Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

translation of such aims into practice can never be assumed. As described in
Chapter 1, however, integration of ESD/GCED into teacher education lies outside
the scope of the original research that informs the present study. In what follows,
therefore, reference will be made to recent ethnographic and other studies of
Asian schooling that shed light on the actual situation in schools and classrooms.
Finally, and crucially, while this report draws on extensive numerical data generated
through the coding of official curricular documents, the capacity of these data to
represent even the meanings of those documents must be considered on a caseby-case
basis. As pointed out in Chapter 2, a proliferation of references to ‘gender
equality’, for example, may indicate strong official commitment to promoting
this ideal through education, or it may merely constitute a superficial or symbolic
‘flagging’ of the concept aimed at deflecting criticism. More fundamentally,
texts impart meaning through narrative, not through numbers; it is the stories
they tell that are important, not the regularity with which they deploy particular
words or phrases. The reliance on quantitative analyses of curricular and policy
documents is one reason why research associated with ‘World Culture Theory’
often gives an exaggerated or misleading impression of convergence across
education systems (on this, see Carney, Rappleye and Silova, 2013).
The analysis of curricula here, while citing quantitative data generated through
the coding exercise, therefore also strives to place these documents in their
broader political and educational context, interpreting the stories that they tell.
The data in the country-level background reports and coding results are carefully
weighed against other comparable datasets and socio-anthropological and
fieldwork studies. The following four sub-regional chapters — East Asia (Chapter
3), Southeast Asia (Chapter 4), South Asia (Chapter 5), and Central Asia (Chapter
6) — follow a similar structure, providing a comparative analysis of the coding
results framed by three sets of challenges to the meaningful integration of ESD/
GCED into education policy and curricula.
These challenges are not simply the often-cited obstacles to scaling up ‘good
practices’, such as a lack of understanding and resources, seen as resolvable
through technical adjustment or incremental tinkering. They encompass rather
more fundamental and complex barriers to the promotion of peace, sustainable
development and global citizenship through education. And they remind us
that reorienting policy and practice towards the pursuit of such aims requires
consideration of how education is embedded in broader political and social
structures, and reappraisal of the cultural or ideological assumptions that
underpin these.
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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