Education as a Political Tool in Asia

Marie Lall, Edward Vickers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415595360
• eBook ISBN: 9781134055128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers a fresh and comparative approach in questioning what education is being used for and what the effects of the politicisation of education are on Asian societies in the era of globalisation. Education has been used as a political tool throughout the ages and across the whole world to define national identity and underlie the political rationale of regimes. In the contemporary, globalising world there are particularly interesting examples of this throughout Asia, ranging from the new definition of Indian national identity as a Hindu identity (to contrast with Pakistan's Islamic identity), to particular versions of nationalism in China, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. In Asia education systems have their origins in processes of state formation aimed either at bolstering 'self-strengthening' resistance to the encroachments of Western and/or Asian imperialism, or at furthering projects of post-colonial nation-building. State elites have sought to popularise powerful visions of nationhood, to equip these visions with a historical 'back-story', and to endow them with the maximum sentimental charge. This book explores all of these developments, emphasising that education is seen by nations across Asia, as elsewhere, as more than simply a tool for economic development, and that issues of national identity and the tolerance - or lack of it - of ethnic, cultural or religious diversity can be at least as important as issues of literacy and access. Interdisciplinary and unique in its analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars of political science, research in education and Asian Studies.

1 Education, identity and the politics of modern state formation in Asia

A comparative and historical perspective

Edward Vickers

This chapter aims to provide some comparative context for the chapters that follow, while drawing together some of the main themes that emerge from these country studies. The focus throughout this volume is on the role played by schooling in the construction of political identities and, through that, in the broader process of state formation. As Green has argued (1990), the structures of schooling (comprehensive or selective, uniform or fragmented) as well as curricular content are important to understanding this process. We emphasise the relationships between socio-economic change (accelerating growth and rising inequality in many societies), political change (or the lack of it), and curriculum development, but our principal focus is on the latter and its function as an instrument of ideological manipulation. Identity operates on many different levels—including class, gender, religion and support for particular sporting clubs—and political education operates through various vehicles, including popular campaigns (such as those of the Mao era in China), the media and military conscription. However, here we largely confine ourselves to the analysis of efforts by state elites to use formal education (primarily schooling) as an instrument for forging political identification with ‘the nation’.

The rationale for selecting ‘Asia’ as a unit for the comparative analysis of the relationship between schooling and politics lies primarily in the common history of attempts to build modern nation-states in resistance to the threat of Western imperialism from the nineteenth century onwards. As scholars such as Said (1995) have reminded us, terms such as ‘Asia’ or ‘the Orient’ originated as constructs of the European imagination, and were defined in opposition to ‘Europe’. However, the rise of Europe, and the existential threat this appeared to pose to states and civilisations east of the Bosphorus, have come to give ‘Asia’ real meaning for Asians themselves. The experiences of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and Persia/Iran in undertaking programmes of modern state formation or ‘self-strengthening’ in reaction to the European challenge also deserve to be discussed in any historical overview of the politics of schooling in modern Asia. Nonetheless, despite the strong historical connections between the Islamic Middle East and South and Central Asia, for the purposes of this volume we confine ourselves to East, South and South East Asia.

Before turning to a more general discussion of the historical relationships between education and political socialisation in the context of rapid socio-economic change, a brief analysis is offered of four Asian states with very different experiences of modernisation and state formation. The earliest and perhaps the classic case of an ‘Asian’ state that redefined itself in reaction to the Western challenge is Japan, and schooling formed a key element of the ambitious strategy of state formation pursued from the Meiji era of the late nineteenth century onwards. The Japanese example is of more than merely comparative interest, since Japanese enjoyed considerable influence particularly over its East Asian neighbours (China, Korea, Taiwan), but also amongst anti-colonial nationalists elsewhere on the continent. For example, there were those in the Indian nationalist movement, most famously Subhas Chandra Bose, who (at least for a time) saw Japan as an exemplar of ‘Asian’ resistance to Western hegemony. However, the process of Indian state formation, and the role within it of education and schooling, ultimately followed a rather different path. From a discussion of the Indian experience the chapter moves on to the case of Singapore, a tiny city-state with a colonial history and a mixed population of East and South Asian heritage, which in consciously manufacturing (through education) a new national identity has also set itself up as a beacon of ‘Asian values’. This vision of ‘Asian values’ is founded upon essentialist notions of culture and identity, implying (to paraphrase Amartya Sen) the illusion of a destiny for ‘Asia’ that eschews genuinely participatory politics. The last case discussed here, that of Taiwan, puts the lie to such arguments since, it is argued, the Taiwanese have in recent years developed a vibrant democratic political culture, without sacrificing a distinctively ‘Asian’ cultural identity.

