Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Trend 6:
Human rights and democracy are narrowly understood in
education policy and curricular documents
‘Human rights’ rates a fair mention in education policy and curricular documents
across all 22 countries, with the exception of the sub-category ‘civil liberties’,
which receives no mention in 9 countries (see Appendix II-4; Figure 2.6). As
in the case for South Asia with respect to ‘gender equality’, Central Asia is
the only sub-region that puts a high weightage on ‘civil liberties’. Among 22
countries, Uzbekistan is the only country that gives a high weightage to all
the sub-categories subsumed under the category ‘human rights’, including
‘democracy’ and ‘social justice’. This result is intriguing, given that, according
to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2016 Democracy Index, 18 Uzbekistan is rated
as an ‘authoritarian regime’ and its score for ‘civil liberties’ is particularly low
at 0.59 — bottom amongst the 22 countries included in the present review (the
score for Kazakhstan is 3.82, for Kyrgyzstan 5.00, and for Mongolia, 8.24). Indeed,
according to the 2016 Democracy Index, no Asian country covered in the present
review qualifies as a ‘full democracy’. Among 22 countries, Japan comes at the
Figure 2.6 The prevalence of the concept ‘freedom and civil liberties’
‘Freedom and civil liberties’ rate a very high mention in education policy and
curriculum in Central Asian countries.
The absence of references to the concept is observed in relatively democratic as
well as ‘authoritarian’ countries according to the Democracy Index.
Democracy Index (2016)
Freedom and civil liberties
(sub-category 4c)
Full democracies
Flawed democracies
Hybrid regimes
Authoritarian regimes
Prevalence
Very High High Moderate Low Absent
Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). 2017. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy
Index. https://infographics.economist.com/2017/DemocracyIndex/ (Accessed 30 September 2017).
18 See https://www.eiu.com/democracy2016.
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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