Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

— and in some respects becoming more so. Teachers in Japan and Korea are not
subject to the kinds of political or ideological controls enforced within China, and
therefore freer — in theory — to promote critical debate in a manner conducive to
the construction of open and tolerant conceptions of global citizenship. However,
in practice teachers’ willingness to experiment pedagogically and model the kind
of creativity that curricula purport to value is limited by various factors. These
include their own ethical predilections (often prioritising other goals, such as
the fostering of interdependence); lack of appropriate training; and official
strategies for controlling the profession that undermine teachers’ security as
a means of rendering them ‘accountable’ (i.e. more susceptible to managerial
control). Perhaps most importantly, the intensely competitive pursuit of success
in public examinations, which test received knowledge and command of set
formulae, also tends to squeeze out other objectives, especially at secondary
level (see below).
But the acutely contradictory demands placed upon teachers are not just
implied by mechanisms for controlling them; they are to some extent explicit
in the ideology of the official curriculum itself. Subordinating teachers to the
pursuit of officially-determined national goals is the natural concomitant of a
nationalism that preaches and presumes harmonious conformity with statemandated
values and identities — conceived as homogenous and totalising.
This can profoundly complicate the task of exploring or accommodating ethical
diversity or promoting critical debate, as the following section details.
B: Challenges of Nationalism and Identities
This section discusses the challenges that curricular portrayals of identities
— national or otherwise — pose for the pursuit of the sustainable development
goals, and especially for the kind of tolerant transnationalism which the concept
of ‘global citizenship’ implies. We briefly analyse how the nation is portrayed
in curricular documents, with reference to culture, ethnicity and geography.
However, conceptions of the nation are most clearly revealed in narratives of
its past, and accounts of relations with non-national ‘others’. The curricular
treatment of history is therefore of particular relevance here. And relevant to
any consideration of how officially-mandated historical narratives represent
national identity is the portrayal of minorities, and of women and gender
issues. Addressing such issues involves asking how far school curricula promote
critical engagement with visions of identity that challenge singular, linear
national narratives, inviting students to consider alternative perspectives on
developmental issues. Finally, we discuss ways in which curricula define and
promote ‘internationalism’, in relation to programmes for foreign language
education and international exchange.
Here the most pertinent finding from our quantitative data concern the marked
prevalence of ‘the nation as a privileged referent of identity’ in curricular
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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