For Taiwan and many other Asian communities in the twenty-first century, the tensions between politics, identity and schooling lie primarily not in any civilisational clash with ‘the West’. The spectre of such a clash may serve as a convenient foil for authoritarian regimes across the continent, but the fundamental struggles over ideology, culture and their implications for schooling in modern societies are not international, but internal to the Asian states discussed here. This is not to say that these struggles have no serious bearing on international politics, since in many parts of Asia they very clearly do (as in the recurring controversies over Japanese history textbooks). The chapter therefore concludes with a consideration of the implications of state-directed efforts at identity formation both for internal social and political stability, and for inter-state relations throughout Asia.

Thorstein Veblen and ‘The opportunity of Japan’—the origins of Asian fascism

It was in the midst of the First World War that the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen published an essay entitled ‘The opportunity of Japan’. In this he prophesied that, within a generation, the imperial Japanese government would be driven by the logic of its strategy of industrialisation without political or social modernisation towards a policy of ‘dynastic aggrandisement’ by military means. In this respect, Japan was to be compared with the states of contemporary Europe, then engaged in bloody conflagration—and particularly with imperial Germany (in many respects the key model for Japan’s Meiji-era statesmen). However, Veblen viewed the Japanese case as an exceptional instance of this all-too-common phenomenon:

It is in this unique combination of a high-wrought spirit of feudalistic fealty and chivalric honor with the material efficiency given by the modern technology that the strength of the Japanese nation lies. In this respect—in being able anachronistically to combine the use of modern technical ways and means with the medieval spirit of servile solidarity—the position of the Japanese government is not unique except in the eminent degree of its successful operation. The several governments of Europe are also…endeavoring similarly to exploit the modern state of the industrial arts by recourse to the servile patriotism of the common man, and for the purposes of a dynastic politics that is substantially of a medieval character; but in respect of the measure of success which this anachronistic enterprise meets with, these European powers…each and several fall short of the Japanese pattern by a long interval.

(Veblen 1915: 251–2)

The leading Japanese statesmen of the Meiji era (1868–1913) saw patriotic education as a strategy for managing the considerable social and political tensions that accompanied the transformation of late nineteenth-century Japan, as well as for forming loyal imperial subjects committed to pursuing the greater glory of their nation on the global stage. This vision of the role of education was largely derived from observation of contemporary European practice (Gluck 1985). Thus Mori Arinori, the main architect of the Meiji education reforms, saw education as above all for ‘the sake of the country’, and his visits to Europe convinced him that giving priority to training ‘an elite for state service was the path Japan should follow’, while ‘Spencerian visions of competition between nations’ reinforced this view (Jansen 2000: 407). The early development of primary education was, in Mori’s opinion, to be aimed primarily at promoting ‘awareness of and support for the state’ amongst all future pupils, but—illustrating the regressive fiscal policy that accompanied the nationalistic rhetoric—parents themselves were expected to bear the bulk of the cost (ibid.: 409). Both curriculum development and teacher education were meanwhile designed to inculcate a ‘parade ground’ ethos of national solidarity and loyalty to the state, and emphatically to discourage active, participatory citizenship (ibid.: 409). The Meiji leaders’ image of the international world into which Japan had been drawn was ‘threatening and almost demonic’ (ibid.: 412), and foreigners they encountered were generally sceptical concerning the capacity of an ‘oriental power’ to assim-ilate the technology and institutions of the modern West in short order. The Meiji state was built around a collective effort to prove such foreigners wrong, and the role of education was to ensure that individual skills and energies were, as far as possible, channelled towards fulfilment of this national enterprise, and away from any agitation against the existing social and political order.

As a contemporary observer of the widespread tensions between the rise of an industrialised, consumption-oriented society, and the continued political dominance of pre-industrial elites, Veblen argued that in the Japanese case, just as in those of Europe or the US, changes in ‘the state of the industrial arts’ and the consequent rise of a consumerist ethic would eventually undermine popular support for an aggressive, expansionist policy:

For good or ill, life under the conditions imposed by the modern industrial system, and by that economic system of price, business enterprise, and competitive earning and spending that always goes with it, is in the long run incompatible with the prepossessions of medievalism.

(Veblen 1915: 254)

However, the implications of industrialisation, consumerism—and the cosmopolitanism which he saw as their inescapable concomitant—would, according to Veblen, take time to work themselves out. Consequently, he argued:

The opportunity of Japan as a fearsome power in the world’s concert of dynastic politics may…confidently be expected to lie within the historical interval that so intervenes between Japan’s acquirement of the western state of the industrial arts and its consequent, slower but inevitable, falling into line with those materialistic, commercial, and spendthrift conceptions of right and honest living that make the outcome among the (Christian) peoples that have gone before along the road of industrial dominion and individual self-help.

