Education Reform And Education Policy In East Asia

This book assesses the impact of globalization on the education systems of key East Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the "tiger economies" of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, examining how the increasingly interdependent economic system has driven policy change and education reform. It discusses how policy makers have responded to changes required in educational outcomes in order to equip their societies for new global conditions and explores the impact of new approaches and ideologies related to globalization, such as marketization, privatization, governance changes, managerialism, economic rationalism and neo-liberalism, making comparisons across the region. Based upon in-depth research, fieldwork, literature analysis, policy document analysis and personal reflections of academics serving in the education sector, this volume recounts heated debates about the pros and cons of education restructuring in East Asia. The discussions on national responses and coping strategies in this volume offer highly relevant insights on how globalization has resulted in restructuring and draws lessons from comparative public policy analysis and comparative education studies.

Yasushi Hirosato and Yuto Kitamura Developing countries, including Southeast Asian countries, face an enormous challenge in ensuring equitable access to quality education in the context of deepening globalization and increasing international competition. They must simultaneously meet the goals of Education for All (EFA) at the basic education level and of developing a more sophisticated workforce required by the knowledge-based economy at the post-basic, especially tertiary, education level. To meet this challenge, developing countries need to reform/renovate their education systems and service deliveries as an integral part of national development. However, most of them have not yet fully developed the individual, institutional, and system capacities in undertaking necessary education reforms, especially under decentralization and privatization requiring new roles at various (central and local, or public and private) levels of administration and stakeholders. Provided that an ultimate vision of educational development and cooperation in the twenty-first century would be to develop indigenous capacity in engineering education reforms, this book analyzes the overall education reform context and capacity, including the status of sector program support using the sector-wide approach (SWAp)/program-based approach (PBA) in developing countries. We also address how different stakeholders have been interacting in order to promote equitable access to quality education, particularly from the perspectives of capacity development under the system of decentralization.

Education in east Asia varies widely, due to the cultural and political histories of each country. The communist governments of China, North Korea, and Vietnam mandate schooling differently from the limited democracy of Hong Kong and the parliamentary government of Japan. The history of the educational philosophies, systems, and curricula of seventeen East Asian countries are described here, with a timeline highlighting educational developments, and a special day in the life feature, a personal account of what it is like for a student to attend school in that country.

Exploring contemporary issues and challenges facing education in South-East Asia, this Handbook covers the 10 member states of the ASEAN and Timor-Leste.

The Challenge of Eastern Asian Education highlights how Asian education policy and practice challenge American schools. The book focuses on innovations that the nations of the Pacific Rim have developed for their schools, and it analyzes how these educational systems have tried to meet the challenges of rapid social and economic change. It is unique in that it provides in-depth coverage of the Asian approach to education and explicitly discusses the implications of Asian education for America. There is special interest in Asian countries, not only because of their unparalleled economic success, but because Asian societies have been held up as models for social harmony and discipline. This book provides specific examples of Asian educational practice that may have relevance to the United States. It is unique in that it deals not only with Japan, which has received considerable attention, but with other Pacific Rim nations as well.

Education in East Asia is a comprehensive critical reference guide to education in the region. With chapters written by an international team of leading regional education experts, the book explores the education systems of China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea and Taiwan, covering local regional developments in each country as well as recent reforms and global contexts. Including a comparative introduction to the issues facing education in the region as a whole and guides to available online datasets, this handbook will be an essential reference for researchers, scholars, international agencies and policy-makers at all levels.

This book discusses how East Asia has introduced school and curricular reform to reflect democratic citizenship and globalized skills, knowledge, dispositions, and competencies in the 21st century. It also focuses on the tendencies and reasons students from Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore receive the highest scores in international students’ assessment such as PISA and TIMSS; yet their curiosity and motivation for learning are the lowest internationally. Moreover, Indonesian and Vietnamese students are likely to receive the lowest testing scores, yet their motivation for learning is quite high. It is worth investigating high academic achievement in East Asia in light of the trend towards democratization. The authors consider controversial issues such as whether the goals of democratic education should be the attainment of high academic scores, consideration of whether to implement competency-based curriculums or meritocratic systems of academic competition, and the provision of equal opportunities in the community of learning. The book illuminates each country’s struggle to realise school reform on the basis of its social and cultural settings, and looks at what connects East Asia’s past, present, and future.

Offers a snapshot of key educational stratification issues in East Asian nations, and their evolution in conjunction with changing student populations. This book addresses issues ranging from curricular adaptations to globalization, to persisting and new forms of educational stratification, to new multiculturalism in educational policy.