Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Prior to Jomtien, international aid and multilateral efforts focused mainly on
non-formal education. But the Jomtien Declaration 4 articulated a concern
for formal schooling in economically less-developed nations. Several Asian
countries subsequently embarked on reforms supported by aid and loans,
informed by new policy discourses that carried the stamp of global approval.
These discourses centred on specific targets, to be implemented and monitored
through procedures capable of bypassing putatively cumbersome and decrepit
state structures, with the large-scale involvement of NGOs. This new education
policy paradigm emerged in parallel with programmes of structural adjustment
in the economic and financial spheres, which similarly sought to reduce the role
of the state in directly providing key public goods, reframing it as essentially a
regulating and monitoring agency. The post-Jomtien era has witnessed significant
progress in expanding access to education across Asia, but also persistent or
worsening educational inequality in both ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ societies,
partly as a consequence of the spread of an ethos of marketisation.
With respect to education, recent policy
trends are largely traceable to the enduring
influence of human capital theory. First
clearly formulated in the mid-1960s (Becker,
1964/1994), this demonstrated education’s
role in improving the overall potential of a
population for economic growth. The theory
provided a strong justification for public
investment in schooling, while also, perhaps
inadvertently, heightening an emphasis on
its instrumental utility over its intrinsic value.
If we assume that
education’s overriding
function is to provide
talent to fuel economic
growth, then inequality
may come to seem
the necessary price of
efficient meritocracy
While furnishing useful grounds for persuading governments to pay greater
attention to education, the popularity of this theory mythologised education’s
efficacy as a catalyst of development and democracy. At the same time, it
distracted public and policymaking attention from the socially distributive role
of education — its function, as Wolf puts it, in labelling an individual as ‘a “top” or
“near the top” sort of person’ (2002, p. 251) — something that sociologists in the
1970s had been at pains to highlight (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). This is not
accidental: the more we can be persuaded to put faith in education’s capacity to
promote economic growth, the more we may be inclined to overlook the socially
divisive consequences of competitive intensity and credentialism. If we assume
that education’s overriding function is to provide talent to fuel economic growth,
then inequality may come to seem the necessary price of efficient meritocracy.
Recent trends in educational policy across a wide spectrum of Asian societies,
‘developed’ and ‘developing’, reflect the persistent or growing prevalence
of a human resource development perspective. This is as true of relatively
impoverished South Asia (Chapter 5) as of relatively prosperous East Asia
4 See http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001275/127583e.pdf.
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Introduction