Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

learning of other Asian languages out of school timetables. Japanese students,
for example, study classical Chinese (in their Japanese language lessons), but
almost never any modern Chinese at all (see Chapter 3). This is not conducive to
promoting the kind of transnational consciousness that Asia needs to foster in
the interests of peace.
In the context of citizenship education, the discourse of ‘jobs’ and ‘employable
skills’ poses yet another key challenge. Much of the world, including parts of
Asia, is witnessing largely jobless growth, widespread youth unemployment or
under-employment, or increasingly irregular, insecure employment, in ways
that are putting immense strains on social cohesion. Nonetheless, educational
policies generally continue to treat skills-training and employability in isolation
from the broader humanistic and civic goals of schooling. Education continues to
fuel the aspiration for a steady career and the life-style associated with it. But in
many countries, stable jobs have greatly dwindled, while employers attempt to
maintain motivation and productivity by manipulating the ambitions and fears
of their increasingly transient and insecure workforces. Vocational education
is widely touted as a means of job-creation, but it tends to focus on narrowly
defined skills packages. Rather than fostering
opportunities for fulfilling careers, vocational
high-schooling often performs the social function
of managing expectations amongst students
whom society has deemed ‘failures’, condemning
them to insecure and unremunerative employment
(Woronov, 2016).
An excessive or unbalanced focus on the role
of education in enhancing ‘employability’
and boosting growth intensifies pressures on
learners and undermines the impact of curricular
exhortations to pursue sustainability. Such a
Such a focus
encourages young
people to see
schooling primarily
as an exercise in
the competitive
acquisition of ‘human
capital’, and to value
themselves and others
primarily as units of
productive capacity
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Conclusions and Ways Forward