Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

doing. Official curricular guidelines emphasise the necessity for fostering a
capacity for autonomous thinking, judgement and self-expression (shikouryoku,
handanryoku, hyougenryoku) ( P. General Provisions Com., pp. 2, 4, 6, 7, 13, 16, 21,
22, 61, 65, 79, 82, 83, 89). Thus will schools turn out ‘robust Japanese with fertile
minds, prepared to grasp the opportunities of the 21 st century’ 21 (P. General
Provisions Com., p. 2). This emphasis is reflected in the relative weight accorded
to ‘critical thinking’ in Japan’s formal curricular aims (see Figure 3.1).
Recent policy discourse in Korea has similarly stressed the need to enhance
‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ to promote technology-driven economic growth.
The Park Geun-hye regime made a slogan out of the phrase ‘creative economy’
(Korea, Republic of, 2015). There, as in China and Japan (see below), ‘integration’
of science and humanities curricula has been promoted since the early 2000s as
a means of achieving ‘creative and character building education’ (Kim, 2013) to
produce individuals capable of discovering ‘something novel by means of diverse
challenges and ideas based upon basic abilities’ (National Curriculum Guidelines,
2015, p. 8). At the same time, the curriculum for primary and middle school Ethics
(the Korean equivalent of China’s ‘Morality and Life’ subject) invokes notions of
global citizenship, human rights (mentioned twice), respect for diversity (rating
13 references) and the virtues of critical thinking that its Chinese counterpart, in
particular, appears to downplay. A recent UNESCO study of approaches to global
citizenship education in ten countries worldwide acknowledged Korea for the
exceptional prominence it accorded to this concept, and for ‘uniquely’ dealing
with it in ‘socio-affective’ as well as cognitive terms (IBE-UNESCO and APCEIU,
2016, p. 30). However, such aims or messages have been in tension with parallel
efforts to ramp up patriotic education (see below) and re-centralise control
over curriculum and textbook development. There are indications that diversity,
creativity and innovation have been valued by policymakers primarily for their
economic instrumentality, rather than for their potential to render notions of
citizenship broader, more critical and more participatory (Sung, 2016). In this
respect, the implications of the 2017 change in administration remain to be seen.
Curricular Treatment of ‘Sustainability’
The strongly instrumentalist — and economistic — outlook that informs official
thinking on the goals of education across East Asia raises questions regarding
the curricular treatment of ‘sustainability’. For example, when official documents
discuss ‘sustainable growth’, do they emphasise sustained economic expansion,
or the adaptation of economic strategy, lifestyles and attitudes to the demands
of environmental sustainability? And are potential contradictions between these
two very different interpretations of ‘sustainability’ highlighted and explicitly
addressed in curricula and textbooks, or elided and ignored?
21 Original in Japanese: ‘21 世 紀 を 切 り 拓 く 心 豊 かでたくましい 日 本 人 ’ (21 seiki wo
kirihiraaku kokoro yutaka de takumashii nihonjin).
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
67