Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

CHAPTER 6
Central Asia
and Mongolia
THE CONTEXT:
POST-SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATIONS AND
EDUCATIONAL CHANGE
The term Central Asia typically denotes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan: all were part of the Soviet Union before 1991.
Together with Mongolia, Manchuria and parts of Iran and Western China, they are
sometimes alternatively described as Inner Asia (Rossabi, 2017). Mongolia is hard
to classify geopolitically, having had extensive historical links with various parts
of Northeast and Inner/Central Asia (and points far beyond) during different
periods (Sabloff, 2011). But for the purposes of this report, we treat Mongolia
together with the states of Central Asia, given their shared recent legacy of
Soviet hegemony, and the importance of this for their educational development.
The Central Asian states and Mongolia share many social and cultural
commonalities, but their recent socialist past and the scale and impact of their
post-socialist political, economic and social transformations are among the
most significant. While the Central Asian states were numbered among the
Soviet Union’s fifteen republics, Mongolia, although formally sovereign, was
often regarded as the 16 th republic or a Soviet satellite state by foreign observers
(Lattimore, 1956). Though each state had a distinct geopolitical and domestic
political situation, the rediscovery of national identities and the process of nation
building became one of the fundamental tasks for the countries in this region
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In particular, establishing unitary states in
multi-ethnic societies was one of the major and urgent challenges for the Central
Asian states, which until the collapse of the USSR had shown little propensity for
political independence. The dissolution of the Soviet state prompted feverish
efforts at nation-building throughout the region, as the governing elites of new
states sought to re-appropriate and re-interpret histories distorted or ignored
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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