Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

during Communist times, and turn schooling to the purpose of instilling new
forms of national consciousness.
Economic and Political Contexts
The countries reviewed in this chapter — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and
Uzbekistan — find themselves in significantly different political and economic
situations after nearly three decades of ‘post-Soviet transition’. The abrupt end
of the Soviet-era command economy in the region, which was the poorest and
least developed in the entire socialist bloc, and consequent economic crisis in
the 1990s, had a devastating effect on the school system. High unemployment,
steeply rising poverty and declining government expenditure on public goods,
including education, were experienced across the region. The economies of the
Central Asian states and Mongolia declined by 20-60% of GDP by 1996 (Hill, 2002;
UNDP, 1997). The education system faced unprecedented difficulties due to a
lack of funding, shortages of human resources and declining enrolment rates.
The Central Asian states and Mongolia have addressed these issues with varying
effectiveness, depending on the performance of their resource-dependent
economies and official policy priorities. Post-socialist educational reforms have
been circumscribed by the availability of finance, in turn contingent on national
economic performance. But as elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, these
societies were also subjected to ideologically flavoured doses of ‘shock therapy‘,
administered by institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development
Bank. As Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe (Chapter 6, 2006) have argued with respect
to Mongolia, this contributed to the wilful destruction of the institutional
infrastructure of schooling systems that had achieved strikingly high levels of
literacy and numeracy during the Soviet period.
Figure 6.1 Share of commodities in total exports in Central Asia and Mongolia
Kazakhstan
Total 82%
1 st : 66% Crude oil
2 nd : 5% Copper
3 rd : 4% Iron ore
Mongolia
Total 74%
1 st : 31% Coal
2 nd : 25% Copper
3 rd : 12% Crude oil
Uzbekistan
Total 55%
1 st : 20% Natural gas
2 nd : 18% Cotton
3 rd : 10% Copper
Kyrgyzstan
Total 18%
1 st : 10% Copper
2 nd : 3% Cotton
3 rd : 2% Gold
Source: Adapted from Saggu and Anukoonwattaka, 2015
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Chapter 6: Central Asia and Mongolia