Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xiii, 365 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$165.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-85578-5.
In Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship, Krishna Kumar and Edward Vickers begin their introduction with two questions: “How has citizenship been constructed in Asian societies negotiating transitions to modern statehood?” “To what extent have such transitions, and associated citizenship discourses, been shaped by any distinctively ‘Asian’ ideas or conditions?” (1).
The first question is addressed convincingly. First, this volume covers India, China, Japan, the Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Mongolia, giving a broad view of citizenship in Asia. Second, the sketch of the reality of citizenship is multi-dimensional. Each chapter begins with theories of citizenship and modernity, then progresses to more and more concrete matters: the history of state formation, educational policies, textbooks, the actual images and narratives used to convey citizenship, and the reaction of students to them. Additionally, five chapters go beyond the school system, delving into other sites of education like museums, youth groups, and the internet. The end result is an understanding of modern Asian citizenship that is dense, vivid, and dynamic, not merely showing how citizenship evolves in various histories, but providing a glimpse of how students are shaped in various processes of education.
To what extent have these processes been affected by Asian conditions? Here, most chapters paint a dark picture of education as hegemonic (although multi-directional), a power play between key tensions of modernity: majority vs. minority, Asia vs. the West, the nation vs. the others. I will use these to summarize some key arguments in the book.
In the first tension, we see that modern education tends to create centralized unity and identity at the expense of minorities and those at the fringes. This is clearest in Kumar’s chapter on rural India and Vickers’ chapter on China. Be it the domination of urban India over rural areas, or majority culture in China being imposed on minorities, education functions as a method of enculturation, draining rural areas of young, talented people and centralizing power around the cities. Of course, this tension is quite complex, and nuance is added by chapters like Jiang Lei and Vickers’ on Shanghai’s museums, where Shanghai is shown as negotiating its own identity within that of China as a whole.
Amidst this erasure of the margins, both Vickers and Kumar call for a need to rebalance our understanding of society and history by allowing all children in school, including the marginalized, to discuss and critique this ethos. A concrete suggestion can be found in Latika Gupta’s study of India’s textbooks for Social and Political Life. Here, we see what a more genuinely democratic education might be like: foregrounding conflict and issues, and actively involving students in social change.
The second tension of modernity is between Asia and the West. As Kumar and Vickers repeatedly point out, Asian modernization has always been complexly related to Westernization. This tension shows in every chapter, but is particularly clear in Caroline Rose’s comparison of China and Japan, Filiz Keser Aschenberger’s discussion of Turkey, and Myagmarsuren Damdin and Vickers’ analysis of Mongolia. In all of these countries, modernization mixes learning from the West with attempts to resist the West with a strong national identity. However, Mark Maca and Paul Morris point out that the Philippines is an exception: for various historical and political reasons, it seems to have simply failed to create a strong national identity or citizenship, resulting in a widespread embracing of values of globality and easy assimilation into foreign cultures. In a country economically buoyed by overseas workers, this ethos is useful but perhaps unsustainable.
The third tension is the nation vs. the others, where Asian modernization seems to very often couple national unity with national chauvinism. Aschenberger’s chapter on Turkey, Rubina Saigol’s chapter on Pakistan, Rose’s chapter on Japan and China, and Rowena Xiaoqing He’s article on overseas Chinese student nationalism take this up directly. They depict the concrete processes by which individuals learn to love their own countries by hating others: reiterating instances of national victimhood, creating a sense of suspicion that others (or the West) are trying to destroy one’s country, depicting the state as a family that ought not to be betrayed, strongly depicting a binary between martyrs and traitors, etc. The dangers these pose for regional and global stability is clear.
With these tensions shown in their various forms, in a wide range of countries and levels, this volume provides an excellent entry point not only for those in comparative education but for anyone engaged with a study of modernization as a whole.
However, there is room for further argument. In this volume, we see that in the process of Asian modernization, Asian teachings (philosophies and religions)—“Asian values,” Confucianism, Islam, State Shinto, and the cult of Chinggis Khan—have been complicit in supporting anti-Western, chauvinistic, authoritarian regimes. The solution offered by Kumar, Vickers, Gupta, and others seems to be “discourse, discussion, and critique.” While these are important, perhaps it is still prudent to consider Asian teachings in the search for solutions.
First, alongside Helen Ting Mu Hung’s discussion of Islamizing Malaysia, I think there needs to be a more thorough engagement with post-secularism. Is secularist “neutrality” the only solution to a multi-religious state? Is secularism not a religion onto itself, with its own implications for private life and the existential needs of man, and thus in competition with other religions? (See Talal Asad, OnSuicide Bombing, Columbia University Press, 2007.) Perhaps we, especially in education, need to take more seriously this “moral, spiritual void” secular modernity seems to create, especially in a region where the very idea of “religion” (in relation to the public and private spheres) formed in a distinctive way.
Second, might Asian teachings not provide alternate, profitable visions of participatory democracy that enable rather than merely presuppose discourse? One common idea in contemporary Confucianism and Japanese Philosophy (particularly Watsuji Tetsurô) is that perhaps, prior to reason, communication needs trust. In cases of an “allergy to critique” in countries like China, perhaps the ethics and psychology of critique and discourse need to be reconsidered.
Anton Luis Sevilla
Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
pp. 859-861