Character, citizen education: Lessons from Singapore
Uganda has the framework and the ambition; now it needs the will to educate the whole child: head, hands, heart and feet.
Barbara Kaija. (File)
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OPINION
How Ugandan students can form into a human resource with strong character and strong citizenship responsibility.
Singapore’s streets are spotless. The underground train platforms are cleaner than many kitchens. Litter is rare. Cigarette butts never seen! Yet Singapore has few public dustbins. The secret is not more bins. The secret is a culture of personal responsibility. Singaporeans carry their rubbish, until they find a bin. They treat public spaces as their own. Why is Uganda different?
Singapore is widely regarded as the world’s cleanest capital and the government invests heavily in cleaning infrastructure. It invests just as heavily in people, teaching children from an early age to protect their environment. Social responsibility sits at the heart of the school curriculum and the Keep Singapore Clean campaign has run since 1968. Still, infrastructure alone does not explain the results; education does.
Uganda’s own Keep Uganda Clean campaign deserves praise; still in infancy, it is already helping to address hygiene problems in our cities and towns, but a campaign alone cannot build a culture the way Singapore has built one. Only a curriculum that foregrounds character and citizenship can do that. The work to grow children into socially responsible citizens must start early at home and in school.
Uganda is already implementing the competence-based curriculum and the Ministry of Education deserves credit for this. The curriculum is successfully running at secondary level; it is now cascading to primary schools and should reach universities by 2027 or 2028. Rote learning is phasing out as students learn to reason and to use their hands, though progress varies between regions and schools. Six years in, a thorough national assessment is overdue and it should ask not only how well students are learning to think and to do, but how well they are learning to belong.
Uganda must not stop at the head and the hands; the heart and the feet matter too.
A competence-based curriculum can deliver holistic education by educating the head to think, the hands to create and work, the heart to develop values and responsibility and the feet to walk in purpose, service and responsible citizenship.
Hong Kong exemplifies this well. Their schools have deliberately identified integrity, responsibility, commitment and respect among the values young people should develop, not as abstract words to be memorised, but as qualities to be explored through subjects, real-life situations and experiences beyond the classroom. The underlying reasoning is that integrity makes truthful communication possible, truthful communication builds trust and trust makes relationships, institutions and collaboration work.
A society that wants reliable employees, honest public servants and citizens who can co-operate with people they do not know must begin teaching those habits before young people enter the workplace. Uganda does not lack a similar foundation to build on. Our philosophy of education draws from several sources, including the 1995 Constitution, the 1992 Government White Paper on Education and the Senteza Kajubi Education Policy Review Commission. Together, these point to national unity, functional and practical skills and moral values.
Uganda’s education philosophy already values strong moral character, yet those values are not foregrounded in the teaching of the new syllabus.
Singapore’s classroom model
Singapore offers a different model, guided by its Ministry of Education’s clear vision of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation.” Character and moral values sit alongside academic achievement, with every school building on this vision to create its own framework for Character and Citizenship Education. The goal is to unlock every child’s potential, foster lifelong learning and anchor learners in sound moral values; this framework runs through both classroom lessons and extracurricular activities.
The details differ from school to school, yet five domains remain constant: moral uprightness, social responsibility, mental, emotional and physical health and the pursuit of excellence and lifelong learning. School leaders build these domains into clear learning outcomes and visible behavioural indicators. A
Lesson from Portland
Portland Oregon, offers more lessons. In 2022, the city launched a district-wide Social and Emotional Learning curriculum in its public schools, and the results have been striking: attendance has improved, suspensions have fallen by half in some schools and completion rates have risen from 62 per cent to 84 per cent.
Portland’s experience teaches something important: a curriculum on paper is not enough, for awareness must come first and adults must be ready before children can benefit.
This applies equally to Character and Citizenship Education and to Social and Emotional Learning; change must start with adults and with systems. We must build the right structures and create an enabling environment.
Programmes like Maama Janet Museveni’s Emerging Leaders Programme are transformative, yet they cannot work in isolation. They must be embedded in wider systems, appearing in ministry, district, university and school strategic plans.
The portrait of a graduate
Singapore has a clear portrait of its ideal graduate: A confident person, a self-directed learner, an active contributor and a concerned citizen. Uganda needs its own portrait of a graduate, explicitly stated, so that every transformative programme can work towards it. Educators must model this portrait themselves, for teachers cannot teach virtues they do not practise; they must live the values they wish to see in their learners.
What policymakers should do now
Seven concrete steps would move Uganda from ambition to practice:
Commission a national assessment of the competence-based curriculum’s first six years, and use it to establish, subject by subject, how much of the teaching is holistic. How are we doing on reaching the heart and the feet, not just the head and the hands?
The Ministry of Education should publish Uganda’s own portrait of a graduate, built through the inclusive process described above, so every school, teacher and programme has a shared target to design toward.
Write the heart and the feet into the syllabus itself, with defined learning outcomes and visible behavioural indicators for character and citizenship in every subject, rather than leaving them to individual teachers’ goodwill.
Fund pre-service and in-service teacher training in character and citizenship education, since the Emerging Leaders Programme shows that teachers cannot pass on values they have not themselves learned.
Anchor Keep Uganda Clean and similar civic campaigns inside the curriculum and inside ministry, district, university and school strategic plans, so they outlast a single event or administration.
Establish a single national body to coordinate, monitor and regulate Uganda’s growing number of citizenship- and character development campaigns, so that their combined efforts build consistently toward the same portrait of a graduate rather than pulling in different directions.
Pilot a structured social and emotional learning component in a handful of districts, track attendance, discipline and completion as Portland did, and use the evidence to guide national scale-up.
Uganda has the framework and the ambition; now it needs the will to educate the whole child: head, hands, heart and feet.
For God and My Country.
The writer is an educationist, a media communication specialist and the Chairperson of the Board for the Emerging Leaders Programme; Kaijabarbara@gmail.com WhatsApp: 0708746624.