This abstract presents content groups with different goals and scopes. This book is divided into three parts. Ethnic pluralism in the first three chapters reflects history, politics, and development of ethnic pluralism. Ethnic relation and interaction issues and microism focus on educational contexts, the school system, and a shared feeling of communities and members. The last two chapter views community assimilation and daily-life dimensions. The last chapter views community assimilation and shared feelings in the age of globalization, which indicates human migration in the global economic system.
The first group: history, politics, institutions and policies. The author of each chapter illustrates the complexity of state mandate of Singapore. The constitution recognizes ethnic and racial diversity, but in practice it creates problems and complexity.
Ganesan Narayana indicates the importance of ethnic politics and state management in events via leader representatives of their communities. However, there is a gap in such a system because their representatives could not connect or reflect true needs of community members. Eugene Tan assessed the anomaly of the state’s ethnic pluralism policy. In one way, the policy promotes awareness of ethnic diversity. However, there were doubts about the loyalty of certain ethnic groups, especially the Muslim Malays. In many historical events, the Muslim Malay minority group was asked about their loyalty including the problem of social division. This has made Muslim Malay position even more complicated and marginalized.
The second group: Education. the focus is on education and the school system. The contents of this issue cover almost half of the book. The editorial identified the foundation of educational institutions in creating citizens in order to accept cultural and racial pluralism, but it reflected a number of flaws.
Christine Lee et al. viewed informal interactions among primary students. In general, it is common for students of the same race and gender to be together due to language background. However, cross-racial interactions could occur in informal and extra-curricular activities, leading to mutual trust among them. Trivina Kang observed that the students under investigation formed into distinct groups of “their ethnic world” with languages identifying insiders and outsiders. Family resources were an important factor in driving mainstream students to study efficiently. Parents played a part in the decision making of Malay students. Extra-curricular activities provided an opportunity to promote cross-racial and cross-educational grouping.
Lanna Khong et al. put a significance on national education to mean an education to create national citizens. Fundamentally, schools emphasize academic success. However, school leaders play an important role in promoting social solidarity activities according to national education curricula and extra-curricular activities, for instance, transfer of ethnic cultural knowledge, including food, dress, and traditions. It is imperative to step beyond knowledge and understanding about ethnic relations.
Angeline Khoo and Lim Kang Min explored perspectives of student teachers and stereotypes of various ethnic groups. A large number of headmasters and teachers ignored cultural diversity. Consequently, if these student teachers are to be a force for cross-ethnic interactions in the future, it is necessary to reveal an implicit bias in each individual.
S. Gopinathan et al. viewed educational policies on language and diversity management and found that it was essential to revise the bilingual policy because language was more important than language skills. It is to establish cross-cultural awareness. Therefore, providing an opportunity to select languages to study is as important as developing a language curriculum to increase cross-cultural knowledge and skills.
The third group: Organizational workers, mass media, and contemporary foreign migrant movements
Social welfare: Lai Ah Eng and Rosaleen Ow talked about ethnic-free social development organizations, e.g., family service centers, which are different from ethnic-bound social development organizations. From a survey, the authors found that social welfare workers are open and tolerant to cultural diversity more than cultural understanding. However, in daily-life work, they learn from colleagues and their work paves the way for them to develop their knowledge and abilities. The article indicates that ethnic-bound social development organizations are more open in order to have workers with diverse backgrounds.
Mass media content analysis: Kenneth Paul Tan pointed out ethnic stereotypes in movies and television. For instance, Western-educated Chinese characters overlook Mandarin and Chinese culture, but focus on socialization. However, Chinese characters with Chinese education usually use “Singlish” or English mixed with local Malay and Chinese. They focus on being Chinese, making money, being rude, believing in superstition, and dividing according to local dialects. Ethnic stereotype is a complicated area. Negative stereotype is difficult to eliminate from society. The solution is to create positive stereotype for a better social change.
Community and the feeling of being a part of Singaporean society: Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang questioned about foreign talents and social bond. They questioned about communities of foreigners in the labor market by conducting a survey on adaptation levels of foreign and local workers. This survey stemmed from the controversy about the influx of talented and highly skilled foreign workers regarding the issues of unfair competition and “alienated” value in the social network. In reality, the more diverse foreign workers are, the more complicated image of ethnic pluralism than the C-M-I-O ethnic model will become. This leads to the questioning of the model.