Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

einforced by the fact that Thailand hosts the Asian regional offices of UNESCO
and UNICEF, which in turn work closely with SEAMEO. One ongoing initiative
relevant to SDG 4.7 is the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metric (SEA-PLM),
developed by SEAMEO and UNICEF. This is a primary education learning metric
for SEAMEO countries which covers the key domains of reading, writing,
mathematics and global citizenship for Grade 5. 42
An important element of the context for understanding the urgent need for
reorienting education towards sustainability in this region concerns the highly
uneven distribution of the benefits of rapid economic development (UNESCO,
2014c). Calls for a people- rather than state-centric ASEAN reflect the urgency
of addressing consequent socio-economic inequality, and an associated rise
in social tensions, often involving ethno-religious discrimination (Rigg, 2016;
Davies, 2016). These problems exist for both newly industrialising economies as
well as those that have attained middle- or high-income status. Of the former,
having emerged in 1993 from a traumatic history of genocide and communist
rule, Cambodia, a constitutional monarchy with multi-party politics, has
developed rapidly with substantial national and international investment. At the
same time, the country has suffered from chronic corruption and inequality. Viet
Nam initiated its own economic opening up or doi moi policy in the 1980s, 43 and
since joining the WTO in 2007 has seen its economy grow at about 6 per cent
per year, with the private sector playing a vital role (McKinsey Global Institute,
2012). Lao PDR, which opened its economy to foreign capital investment around
the same time, has also enjoyed rapid rates of growth in recent years, although
poverty, youth unemployment and the rural-urban income gap remain substantial
problems (World Bank, 2015). The experience of these countries shows that
economic growth is a far from an adequate measure of ‘development’ broadly
understood (see, for example, Sen, 1999), let alone of ‘sustainable development’.
Among the more established economies, Malaysia, having recorded an average
economic growth of 7 per cent over the past 25 years, is likely to become a
high-income nation by 2020 (OECD, 2016b). The Philippines is in the medium
category of the Human Development Index (HDI) and has enjoyed substantial
economic growth, particularly in recent years. However, in 2012, the Philippines
had the highest inequality among the middle-income countries of Southeast
Asia (World Bank, 2014). Likewise, Indonesia has experienced both substantial
economic growth and rising inequality in recent years. Thailand is similarly an
upper-middle income country, but is facing a middle-income trap. It loses out
on competitiveness to fellow Asian countries that can offer lower costs of
production, while lacking the technological capacity to compete with highervalue-added
industries in other countries.
42 See http://www.seaplm.org/seaplm/.
43 The doi moi policy is a comprehensive political and economic reform in 1986 towards a
‘socialist oriented market economy’ (Neubart and Roeckel, 2008).
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Chapter 4: Southeast Asia