Abstract
The Strong State and Curriculum Reform stresses the need to adopt a nuanced and contextualised critical lens while studying the influence of the state on education systems in Asia. All the authors in this volume refute the notion of the complete hegemony of the state on education systems in the unique and diverse contexts of their own countries and examine ‘a series of unfolding tensions and contradictions, as states attempt to extend their control over the production and regulation of “official” knowledge as well as the work of schools and teachers’ (p. 180).
It is not without reason that I have chosen to begin the review of this book with the Afterword, where Michael W. Apple and Leonel Lim, the volume editors, list nine tasks for critical scholars studying Asian education systems who need to maintain a balance between a total and uncritical acceptance of Western paradigms and an outright and unilateral negation of these constructs, in an attempt to understand educational reform in their own countries. These nine tasks are as follows: acknowledge the brutality with which some of these states introduced and strengthened multiple social, cultural, and ethnic cleavages in society; point to contradiction and to spaces of possible action; document the work of some of these counterhegemonic social movements; refrain from committing ‘intellectual suicide’ (p. 182) by discrediting all knowledge that may have an elite basis; keep alive traditions of radical and progressive work; be aware of the multiple languages through which such radical and progressive work needs to be spoken about to different people belonging to different locations and backgrounds; provide critical insights into the importance of such movements; be ‘committed researchers and committed members of a society that is scarred by persistent inequalities’ (p. 184); and create spaces in the university for those who are outside its ambit. The aim of this volume is to afford critical scholars of education in Asia a unique and powerful dialectic of comparison, one that transcends an understanding of curriculum policies based on Western interpretations and, at the same time, also transcends understandings of the politics of our own nation’s curriculum based solely on our own localised histories (p. 186).
Herein lies the contribution of this extremely insightful volume which provides us with layered and contextualised perspectives and analyses to understand what is happening in the educational spaces of various Asian nations.
The 11 chapters of this book are grouped into three sections. The first chapter introduces the underlying themes. More importantly, it asserts the importance of examining educational changes in Asia within the unique social, historical and political context of each country, rather than adopting an uncritical and uniform critical lens developed in the West, and therefore being a more suitable approach in that context.
The first section, ‘Ideology and the Strong State: The Tensions and Limits of State Curricular Control’, has three chapters. The argument put forth in this section is that even while the strong state in a number of Asian nations continues to initiate direct curricular changes, these initiatives are riddled with tensions and contradictions not only within the state but also in terms of its ideologies.
Leonel Lim’s chapter, ‘Global City, Illiberal Ideology: Curriculum Control and the Politics of Pedagogy in Singapore’, provides an excellent exposition of the form taken by the teaching of a new subject like ‘critical thinking’ in schools, as mandated by the Ministry of Education, in a society with a weak and underdeveloped language or notion of individual rights. Lim draws his insights from ethnographic data gathered from a public, mainstream secondary school. In a country where Western liberal values and practices, such as open dissension, political debate and freedom of speech, are regarded as unnecessary, and even undesirable, the teaching of critical thinking is reduced to the probing of difficult questions but with the teacher closely monitoring the process.
The next chapter, ‘Strong State Politics of the National History Curriculum and Struggles for Knowledge, Ideology, and Power in South Korea’ by Mi Ok Kang, presents the debates on the national history curriculum in South Korea between rightist and leftist groups. The year 2002 was an important landmark in the history of the writing of South Korean history school textbooks, when the teaching of history moved from the teaching of the history of militarist regimes and rightist hegemonic groups to the teaching of the histories of various agents and groups, including leftist counterhegemonic sections. Through the competent use of Standpoint theory, which is an analytic approach that examines the socially situated perspectives of conflicting groups, Kang examines the nature, personality and subjectivity of various stakeholders during the national curriculum reform in South Korea. As numerous stakeholders compete to establish the legitimacy of their own version of a proper and equitable curriculum in a vitiated social, cultural, economic and political situation, an understanding of their respective positions needs a sophisticated analysis, and that is what Kang provides in this chapter.
Ting-Hong Wong’s chapter, ‘Unintended Hegemonic Effects: Institutional Incorporation of Chinese Schools in Post-War Hong Kong’, points out the limitations of Gramsci and Apple’s concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘cultural incorporation’, respectively. He asserts that these concepts take the concessions made by the ruling group to the ruled for granted, but make no attempt to examine the factors that propel and limit these concessions. As a result, they fail to gauge the extent of the compromises and concessions actually made, leave alone examine in depth the consequences of the hegemonic practices that accompany the various compromises and concessions. Wong’s analysis of Chinese schools in post-war Hong Kong reveals the unintended hegemonic consequences of the state’s partial incorporation of hitherto subordinated Chinese schools. Wong argues for the need to avoid considering the imposition of hegemony as a conscious, conspiratorial agenda of the ruling class to maintain the status quo. He asserts that such domination is far more insidious because ‘the existence of these kinds of power relations, resulting from the convergence of a series of conjunctural and contradictory forces, is often unbeknown to both the oppressed and the oppressors. Consequently, the dominated groups are unlikely to mount any pressure against them’ (p. 71).
Section two, ‘Praxis and Change: Teachers, Social Movements and Pedagogic Agents’, has three chapters.
Sara G. Lam’s chapter, ‘National Education in Hong Kong: Curriculum as a Site of Struggle between “One Country” and “Two Systems”’, discusses the period beginning in 1997 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) took over control of Hong Kong from the British. The PRC adopted the framework of ‘one country, two systems’ to ease anxiety on the part of Hong Kong and as a means of upholding Chinese sovereignty while allowing some degree of autonomy to Hong Kong. Lam examines the role played by the school curriculum in creating consent for hegemonic domination by focusing on the case study of Moral and National Education (MNE), which was introduced in schools to foster a certain kind of citizenship that minimised the role of civil society and discouraged dissent. Conversely, the anti-MNE social movement, as Lam shows, reveals the relationship between educational issues and counterhegemonic resistance.