(ibid.: 255)

Veblen’s argument no doubt stands in need of considerable qualification—not least regarding his rather reductionist assumption of the fundamental incompatibility of consumerism and ‘medieval’ patriotic loyalties, and certainly in terms of the time-scale he envisaged for the working out of the social and political implications of the rise of industrialism and consumerism. In this respect, his position resembles that of those who nowadays suggest that globalisation could lead to the erosion of blind and uncritical national loyalties and their displacement by more critical, rational (and perhaps ‘selfish’) ‘market values’ (Mathews et al. 2008). However, if rampant consumerism and a chauvinist brand of nationalism are ultimately irreconcilable, then it is hard to account for the strong residual appeal, right into the twenty-first century, of what Veblen dismissively terms the ‘Spirit of Old Japan’ (or atavistic nationalism in general—see Chapter 2 in this volume). It is also interesting to note that, at least in contemporary China, consumerism seems actually to be providing a forum for the expression of extreme nationalistic sentiments—as witnessed by the anti-French riots outside Chinese branches of the Carrefour supermarket chain in April 2008.¹ And even if, as seems likely, the spread of consumerism tends to take the edge off any popular appetite for ‘dynastic aggrandisement’, the long-term sustainability of the consumer society, and the ethical outlook that it supports, may appear more fragile to those of us who live in the shadow of catastrophic climate change than they did to Veblen and his contemporaries. His prophesies concerning the dangers of ‘medieval’ Japanese militarism were fulfilled largely as a consequence of the global economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s. We live with the growing consciousness that environmental threats, as well as the unpredictable vagaries of the economic cycle, could call a sudden halt to the seemingly relentless expansion of consumption; and if this happens, then we may discover the extent to which ‘medievalism’ still lurks beneath the surface of prosperous complacency in many societies.

However, to make reference, as Veblen does, to such notions as the ‘Spirit of Old Japan’ is by no means to posit the existence of national identities founded upon ineffable ethno-cultural ‘essences’. By contrast with the more racialist or neo-Darwinist assumptions of many of his contemporaries,² for Veblen, national character, so crucial to determining the strength of the bond between rulers and ruled, and thus the ‘fearsomeness’ of any nation within the concert of powers, is constructed and acquired, not immutable and unchanging. As he expresses it,

the popular and romantic faith holds the received scheme of habits to be an innate and irreducible specific character peculiar to this people, and therefore holds it to be a national heritage unalterable and indefeasible through the ages—‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’, etc.; this romantic prejudice need of course not detain us, since it is itself an integral part in that scheme of habits of thought that comes and goes under the compulsion of shifting circumstance.

(Veblen 1915: 256)

What Veblen—like the majority of mainstream sociologists and economists to this day—does not discuss in any detail is the role that education, or more specifically schooling, plays in constructing and reproducing this ‘romantic prejudice’. While he notes that the ‘modern state of the industrial arts’ requires mass literacy, and that the spread of literacy might render it more difficult for the state to control the flow of information, his belief that mass literacy would eventually undermine popular belief in ‘that opera bouffe mythology that makes up the state religion’ (ibid.: 262) may in retrospect appear unduly sanguine. What is missing here, perhaps, is a concept of hegemony that gives more weight to the power of ideas in their own right, since this might help to account for the persistent attraction down to the present day of ‘opera bouffe’ mythologies—of nationalist and other varieties.

One mythology very much at large in the contemporary world is neoliberalism—by which is meant the fundamentalist belief in the market mechanism, not only as the touchstone for macroeconomic policy, but also as a model for the delivery of public services. Harvey (2005) extends this definition by arguing that the worldwide rise of market fundamentalism is in fact largely the consequence of an orchestrated attempt by capitalist classes to recapture state power, after the prolonged post-war period of Keynesian interventionism had eroded capitalist control of the levers of government. Echoing Polanyi (2001), he contends that the undermining of structures of social solidarity resulting from the doctrinaire pursuit of a neoliberal agenda ultimately threatens to provoke a reaction amongst impoverished, fragmented and disoriented populations. This may take the form of religious revivalism (as witnessed in China with the Falun Gong movement during the 1990s), new forms of associationism, communitarianism and talk of civic rights and duties (as seen recently in some Western countries), or, as Polanyi argued, in the emergence or revival of fascism, nationalism or localism. ‘Neoliberalism in its pure form’, according to Harvey, ‘has always threatened to conjure up its own nemesis in varieties of authoritarian populism and nationalism’ (Harvey 2005: 81).

