Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Darker colours show that a sub-category is more prevalent. Therefore, those
categories dense with darker colours were ‘hot’ or more frequently mentioned
in policy and curricular documents across all 22 countries. On the other hand,
those categories patchy or sparse with lighter colours were not covered well
by these documents. Subcategory-wise heatmaps can be found in Appendix II.
Where a horizontal bar in dark blue is visible, it means that a concept is highly
prevalent consistently across countries. Nine such bars can be identified, and
they correspond to ‘human resource development’ (in Category 1); ‘culture and
heritage’ (in Category 10); ‘critical thinking’, ‘creative thinking’ (in Category 11),
‘empathy’, ‘nation as privileged referent of identity’ (in Category 12); ‘problem
solving’, ‘collaboration’ (in Category 13.i), and ‘civic engagement’ (in Category
13.ii). Out of more than 80 sub-categories, these nine concepts were most
prevalent in policy and curriculum document analysed for this review.
Major Regional Trends
Overall, the coding data seem to indicate that a conception of development as
centred on the nation-state dominates understandings of the role of education
across most of Asia today. It also demonstrates that citizenship is similarly
conceived primarily in relation to the nation-state. As pointed out in the
Introduction, securing mass recognition of these conceptions of ‘development’
and ‘citizenship’ has proven rather challenging in many post-colonial countries
which have struggled economically. In many countries in Asia, pursuing state
formation through popularising awareness of a basic historical narrative of
nationhood remains a major priority for schooling. The data also seem to indicate
a widespread lack of emphasis on ideas of active, reflective or participatory
democratic citizenship. In the following description of major trends that emerge
from the quantitative data, the prevalence of concepts in educational policy and
curricular documents is explained in terms of ‘weightage’.
Weightage is the number of excerpts coded under a sub-category as a percentage of all
excerpts coded for all documents for a particular country
Total number of sentences reported for a particular category
Percentage = × 100
Total number of sentences reported for all categories
• Very high prevalence or weightage = more than 5 per cent (This means that there are
40 or more references to the concept when the total number of excerpts coded for the
country is 800.)
• High prevalence or weightage = 1-5 per cent
• Moderate prevalence or weightage = 0.5-1 per cent
• Low prevalence or weightage = less than 0.5 per cent (This means that there are 4
or fewer references to the concept when the total number of excerpts coded for the
country is 800.)
• Absence = zero
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
45