I am a Wikipedian. So I immediately noticed that the Wikipedia article you kindly recommended has been flagged for revision for a year. I dig into its sources and note it largely reflects the official view of the Singapore government, which, as the thread has already noted, is not fully democratic. Anyway, the article SUPPORTS my claim that the generation in Singapore that grew up when I grew up mostly didn't speak the language of school instruction at home and came from such a diverse language background that there was no spoken language that was a majority (rather than plurality) language for school pupils in Singapore.

Because I am a Wikipedian, I don't rely on Wikipedia to tell me things that I know more thoroughly from better sources, including but not limited to personal experience. I speak Chinese (the four Sinitic languages Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), and I can understand the jokes that people of differing Chinese ethnicities tell about people of other Chinese ethnicities. All I can say is that if you think "Chinese" is one ethnic group practically or for purposes of educational policy, you should have another think coming. Even in China itself that is an issue. By official Chinese government survey,

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

barely more than half of the population in China is even conversant in the national standard language.

So thank you for your suggestion. My suggestion is next time, please, do more than 10 seconds of research. You might learn something if you are open to more sources than just the University of Google.

I am a (youngish) Singaporean, born in the mid-80s. To be fair, I'd say the Chinese here generally don't consider dialect groups to be major divisions any more - it's more a point of curiosity, a minor variation for most people. Among the older generation, perhaps, but the time of actual conflict and distrust between the groups is essentially long gone, steamrolled by government language policy. It was hard enough for me to learn to speak Hokkien, because my circles are English-dominated.

This is all to say that it could be argued that Singapore is a Chinese-majority nation, but it doesn't take away from the fact that there are many Malays and Indians here, and many foreigners of all stripes (Indians, Europeans, Americans). Foreigners make up 2m of our 5.2m people (38%), which is pretty shocking really (500k of them have become permanent residents, though).

I'd say that in the context of primary schools here, diversity isn't at a true melting-pot level. Furthermore, education among Chinese families is pursued in the same aggressive way as in other East Asian nations - the majority of students have supplementary tutoring, sometimes from the early grades. The culture of academic emphasis among parents is in line with the government's pedadogical efforts, which results in high achievement levels.

This is not to take away from the success of the Singaporean mathematics curriculum, which is quite outstanding by most measures - probably because it was designed by mathematicians and teachers in tandem, drawing on the best practices in the world known at the time (the late 70s/early 80s). Though even that is changing with our new emphasis on knowledge by construction, collaboration and discovery.