It may be objected that Neoliberalism is seldom found ‘in its pure form’, but Harvey’s argument nonetheless offers a corrective to Veblen’s assumptions concerning the eventual triumph of consumerist values. This is particularly so in societies, like many of those in early twenty-first-century Asia, where patterns of consumption, education (especially international higher education) and employment increasingly integrate a cosmopolitan urban elite into global networks, while the bulk of their compatriots remain confined to far narrower horizons and more impoverished conditions. In these societies, as in early twentieth-century Japan, ideologies of populist ethno-cultural nationalism can offer a means for established political elites to sublimate the strains and divisions caused by rapid and unequal economic development. As the example of Japan shows, however, this strategy is a short-term palliative with potentially disastrous long-term side-effects.

Secular democracy or spiritual ‘volksgemeinschaft’? Politics, education and the search for modern India

India’s nightmare is that the millions left behind by its new prosperity might lash out, turning to Maoist violence. But equally sinister is the prospect of its aspirant classes casting their lot with a business-friendly strongman who promises to make the proverbial trains run on time and to keep disaffected minorities in check.

(The Economist 2008)

Like many of the societies that experienced British colonial rule, India’s educational legacy at independence was one of a highly elitist, examination-oriented system of schooling, characterised by patchy state investment and extensive reliance on a private or missionary ‘voluntary-aided’ sector (see for example Sweeting and Vickers 2007). Pedagogy was influenced by a combination of indigenous traditions, such as the informal ‘guru’ model of learning common in temple academies, and ‘Western’ imports, such as the ‘monitorial’ system, though Alexander notes that this was quite possibly an English re-export with roots in Bengali educational experiments of the late eighteenth century (Alexander 2000: Chapter 4). The examination-driven ethos of Indian education as it developed under the Raj was a much clearer instance of a British educational reexport since, like the tea bushes carpeting many Indian hillsides, the system of competitive examinations for selection to state service was ultimately derived from China. Whatever the historical origins of the various features of the colonial education system, its bequest to an independent India included comparatively low levels of literacy (around 25 per cent), huge inequalities of access to education (across regions and classes), and a narrowly academic curricular focus driven by the content of those examinations that determined progression up to the crowded summits of learning in the universities. Arguably also part of this legacy were the rigid and totalising conceptions of religious and caste identity manipulated, if not created, by the British, in their attempts to shore up control over Indian society (Thapar 1996; Cohn 1996). At the same time, and largely independent of colonial manipulation, religious reformers of different stripes promoted Islamic revivalism, and moves to reinvent ‘Hinduism’ as an identifiable and articulated ‘religion’, in the process heightening consciousness of communal identities (Bayly 2005).

India in the late 1940s thus shared with the China of the time a very rudimentary system of basic schooling, and—at the elite level—an ideology of modernising nationalism that sought to transcend a social reality of strong regionalism (though with religion playing a far less salient role in China outside Tibet and Xinjiang), and relatively weak popular identification with the state. However, while both India and China underwent dramatic political transitions in this period—with Indian independence in 1947 followed in 1949 by the communist triumph in China’s Civil War—their subsequent development, and that of their education systems, was radically divergent. In China, a concerted drive to deepen and accelerate the process of modern state formation begun under the nationalists saw land and property reforms sweep away pre-revolutionary structures of ownership, and rapid progress towards a mass system of basic education proceeded in the face of greatly enfeebled resistance from the old educated elites, who bore the brunt of Mao’s brutal campaigns (Pepper 1996; Thøgersen 2002). In India, by contrast, despite the humbling of the emasculated rulers of the princely states, political independence was accompanied by no social revolution to seriously challenge the dominance of the elites cultivated as collaborators by the British. While both Nehru’s India and early communist China combined emulation of a Stalinist ‘top-down’ model of economic and technological modernisation with a fierce pride in their independence from Soviet (or any other ‘foreign’) influence,³ the social foundations of the two regimes were very different (Moore 1996). This difference helps to explain on the one hand India’s avoidance of the kind of chaos and violence unleashed by Mao in the name of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Education, identity and the politics of modern state formation in Asia: a comparative and historical perspective
• 2 The inescapability of politics? Nationalism, democratization and social order in Japanese education
• 3 The opportunity of China? Education, patriotic values and the Chinese state
• 4 Education, politics and the state in Hong Kong
• 5 Creating good citizens, or a competitive workforce, or just plain political socialisation? Tensions in the aims of education in Singapore
• 6 ‘Reverse! Now play fast forward’: education and the politics of change in Malaysia
• 7 education and identity formation in contemporary Vietnam
• 8 Globalization and the fundamentalization of curricula: lessons from India
• 9 Education dilemmas in Pakistan: the current curriculum reform
• 10 Non Più Andrai: bullets, burqas, books—education policy and its discontents in communist and Taleban Afghanistan
• Bibliography