Member of Parliament Louis Ng recently called for the Government to stop streaming in secondary schools because it contributes to the social divide.

Mr Ng said that abolishing streaming can also address the biases inherent in our Primary School Leaving Examination system that unintentionally “streams” students of lower socio-economic background to a lower academic stream. Without streaming, students of different socioeconomic backgrounds may have more opportunities to mingle with each other.

While Mr Ng’s proposition stemmed from a good intent, it is important to recognise that the lack of interaction between students of different social backgrounds cannot be readily resolved by removing streaming.

Co-existing in the same physical space, putting students of different learning abilities and socio-economic statuses in the same classroom, does not guarantee integration.

If a teenager comes from a privileged background that allows him or her to frequent fancy restaurants and upmarket coffee joints without batting an eyelid, they are likely to be attracted to similar friends who can keep up with such spending habits even if there are other students of different backgrounds in the same classroom. This is called homophily in psychology terms, and it is a natural phenomenon.

It is therefore important for policymakers to go beyond superficial interventions when trying to facilitate social mixing between people of different socioeconomic statuses.

Potential interventions include reminding parents of a wealthier status to inform their children not to stigmatise others of poorer backgrounds, and not to associate their own children’s interactions with others as a regression of their own socio-economic status.

Schools can explicitly address the issue of socio-economic status in the national education curriculum so that students understand from young that one’s level of conventional achievement (for example, academic results) may be constricted by one’s access to opportunities that exist alongside one’s socio-economic background.

In other words, we should be transparent to students that biases do exist in a meritocratic system instead of instilling unquestioning trust in it.

Students should be aware that the partiality of this system may grow over time as the rich accumulates greater wealth and knowledge of how to ace it in life.

Teachers can also receive training on how to foster an inclusive environment, to engage students of different backgrounds in open conversations to enhance understanding among them. Additionally, streaming outcomes can be complemented with assessment tools that are proven to be less biased by one’s socioeconomic backgrounds, such as measures of conscientiousness, motivation and resilience.

In evaluating the decision to abolish streaming, we also need to consider what alternative mechanism can be used for enrolling students into schools. Without streaming, will we enrol students to schools based on their residential addresses? If so, wealthier Singaporeans who live in private residential estates will congregate in the same few schools, thus forming an affluent circle based on geographical locations and children from lower socio-economic statuses will have even lower chances of breaking into the circle.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Dr Chong Sin Hui is an assistant professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests include employee motivation and organisational psychology.