side-stepping racial issues). This still left room for some of the series to engage in milder and probably completely unconscious stereotyping in their depictions of children at play and in the classroom as described by Kwa, but even this fault appears to be absent from the Treks and My Pals are Here! series. The key to this next step seems to be simply one of empowering minorities in the production process. In stark contrast to all the other series considered to date, nei- ther of the Treks nor the My Pals are Here! series were written by a 26 MICHAEL D. BARR

Chinese-dominated committee.35 The General Editor of the Treks series was Duriya Azeez (who must be either a Muslim Indian or a Malay), and her two editors were an Indian and a Chinese. The My Pals are Here! series of textbooks was sole authored by Duriya Azeez, while the compan- ion workbooks were primarily the work of Sharifah Khadijah (editor) and Ruzira Bte Rabu (page layout), both of whom must also be Indian Mus- lims or Malays.36 Let us not, however, dismiss the continuing racialisation of characters lightly. Even the best of these books are socialising children of the most impressionable age to see the world through the prism of race, and training them to racially categorise people by physiological characteristics such as skin colour and hair texture, and secondary ethnic and religious markers such as names and clothing. This practice lends itself to perpetuating a society’s racial stereotypes.

Conclusion

The propagation of racial stereotypes in Singapore’s English primary textbooks during the 1980s and 1990s is the most startling revelation in this paper, but a feature that should be just as worrying is the more subtle damage done by merely using local characters to illustrate textbooks in a multiracial society. As soon as one starts depicting local characters in a multiracial society in either words or pictures there is a seemingly irre- sistible demand that each character be given racial-cum-ethnic markers, whether by name, dress, skin colour or whatever. It is very difﬁcult to do this without highlighting the differences – whether they are constructed or real – between people based on these markers. Unless one is then going to actively produce counter-hegemonic stereotypes, the dominant stereotypes are going to be reinforced. Giving members of the subordinate minority groups a strong role in the creation of this material is likely to be sufﬁcient to avoid overt stereotyping. Yet this practice fails to avoid the racialisation of characters per se, and when racialisation in textbooks reinforces the generation of racial and ethnic identities in the broader society, the textbooks are still vehicles through which children are systematically taught the nuances of seeing themselves and their fellows through the prism of their society’s prejudices.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Australian Research Council for its ﬁnan- cial support, the National University of Singapore’s Department of History RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 27 and Asia Research Institute for hosting me during my ﬁeld work, and the National Institute of Education Library for allowing me access to their archives. A special thanks to Loh Kah Seng for airmailing me a thesis I had missed and to the Singaporeans who generously consented to be interviewed.

