Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

more familiar GDP. The National Education Framework (2012) of Bhutan specifies
the meaning and implications of GNH for education. Nurturing mindfulness and
reflective capacities is given high priority, and values to be cultivated among
citizens are defined in terms of various levels of relationships: in the family,
communities and the nation. The Framework states:
Bhutan envisions a System of Whole Education that will nurture and
encourage its citizens to be mindful, reflective, creative, skilful,
successful, confident, active and informed, capable of contributing
effectively to the successful realisation of GNH and the values therein,
and building a peaceful, democratic, sovereign, secure, stable and selfreliant
Bhutan, full of creativity and vitality. (p. 11)
Bhutan’s model of development and its associated vision for education is
uncommon, but some of the constraints it faces are not. Corporal punishment is an
example of a culturally rooted practice at odds with the declared aims of reform.
There have been substantial efforts by the Ministry of Education to ban corporal
punishment, but these have met with significant resistance. 77 Similar resistance
in other South Asian societies is widely-known but seldom acknowledged. A
large-scale survey carried by India’s National Commission for the Protection
of Child Rights (NCPCR) showed that the practice of administering corporal
punishment is prevalent among all categories of
schools and at all levels of education (NCPCR, 2011).
In Pakistan, efforts to control this practice have been
mooted with the support of NGOs, but cooperation
from teachers has been patchy. 78 The prevalence of
corporal punishment is an indicator of the extent
to which education is perceived across the region
as a means of regimentation. This assumption finds
legitimacy in traditional understandings of the role of
parents and teachers in the children‘s lives.
The prevalence of
corporal punishment
is an indicator
of the extent to
which education is
perceived across the
region as a means of
regimentation
GCED ideas may not be easy to reconcile with nationalist goals. This is particularly
true of South Asia because nation-building agendas are informed either by the
imperative of military preparedness to meet external attack, or by the threat of
internal strife, or both. The kind of enlargement of empathy associated with GCED
is not easy to accommodate in such a climate, despite the economic incentives
that are often invoked for nurturing a global outlook among the young.
The challenges posed by excessively nationalistic pressures on curriculum
designers and textbook developers needs to be understood in the context of
widespread political uncertainty. Reforms designed to address the challenge of
nationalism are hard to enact, and even harder to implement, in circumstances
of domestic and international political instability — even while such instability
77 See http://www.saievac.org/cp/bhutan.
78 See http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/assets/pdfs/states-reports/Pakistan.pdf.
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Chapter 5: South Asia