As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray humans in Singapore as isolated from, rather than depending on and entangled with, the environment. We describe and analyze two trends. First, narratives about the nonhuman environment are largely relegated to Singapore’s past and disappear almost entirely as textbook narratives approach the present. Second, history narratives represent narrowly utilitarian, negativistic, and dominionistic perspectives of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. We contextualize these results and discuss the implications of teaching such narrow and misleading conceptions of human–environment interactions in official history education. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Many universities strive to become world-class and two of Singapore's universities are almost there, being ranked 12th and 13th in the QSWUR 2015/16. This study looked into the details of indicator rankings and found that the two universities are comparable to those in the top 10 universities in the same ranking in practically all indicators with the exception of Citations. Further analysis of the data of the 58 highest ranking universities with complete data revealed discrepancies in the assigned and attained indicator weights. Moreover, the Academic and Citations categories were not able to be used in stepwise regression calculations. These indicate that the computed Overall result is not what the ranker intended it to be and needs re-interpretation. If rankings are not anchored in statistical ground, discussions on rankings are at the abstract and verbal level, similar to discourses on alchemy (faith) vis-a-vis chemistry (facts).

Many governments have launched the top-down early childhood curriculum (ECC) reforms to enhance the accountability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The present discourse analysis of latest ECC policies across four diverse but representative countries–Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore–aims to examine the effects of neoliberalism and contextualization through within- and cross-case analyses. Our findings revealed that despite the mutual interactions and similarities, neoliberal ECC policies had been developed in context-specific ways across countries. Children's agency had been commonly valued to recognize its essential role in effective learning, which was constructed in play, social interaction, and community participation. Moreover, Australia and New Zealand emphasized the development of the culturally competent child on top of children's holistic development, without segregating children's learning into domains. These findings demonstrate the confounding effect produced by the diverse shaping forces in terms of defining the ideal ECC across countries–‘curriculum hybridization’. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.