Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

espects and cultivates local and regional vernaculars as the national cultural
treasure’. 62 Correspondingly, Article 33, Point 2 of Law No. 20 Year 2003 63 states
that ‘Vernacular languages can be used as a medium of instruction in the early
stages of education if necessary in the delivery of specific knowledge and/
or skills’ (p. 11). 64 On the other hand, while the importance of English as a tool
of global communication is recognised, its growing popularity has ‘worried’
policymakers who fear its spread may hamper the use of Bahasa Indonesia as
the national lingua franca (Nazarudin, 2009). The use of English is curbed in
most forms of media, including the advertising and entertainment sectors. This
promotion of the national language, taking precedence over both regional and
foreign languages, is seen by some as limiting Indonesia’s economic, social and
scientific growth, while its neighbours benefit from a more unrestricted adoption
of English (Nazarudin, 2009).
Box 4.3 Tensions and convergences between ‘traditional’ and ESD/GCED
concepts and values in Southeast Asia
Asia has a long history of the selective interpretation and translation of Western concepts
by national leaders and curriculum developers, who have sometimes contested ‘universal
values,’ arguing that they are ‘Western’ and thus unapplicable to ‘Asian’ societies. Amartya
Sen characterises and critiques this as the ‘Lee thesis’, named after Singapore’s founding
leader Lee Kuan Yew, devoting much of his classic work, Development as Freedom (1999),
to countering it. But the Lee thesis remains very much alive and well across Southeast
Asia, as many national education policy and curricular documents reveal.
In Thailand, for example, human rights (sitthi manutsayachon) has often been dismissed
as a Western concept that disregards Thai values and social harmony (Hongladarom, 1998,
p. 97); it is no accident that a landmark statement of an ‘Asian’ vision of human rights,
prioritising ‘economic rights’, is the Bangkok Declaration of 1993. 67 Human rights education
in Thailand is limited to such efforts as the work of the small Associated Schools Project
Network (ASPnet), which promotes child rights and UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Schools
(Churairat, 2002). The NEA exhorts students to support the Thai system of democracy
under the constitutional monarchy. In particular, the Grade 4 curriculum teaches that to
be a good citizen is to participate in the democratic system (withi prachathipatai), but this
refers merely to overt acts like voting in elections (p. 9). Thailand’s educational policies and
curricula do not explore issues related to civil liberties. Similarly, in Lao PDR, democracy
is popularly equated with elections, while human rights receives little attention in subject
curricula. Concepts related to global citizenship and activism are absent from curriculum
documents, in a wider political context in which public demonstrations and debates
over contentious socio-economic issues are rare and officially discouraged. In Viet Nam,
the subject curriculum for the Vietnamese language briefly mentions democracy, but
this is interpreted as meaning support for the socialist ideology of the ruling party, and
possession of a democratic and humane spirit.
62 Original in Indonesian: ‘Negara menghormati dan memelihara bahasa daerah sebagai
kekayaan budaya nasional’.
63 See http://pendis.kemenag.go.id/file/dokumen/uuno20th2003ttgsisdiknas.pdf.
64 Original in Indonesian: ‘Bahasa daerah dapat digunakan sebagai bahasa pengantar dalam
tahap awal pendidikan apabila diperlukan dalam penyampaian pengetahuan dan/atau
keterampilan tertentu’.
128
Chapter 4: Southeast Asia