Editorial – Asian perspectives on diversity and its implications for education

“Diversity” has become something of a buzzword in contemporary educational debate. The United Nations, in elaborating its “sustainable development goals” (SDGs), has made “appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development” a key component of its “target” for education (SDG 4.7) (UNESCO-MGIEP, 2017). However, leaving aside the studied vagueness of the term “appreciation,” how is diversity itself to be understood? What do we mean when we talk about diversity, and why precisely should we value it – in our societies, or in our schools? Are there circumstances in which diversity can become divisive, threatening sustainable development rather than promoting it? How should respect for diversity be balanced with the imperatives of sustaining social cohesion or, in a term beloved of many Asian leaders, “harmony”?

The salience of such questions in discussion of education across Asia is reflected in the articles in this second Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA) special issue of the APJE. The theme of CESA’s 2018 biennial conference in Siem Reap, Cambodia – Education and Social Progress: Insights from Comparative Perspectives – did not in fact reference “diversity” at all. However, issues relating to diversity featured prominently both in the plenary sessions and many paper presentations, as the articles here testify.

Ruth Hayhoe, in a paper based on her conference keynote, discusses the legacy of ancient Indian traditions of higher learning, their influence on the development of various learning traditions in Asia (from Cambodia to China), and their potential role in reconceptualizing the “research university.” Attacking the instrumentalism and flattening, normative assumptions governing the “rankings” culture in higher education, Hayhoe points out that while modern universities in societies such as China, India or Cambodia may be largely modelled on Western templates, they are often animated by distinct conceptions of the aims of higher learning – conceptions derived in large part from indigenous tradition. She highlights the importance of the spiritual and the active involvement of women as aspects of ancient Indian scholarship from which we can derive inspiration. And one purpose in seeking to raise awareness of such traditions and their relevance for us today is to counter the still pervasive assumption that Europe (or “the West”) is uniquely the fount and origin of our “modern” universities.

There is a clear need for greater diversity of philosophical and historical perspective in global educational debate. At the same time, mapping the contours of diversity too neatly along East-West (or North-South) lines, for example, by contrasting Eastern spiritualism with Western instrumentalism, can lead into different sort of Eurocentric trap. Hayhoe highlights the crucial role of monastic institutions in the ancient Indian – and broader Asian – Buddhist tradition of higher learning. But Europe’s medieval universities also had their origins in monasticism, albeit of a Christian variety. As the historical anthropologist Jack Goody has argued (2006), on closer inspection many arguments concerning European or Asian exceptionalism break down, suggesting the artificiality of many Europe–Asia distinctions in what, in many crucial respects, has long been a common “Eurasian” cultural space. And indeed, Hayhoe’s paper can be seen as reinforcing this point, by encouraging us to see the modern research university less as the unique product of European genius, and more as an artefact of our shared Eurasian inheritance. An important benefit of studying other cultural traditions in the manner she advocates can be to awaken us to forgotten diversity in our own.

The Eurasian inheritance encompasses aspects whose shared ownership we may feel less inclined to acknowledge, amongst them imperialism and colonialism. Eurocentric assumptions that distort much thinking about educational practices and institutions (and much else besides) can often be traced to the pervasive legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. But imperialism and colonialism are no more uniquely the products of European civilization than are capitalism, individualism or many “modern” educational ideas and practices associated with them (such as meritocracy and state-mandated competitive examinations). Qing China was an empire before the British extended their dominion over India, and it is the Chinese Empire that, territorially at least, has proved more enduring. The societies of Indochina – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – have been profoundly influenced by French colonialism as well as Soviet and American imperialism, but the competing attempts of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Burmese regimes to extend their hegemony over the region both predate and postdate the Western intrusion.

While colonialism, imperialism and associated habits of dismissiveness towards “other” cultures or traditions are often represented as quintessentially “Western” pathologies, Asians who inhabit the margins or borderlands of this continent’s dominant states may be inclined to take a rather more nuanced view. Many have found themselves at the hard end of hegemonic projects driven not only by Western forces, but also – and often more significantly – by other Asians.

In such cases, discourses that emphasize indigenous victimhood vis-a-vis Western or alien oppression can ironically help legitimate virulently intolerant forms of nationalism that marginalize or persecute many Asian “minorities”. Standing in tragic contrast with the ancient Indian heritage of diversity and tolerance that Hayhoe celebrates is the situation in contemporary India, where Hindu fundamentalists propagate a world view premised on the narrative of a pure indigenous civilization sullied by successive waves of Muslim, then British, interlopers. Nalanda University, praised in Hayhoe’s paper, has found itself in the nationalists’ firing line precisely because its animating vision of Asia’s cultural inheritance as diverse, transnational and open to the world is diametrically opposed to their narrowly chauvinistic version of “Hindutva”.

