Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

of meritocracy, and the social structures and interests that such discourses help
legitimise, is urgently needed to guide educational policy across South Asia.
CONCLUSION
This review of the South Asian region underlines the difficulty of using official
policy and curricular statements as the basis for any assessment of the extent
to which education is contributing to attaining goals such as peace, global
citizenship and sustainability of development. Making any such assessment
requires that we also consider a range of fundamental problems or questions
relating to the context out of which policy emerges, and which it seeks to
influence. One such question relates to systemic or institutional capacity — of the
system for administering schools, and of the broader policy making apparatus.
Both need to be studied before we can arrive at any objective understanding
of how education is contributing to the achievement of policy goals. In India,
the national and state-level realities differ so considerably that generalization
regarding the situation across the country is practically impossible.
An elite stratum of private schools dominates and distorts perceptions of
education amongst policy making elites — divorcing their own experience from
that of the bulk of the population served by public schooling. This is true for
India, Pakistan and most of the rest of South Asia, where there exists a growing
gap between conditions in state-run schools and private schools, the latter now
representing about one third of the system. The continued growth of private
schooling exerts a complex and largely detrimental influence on the general
education system and its capacity for contributing to the realisation of a
coherent policy agenda driven by humanistic values. The assumption that state
regulation alone can ensure effective public accountability and attention to the
broader goals of education is questionable at the best of times. But across South
Asia, the regulatory powers of states have come under great strain over the
recent decades, as global institutions have effectively persuaded governments
to shed state responsibilities and open up a market in provision of key public
services to private operators. These globally endorsed policies have created new
strains and contradictions in a system already steeped in attitudes of colonial
condescension towards the poorer strata of society.
Ideological conflicts are part of the everyday
reality of South Asia. Many of these conflicts have
been managed relatively effectively by democratic
institutions, but others have tended towards
violence. Indeed, violence has become endemic
in several regions of the subcontinent, directly
affecting children’s overall livelihoods and their
opportunities for education. But even for the
majority of children, spared the direct impact of
One way in which
education can
contribute to peace
is by fostering the
belief that a desire for
peace is something
shared by one’s closest
neighbours
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
167