Notes

1Government Minister Ong Pang Boon quoted in Sin Chew Jit Poh,8July 1969, cited in Mirror of Opinion: Highlights of Malay, Chinese & Tamil Press. (1969). 2English This Way Book 1: Special Singapore Edition. (1970), pp. 1, 9, 39; Looking Ahead with English 2A. (1970), pp. 1, 3, 21, 48, 49; Looking Ahead with English 3. (1970). pp. 5, 9, 64, 65; New Primary English 2A. (1972), p. 35; Primary English for Singapore EL2 2A. (1976), p. 15; English Today As Second Language for Singapore Primary Schools. (1976, Revised edition 1977), pp. 10, 17; Enjoying English: Nelson’s Primary English Course for Singapore 1A. (1979). Singapore: Thomas Nelson. pp. 7, 23, 41; Enjoying English: Nelson’s Primary English Course for Singapore IB. (1979), pp. 6, 13, 32, 40. The only non-Chinese school teachers uncovered in this sample were two European school teachers who slipped through from the original American editions on which the 1970 English This Way Series was mod- elled. See English This Way Book 2 Special Singapore Edition. (1970), pp. 1, 2, 10, 11. 3New Primary English 2A. (1972), pp. 2, 3; Enjoying English 1A. (1979), front cover and pp. 20, 21, 23, 25, 35; Enjoying English 1B. (1979), front cover and pp. 2, 19, 34. 4Interview with Catherine Lim, 24 March 2004. Dr Lim was the co-ordinator of the Primary English Programme in the early 1980s. 5See for instance, Primary English Programm [PEP] Textbook 6B Extended. (1984), p. 53. This page contains illustrations of an Ali, a Ravi, a Sumei, a Peihua (twice), a Mr Chen and a Mr Wu. This is typical of the racial representation in this series. 6New English Series for Primary Education [NESPE]Course Book 1B. (1981), p. 19. 7NESPE Teacher’s Edition 4A Extended. (1982), pp. 44, 45. 8New Course English 6A/B. (for use in 1982, 1983; published October 1981, second imprint November 1982), pp. 19–28, 63, 64, 127–131. 9PEP Textbook 6B Extended. (1984), pp. 48, 49, 10PEP Textbook 4A Extended. (1982), pp. 1–5; PEP Textbook 6B Extended. (1984), p. 32. 11PEP Textbook 6B Extended. (1984), p. 68. 28 MICHAEL D. BARR 12For instance, see PEP Textbook 4B Extended. (1982), pp. 13–16; 32–35. There were also comical Chinese characters, but these were a much smaller proportion of the total number of Chinese characters depicted. 13NESPE Course Book 1B. (1981), pp. 2, 17; NESPE Course Book 4B Extended. (1981), p. 18; NESPE Course Book 4A. (1982), p. 6. 14NESPE Course Book 4B Extended. (1981), pp. 25, 26; NESPE Course Book. 4A (1982), pp. 9–11. 15NESPE Course Book 6B. (1985–1994), pp. 35, 36. 16NESPE Course Book 6A. (1984–1994), pp. 52–54. 17PEP Textbook 4A Extended. (1982), pp. 8–11. 18NESPE Course Book: 1B. (1981), p. 3; NESPE Course Book 4B Extended, (1981), p. 18; PEP Textbook 4B Extended. (1982). p. 78; NESPE Course Book 4A. (1982), p. 6; NESPE Course Book 4B (1983), p. 5; NESPE Course Book 6A. (1984–1994), p. 48. Indians fair moderately well in this series’ depiction of the medical profession. This survey of 1980s primary textbooks uncovered: one instance of an illustration of an Indian doctor-character (standing with a Chinese doctor-character); one instance of a text-and-illustration-based Indian vet-character; two instances of text- based Indian doctor-characters. NESPE Course Book 1B. (1981), p. 5; NESPE Course Book 6A Extended. (1983), p. 14; NESPE Course Book 6B Extended. (1983), pp. 19, 30. 19NESPE Course Book 4A. (1982), p. 27. 20New Course English 6A/B. (for use in 1982, 1983; published October 1981, second imprint November 1982), pp. 30, 31; New Course English 6D/C. (for use in 1982, 1983; published December 1981, second imprint November 1982), pp. 63, 64. 21PEP Textbook 1A. (1982), pp. 1–8, 19, 22, 29, 60, 62; PEP Textbook 4B Extended. (1982), pp. 36, 49, 55, 70; PEP Textbook 4A. (1983), pp. 17, 37, 68; PEP Textbook 4B. (1983), pp. 7, 31; 52, 56, 75, 87; PEP Textbook 6A Extended. (1984), pp. 9, 54; PEP Textbook 6B Extended. (1984), pp. 10, 32, 44, 52, 53, 67, 79; PEP Textbook 6A. (1985), p. 11. 22PEP Textbook 4B. (1983), p. 87; PEP Textbook 4A. (1983), p. 68. 23NESPE Course Book 1A. (1981), pp. 2–5, 16, 48, 51; NESPE Course Book 1B. (1981), pp. 3, 6, 56; NESPE Course Book 4B Extended. (1981), pp. 7, 10, 21, 43; NESPE Course Book 4A. (1982), pp. 12, 33; NESPE Work Book 4A Extended. (c.1982), pp. 13, 26, cited in NESPE Teacher’s Edition 4A Extended. (1982), pp. 109, 122; NESPE Course Book 4B. (1983), p. 4, 21, 66; NESPE Course Book 4B, (1983), p. 45; NESPE Course Book 6A Extended. (1983), p. 1–3; NESPE Course Book 6A. (1983), p. 34; NES- PE Course Book 6A. (1984–1994), p. 48; NESPE Course Book 6B. (1985– 1994), p. 37. 24Class Progress Test 2, NESPE Teacher’s Edition 4A Extended. (1982), p. 13. RACIALISED EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE 29 25NESPE Course Book 1A. (1981), p. 51; NESPE Course Book, 1B. (1981), p. 3. 26NESPE Course Book 4B. (1983), p. 26; NESPE Course Book 6B. (1985– 1994), p. 48. 27NESPE Course Book 1A. (1981), p. 14. 28NESPE Teacher’s Edition 1A. (1981), p. 41. 29The New Course English books were written by three Chinese. The PEP books were written by four Chinese, an Indian and someone with a European surname (Ridge). The NESPE books were written by four Chi- nese, an Indian and someone with a European surname (Baruch). 30PEP Textbook 4A Extended. (1982), pp. 74–77; PEP Textbook 4B Extended. (1982), pp. 13–16. 31NESPE Course Book 1B. (1981) p. 36. 32See, for instance, New English Thematic Series Course Book 1A. (1991); In Step: A Course in English for Primary Schools 2B. (2001). 33Primary English Thematic Series [PETS] 1A (1991), pp. 32, 33; PETS 6B EM3 (1996), pp. 28, 35. 34See In Step: A Course in English for Primary Schools [various classes] (beginning in 2001); Celebrate English [various classes] (beginning in 2000); and Treks. Setting Off: Interactive English for Primary Levels [various classes] (beginning in 2000). 35See endnote 29 for an account of the Chinese domination of most of the committees. 36Treks Course Book 1A. (2000), before page 1; and My Pals are Here! English 6A (2005), before page 1; My Pals are Here! English Writing Skills 1 (2002), before page 1.

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