Amartya Sen, who led the recent efforts to re-found Nalanda University on the site of its ancient Buddhist predecessor, has witheringly critiqued the widespread conception of multiculturalism as “plural monoculturalism” (Sen, 2006). By this he means the practice of assuming that individuals can neatly be assigned to one or other identity grouping, denying the shifting, complex and relational manner in which identity is actually constructed and experienced in daily life. As he points out, the sorting and labelling of populations in this way was beloved of British colonial bureaucrats, not least because it facilitated their governing strategy of “divide and rule”. The success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India is largely attributable to its effective weaponization of categories of religion and caste that the British did not invent, but which they exploited and institutionalized.

Sen and other liberal scholars, such as the Anglo-Ghanaian scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018), portray the valuing of diversity as intrinsic to the health of any society – balancing pride in shared identities and traditions with tolerance, openness and a willingness to “see ourselves as others see us”. For them, recognizing the fluid, complex and multi-layered nature of identity is of crucial importance. But when, as in contemporary India, diversity discourse is treated as a crude exercise in labelling, it can instead serve to shore up the boundaries of a monolithic, exclusive sense of selfhood, exacerbating social division and fuelling intolerance. Narratives of victimhood tend to encourage the latter tendency, since they can be invoked to justify heightened emphasis on self-assertion for the purpose of righting what are seen as historic wrongs. Education systems across Asia have played a central role in propagating such narratives.

This is particularly true of China, where consciousness of a history of national victimhood at the hands of foreign imperialism underpins the legitimating narrative of the Communist Party. The themes of “National Humiliation” and its transcendence were given particular prominence in the campaign of “Patriotic Education” with which the Party responded to the 1989 Student Movement and the worldwide collapse of the Communist Bloc. As Yan and Vickers show in their paper here, the ramping up of that campaign during the 1990s and after coincided with a significant reversal of the more sensitive treatment of China’s ethnic diversity that characterized the early years of post-Mao “Reform and Opening.” Whereas the history textbooks drafted during the late 1980s and approved in the early 1990s strove hard to portray China as an intrinsically multi-ethnic nation, and to promote an image of greater inter-ethnic equality, the curriculum reform of the early 2000s reinstated a more Han-centric vision of nationhood. That more chauvinist vision has apparently hardened in the aftermath of the disturbances of 2008–9 in Tibet and Xinjiang, feeding a sweeping kulturkampf against indigenous culture there.

Consciousness of China as a victim rather than perpetrator of colonialism and imperialism also supports claims of Chinese leadership in a wider “Third World” struggle against Western hegemony. In May 2019, President Xi, addressing a “Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations” in Beijing, “called for discarding arrogance and prejudice, deepening the understanding of differences in civilizations, and advancing inter-civilizational exchanges and dialogue.” In comments clearly directed at those who would seek to impose “Western” notions of democracy and human rights on “Asian” societies, Xi also derided the “foolishness” of believing “that one’s race and civilization are superior to others,” and the “disastrous” consequences of seeking “to willfully reshape or even replace other civilizations” (Xinhua, quoted in Tiezzi, 2019).

The reference here to “civilizations” is significant, invoking the idea of China as a civilization-state uniquely able to trace its origins, through an unbroken inheritance, back to the dawn of history (Jones, 2005). What is advocated here is a notion of “plural monoculturalism” on a civilizational scale; a Huntingtonian idea of a world neatly carved up into discrete civilizational units, each with its own incommensurable values. Accepting this division of the world means accepting that each “civilizational” unit retains the prerogative of determining what values, identities or rights deserve recognition within its own inviolable sphere.

Such a vision poses particular challenges for communities, such as Hong Kong, whose histories and identities are intimately bound up with the promotion of international (or “inter-civilizational”) exchange. For the authorities in Beijing, as for much of the Chinese public, Hong Kong’s illegitimate colonization at the outset of the “Century of Humiliation,” and its triumphant reunification with a proudly resurgent China, are the supremely important facts of the territory’s history. From a mainland perspective, Hong Kong is a mere bit-player in a story whose main theme is Chinese victimization and its transcendence (Vickers 2019). From a local perspective, on the other hand, victimhood is increasingly identified with a distinctive Hongkongese community oppressed by a distant and autocratic central government.

