The Political Economy Of Schooling In Cambodia

In the most in-depth look at education in Cambodia to date, scholars long engaged in research on Cambodia provide historical context and unpack key issues of high relevance to Cambodia and other developing countries as they expand and modernize their education systems and grapple with challenges to providing a quality and equitable education.

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.

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible treatment of recent academic and policy studies of basic education in South Asia.

This book focuses on how politics shapes the capacity and commitment of elites to tackle the learning crisis in six developing countries. It deploys a new conceptual framework to show how the type of political settlement shaptes the level of elite commitment and state capacity to improving learning outcomes.

Cambodia for Sale details a post-conflict society that socializes children into a world of private rather than public goods. Through an ethnography of one village, Cambodia for Sale argues that efforts to rebuild Cambodia after decades of conflict have resulted in various forms of everyday privatization.

This book presents a sociocultural account of logic, or a pedagogy, that governs Cambodian education, from policy-making to classroom practices. In so doing, it seeks to not only provide an introduction to Cambodian education, but also to help readers understand the complexities involved in reforming educational practices by drawing on an ethnographic multi-level case study of an ongoing pedagogical reform policy. The book reveals what is actually taking place in today’s Cambodian classrooms and how actors view their own practices in response to the new pedagogy. Importantly, the book situates Cambodian pedagogical reform efforts amid the global wave of student-centered pedagogies and sheds new light on the political economy of educational policy-making and policy implementation along a global-local axis.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

This book is the most comprehensive account yet published about the education system in Cambodia. It covers all system levels and draws upon the knowledge and insights of a wide range of leading Cambodian and foreign scholars. The book focuses on how the system has developed and is making progress. Significant achievements over the past two decades are evident, but many problems remain, including the poor quality of teaching, research and institutional management. Under-funding is an ongoing obstacle, but so too is a bureaucratic culture of resistance to change, a history of weak governance, and an anti-reform sentiment deriving from a teacher-centred and exam-driven curriculum. Achieving international standards must now be the system’s highest priority. To this end, the system must rid itself of conservatism, complacency and manipulation by parochial vested interests.