‘An Hour Before Dawn’: Social and Political Awareness among English-Educated Students in Post-War Singapore

Abstract:Histories of post-war student activism in Singapore have generally focused on the Chinese middle school students, as well as undergraduates at the University of Malaya, with comparatively little attention to the attitudes and actions of the English-educated students in Government schools. This article adds to a growing historiography of the period by pointing to the potential of student publications as primary sources, read in context of late colonial education policy and the broader trajectory of Anglophone writing from Singapore. A close reading of six prose texts published by students at Raffles Institution in 1954, a watershed year for student activism, suggests that student writing can provide significant clues about the level of social and political awareness among the English medium schools of the period.