Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Figure 0.1 Asia: The diverse continent
The majority of countries covered by the review are in the high or medium categories
of the Human Development Index (HDI), with two countries in the very high HDI
category (Japan and Republic of Korea) and three countries in the low category
(Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan). Ten out of 22 countries are rated as at very high or
high risk in the World Risk Index.
Human Development Index (HDI) (2015)
World Risk Index (2016) % (rank)
Very High High Moderate Low Absent 1-34: Very high risk
35-68: High risk
69-102: Moderate risk
103-136: Low risk
137-171: Very low risk
adopted, SDG 4.7 in particular points towards the fundamental challenges that
education policy must address in order to promote peace and sustainability.
Even as systems of education pursue nationally determined priorities, this
goal provides us with a synoptic perspective for reflection and reform. Since
its inception, UNESCO has been strongly committed to a humanistic vision
of education — a vision today encapsulated in SDG 4.7. These ideals need to
be strongly restated and defended in an era when education has come under
the pressure of narrowly economistic and instrumentalist discourses. This
narrowness is epitomised in the widespread reduction of analysis of education
systems to the tracking of certain quantitatively measurable outcomes.
Deriving urgent significance from this broader context, the present study aims
to assess the extent to which the ideals of SDG 4.7 have come to be embodied in
policies and school curricula across Asian societies. Policy documents, including
curriculum frameworks and core subject syllabi, were analysed for a total of
22 countries. The study involved content analysis based on a common coding
scheme, and the development of an interpretive framework that categorises the
key challenges in this area. This required the scoping of a vast amount of data
on Asia’s highly diverse educational landscape. Through surveying present-day
curricular visions and practices, this report seeks to create a benchmark against
4
Introduction