Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

(Chapter 3). In the former region, debates and policies pertaining to child
labour, for example, indicate the tension between the human capital paradigm
and a broader public welfare agenda. Meanwhile, in the education sector, the
human capital perspective also influences public policy towards teachers,
their recruitment, status, working conditions and professional preparation
(Halperin and Ratteree, 2003; Zeichner, 2014). It further affects attitudes
towards educational research as a sphere of academic activity: from Japan to
India, governments in many Asian states have become increasingly dismissive of,
or even actively hostile to, research into education that is anything other than
narrowly policy-oriented. The job of educational researchers is increasingly seen
as investigating how to implement the state-mandated goals of schooling more
effectively, rather than contributing to debate over what those goals should be.
In many Asian societies, this new emphasis on ‘efficiency’ has legitimated the
substitution of professional teachers by trained volunteers, para-teachers and
technological devices. In the area of curriculum design, modular courses and an
agenda of ‘skills’ delivery have increasingly taken precedence over comprehensive
training to nurture in teachers the capabilities, attitudes and identity of
autonomous professionals. These changes pave the way for a narrowly outcomesdriven
approach, involving the quantified measurement of children’s knowledge
through ready-made tests. However, it is hard to effectively implement such an
approach in systems ‘locked in a low-learning, low-accountability, high inequality
equilibrium’ (World Bank, 2016a, p. 3).
Furthermore, the premises underlying the relentlessly outcomes-focused,
economistic interpretation of the aims of schooling are seriously flawed. Claims
that economic growth results directly from the success of schooling in fostering
economically relevant ‘skills’, as measured by cross-national assessment
exercises such as PISA, lack a solid grounding in the statistical evidence
(Wolf, 2002; Komatsu and Rappleye, 2017). This is not to deny that schooling is
important for economic growth, just to point out that the relationship between
schooling and growth is far more complex than is typically assumed, and is not
readily susceptible to quantitative measurement. Quite apart from any ethical
considerations, this fact alone should give us pause when considering to what
extent and how to prioritise the fostering of ‘job-ready skills’ over other aspects
or functions of schooling.
As we discuss in the regionally-focused chapters of this report, the dominance of
a human capital paradigm, combined with other factors common to many Asian
societies — strong meritocratic ideologies, minimal state welfare guarantees and
intense credentialism — carries considerable social costs. Although the policy
and curricular sources examined in the research preparatory to this report do
not bear directly on these issues, they have severe implications for the capacity
of Asian schooling systems to progress towards the goals enshrined in SDG 4.7.
For example, recent years have witnessed not just an expansion of the market
for private education across much of Asia, but also an explosion of examination-
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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