The next chapter, ‘Social Movements and Educational Change in China: The Case of Migrant Children Schools’ by Min Yu, examines the manner in which the state in China has attempted to transform rural migrants and their children into new types of subjects by introducing policies designed to monitor and control them. Yu argues that Western constructs such as ‘democracy’ and ‘social movement’ fail to throw light on the complexity of current social and political changes in China, and also fail to account for the comprehensiveness of the agendas that are developing organically at the grass-roots level. An analysis of this kind offers rich insights into the nature of collective action in Chinese society and the reconfiguration of social dynamics across its cities. For instance, he shows how members of migrant communities adopt ways to chart out alternative paths for their children, such as the collaboration of university students with these children to organise an essay competition on ‘My wish’, thus extending the scope of extracurricular activities citywide. The other such initiative was when teachers of migrant children started Candlelight Communication, the first newspaper written for them. Despite the apparent non-significance of schools for migrant children, Yu shows rather convincingly that these struggles for providing schools for migrant children have inspired, and continue to inspire, a variety of protest activities and movements.
The last chapter in the second section, ‘The Struggles of Teachers Unions in South Korea and the Politics of Educational Change’ by Hee-Ryong Kang, examines the legalisation of the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union (KTU) in 1990 and the later initiatives by the state to outlaw this body in an attempt to restrict its activism. Using the theoretical framework of supersession, Kang examines both the achievements and the limits of KTU since its legalisation, as well as the manner in which conservatives were eventually able to reposition themselves as the majority. This interesting case study highlights the several ingenious ways through which teachers protested against the government’s neoliberal educational policies.
Section three, ‘Globalizing Hegemony: Resisting and Recontextualizing International Reforms’, has four chapters, including the Afterword, which has already been discussed. This provides an account of the transnational politics of globalisation as it is negotiated in Asian education systems.
Christopher B. Crowley’s chapter, ‘Teach for/Future China and the Politics of Alternative Teacher Certification Programs in China’, explores the emergence of alternative teacher certification pathways in China. He examines the politics surrounding the alternative teacher preparation programmes gaining support and popularity in China, that is, Teach for China and Teach Future China, both of which seek to place young teachers from select universities in under-resourced schools in rural China. Crowley argues that while the agendas of these two organisations on the surface may seem to challenge the existing traditional models of teacher preparation, in reality they both support the current state-driven approaches to educational reforms.
Youl Kwan Sung’s chapter, ‘The Politics of Neoliberal Loanwords in South Korean Cross-national Policy Borrowing’, examines the shifting meanings of ‘borrowed’ educational reforms when they are selectively incorporated in the context of South Korea. The state is known to appropriate English-origin loanwords like ‘choice’ and ‘diversity’ to legitimise the reforms and policies of previous governments. Sung argues that there are no straightforward ways in which transnational and Western imperatives can play a role in the Asian context.
Keita Takayama’s chapter, ‘Provincializing and Globalizing Critical Studies of School knowledge: Insights from the Japanese History Textbook Controversy over “Comfort Women”’, focuses on the recent controversy over references in Japanese history textbooks to ‘comfort women’. Takayama points out the conceptual, methodological and political blind spots that result from an unreflective and uncritical adoption of the Western theoretical lens in understanding the politics of school knowledge and practice in Asia. He expresses anguish over the continuing division of intellectual labour in critical educational scholarship where theoretical constructs are developed in the West, by English-speaking academic communities, while non-Western and non-English-speaking critical scholars provide case studies for the former to examine and analyse. This chapter is an important contribution that addresses the weaknesses of this constructed dichotomy and highlights the limitations of this approach.
The editors and contributors of this volume essentially question the relevance of using Western theories for understanding changes in Asian contexts, especially relations of, and conflicts over, knowledge and culture in the sphere of education. The central assertion of the book is that the ‘political discourse and popular legitimacy that underpin weak and minimal states’ (p. 3) are different from those of the strong developmental states of Asia and hence warrant ‘a more authentic—even if complicated—picture of educational and curricular change in Asia’ (p. 3). Since most of the work on curriculum reform and the state has been localised in either single nations in the global West or in the North in places such as the USA, England and Sweden, this volume with its focus on Asia is a welcome contribution to the wider field of critical educational research. While fully acknowledging the contribution of the Gramscian notion of hegemony, it simultaneously points out the limitations of this construct in understanding and studying Asian societies. Similarly, it acknowledges that the Hegelian dialectic of state versus civil society might perhaps be inappropriate in appreciating the dynamics of strong state politics in Asia. Instead, the book adopts cultural anthropologist Kuan-Hsing Chen’s framework of ‘Asia as Method’, and does not completely dismiss the West as being irrelevant, but rather adopts it as one among the several available cultural resources for forming a frame of reference. It avoids falling into the trap of the East–West binary, while employing Western constructs and simultaneously speaking back to them.
This book makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of educational reforms in Asian countries, particularly those characterised by a strong state. It presents rich, nuanced and layered analyses of changes in a variety of educational spaces such as textbook writing, curriculum preparation, teachers’ unions and schools for migrant children. Each chapter is a multifaceted and complex case study of a certain aspect of educational reform in a particular country, with fleshed-out details, appropriate tools for comprehending the reform and useful insights. This is a must-read book for all those interested in understanding not just the significance of educational reform in Asian countries but also in situating the educational reform in its appropriate socio-cultural context, for it is the latter that lends meaning to the former.