| Chapter 1: | The Historian and the Singapore Story |
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word, premised on definitions used by successive census enumerators in Singapore. The first postwar census, conducted in 1947, saw literacy being framed by asking the respondents, “Can you read and write English?” This was followed by a test to read and write a simple letter in English for the enumerator. 2 For the 1957 census, the Standing Technical Committee on Census Matters defined literacy in a particular language as “the ability to read and write the designated language or languages”. 3 The official wording from the latest census (2000) states that literacy is determined by “a person’s ability to read with understanding, e.g. a newspaper, in the language specified”. 4
Structure
The remainder of this book is divided into seven further chapters, and the main content chapters are organised chronologically, alternating between English and Chinese reflections and life stories. The mirroring of these stories is designed to underscore the increasingly divergent experiences between those who were literate in English and those who were not.
Chapter 2 introduces a broad view of Singapore’s history for the reader who might be unfamiliar with the key events in the island’s modernhistory. It also surveys developments in Singaporean historiography through various epochs and illustrates how the methodology of people’s history offers a critical contribution to the historiography of Singapore.
A simplistic dichotomy between the employable English-educated and the unemployable Chinese-educated Chinese has been pervasive in Singapore’s broader historiography and is largely a product of state discourse. In the domain of education and employability, the lives of the non-English-literate Chinese school leavers have often been pitted in direct opposition to the opportunities that were available for their peers who were educated in English-medium institutions. Chapters 3 and 4 seek to redress this widely held belief by demonstrating how the lives of the English- and Chinese-educated Chinese were more similar than many often realise, with little evidence to suggest a strong correlation