Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

CHAPTER 3
East Asia
PROLOGUE:
EDUCATION AND EAST ASIAN NATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES
The role accorded to education by East Asia’s modernising elites is well captured
in the words of Liang Qichao, a prominent Chinese intellectual who was profoundly
influenced by a sojourn in late Meiji Japan:
[The self-governing group] is like an army. Advancing together, stopping
together… Nobody fails to observe the public rules, nobody fails to
seek the group’s advantage. Men like this, and groups like this… [must
certainly] stand strong in the world. (quoted in Kuhn, 2002, p. 127)
In this view, the maintenance of national autonomy — freedom from domination
by other nations — involved disciplining individuals, subordinating them to ‘the
greater good’. Twentieth-century Asian leaders have differed significantly on
how to achieve this, but mainstream visions of nationhood have been profoundly
shaped by military metaphors, implying — at least for the foot-soldiers — the
inculcation of dutiful obedience and commitment to collective goals. The
uniqueness of this pattern should not be exaggerated; a Durkheimian emphasis
on political socialisation — or the role of schooling in turning ‘peasants into
Frenchmen’, as Eugen Weber (1976) famously put it — characterised the nationstates
of 19 th -century Europe from which East Asian educational modernisers
derived their prime inspiration. But the tendency to emphasise such values has
persisted with peculiar force in a region both deeply scarred by the wars of the
mid-twentieth century, and where Chinese and Korean ‘cold civil wars’ remain
unresolved (Mitter and Major, 2004).
Regimentation has thus strongly characterised the socialisation strategies of
East Asian schools, taking more or less overtly militaristic forms at different
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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