02 September 2017

Singapore’s Ministry of Education has clarified that its director-general of education, Wong Siew Hoong, never made statements to assert that our educational success can be attributed to standardised test drilling and a culture of compliance.

The source is an article in the August edition of the Australian Teacher Magazine. In the article, the magazine purportedly reproduced remarks made by the director-general at the National Institute of Education’s Redesigning Pedagogy conference in May 2017. The article claimed that Mr Wong had juxtaposed Singapore’s stellar academic results in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with data on student well-being, showing a negative correlation.

Mr Wong was alleged to have said: “We’ve been winning the wrong race”, adding that Singapore is “building compliant students just as the jobs that value compliance are beginning to disappear”.

The Ministry of Education has clarified Mr Wong had not made the statements quoted in the article. “This is fake news,” said MOE.