However, while that sense of Hongkongese distinctiveness is rooted in a vision of Hong Kong as a diverse “international city,” Hongkongers have long struggled to come to terms with diversity in their midst – whether in the form of mainlander immigrants, the long-standing South Asian minority (Erni & Leung, 2014), or the vast underclass of Filipina maids. As Lin and Jackson show here, local textbooks for Chinese History still emphatically endorse, as they have for decades, a Han-chauvinist vision of Chinese culture. Notwithstanding some superficial acknowledgement of diversity within Hong Kong in other areas of the school curriculum (for example, in the subject of Liberal Studies, analysed elsewhere by Jackson), overall the curriculum remains dominated by discourses that implicitly or explicitly portray “Chinese culture” (and by extension that of Hong Kong) in monolithic and totalizing terms. And while the portrayal of Hong Kong’s relationship with China attracts much critical scholarly attention, until recently very little has been devoted to the curricular treatment of diversity within Hong Kong.

Korea is another example of an Asian society in which intense consciousness of victimhood has fuelled nationalism and political polarization, in ways reflected and reinforced by the school curriculum. But the pattern of polarization differs from that found in Hong Kong. Whereas there it is the liberal Pan-Democrats who perceive their northern neighbours as the chief threat to local freedom and security, in South Korea it is the conservative right that takes the most hard-line stance. And while in post-1997 Hong Kong Pan-Chinese nationalism has been championed by a strange alliance of ultra-capitalist elites and long-standing pro-Communist leftists, Pan-Korean nationalism is most strongly espoused by the social-democratic centre-left. Hence, since the democratization of the South in the 1990s, it is under left-leaning regimes that official discourse, including the formal school curriculum, has taken a more hostile, nationalistic stance vis-à-vis Japan, and a somewhat more emollient position towards North Korea. Meanwhile, regimes of the right, while also evincing strong ethno-nationalism, have been both more hostile towards the North, and more accommodating of the South’s allies in America and Japan – the arch-enemies of the Korean left.

This is the political context for what Kim perceives as a “paradoxical” divergence of Korean textbooks from a supposed global trend towards greater transnationalism in history education. In truth, a widespread international trend in this direction is hard to detect: a recent report on school curricula and related policies across 22 Asian countries found that the prevalence of nationalism and weakness of transnationalism were among the outstanding common features of the education systems surveyed (MGIEP, 2017). What perhaps appears paradoxical in the South Korean case is the intense nationalism of the political left and centre-left, which in many liberal democracies tend rather to moderate the nationalist tendencies of right-wing or conservative parties. By contrast, in South Korea the persistent salience of anti-Communism on the right and of anti-Japanese nationalism on the left have left little political space for the articulation of a tolerant, conciliatory brand of transnationalism capable of transcending the pervasive sense of Korean victimhood – of a nation under siege.

Studies of Northeast Asia’s interminable disputes over the commemoration and teaching of “difficult” history (especially relating to Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War) have often noted the significance of the region’s lack of any meaningful transnational architecture. If only, runs a common argument, Northeast Asia could acquire a framework for cross-national collaboration like the European Union, then perhaps it would become easier to resolve such disputes. However, such counter-factual speculation needs to take full account of the very different conditions pertaining to Cold War Europe and East Asia. And as Frost, Vickers and Schumacher (2019) have recently pointed out, the EU in fact remains an increasingly fragile outlier rather than the harbinger of any new global norm or model for achieving cross-national reconciliation.

At first sight, Southeast Asia might seem to offer more cause for optimism in this respect, boasting as it does the transnational superstructure of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Indeed, recent years have witnessed increasing talk of cross-border collaboration in education as well as with respect to ASEAN’s traditional remit: trade. Education has been touted as a vehicle for mitigating international tensions within the region, and even for cultivating a sense of “ASEAN-ness” distinguished by its own brand of diversity.

The “buffer schools” initiative along Thailand’s border with Cambodia is one project apparently inspired by this ASEAN agenda. These schools were accorded a role in promoting reconciliation between ethnic Thai and Khmer communities in this region, through measures such as teaching the Khmer language alongside Thai. Launched in the early 2000s, it was hoped that this scheme would contribute to calming tensions along a border parts of which are disputed by the Thai and Cambodian states.

However, as Kaewkumkong shows in her article here, official Thai enthusiasm for this initiative has waned, along with the funding necessary for sustaining it. Border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia occurred around the Preah Vihear Temple complex between 2008–2013, causing heightened anxiety within ASEAN about the risks of serious conflict. While such tensions would appear to underline the necessity of reconciliatory projects such as the “buffer schools,” rising nationalism in Thailand over recent years has contributed to sapping official commitment to the pursuit of inter-cultural understanding through education. At the same time, the very concept of schooling as a “buffer” between different communities appears to imply a rather narrow or limited vision of reconciliation – seeking to contain conflict through stabilizing and shoring up borders rather than transcending them.

If nationalism amidst social division is evident in contemporary Thailand, it is all the more acute on the other side of the Thai-Cambodian border. Cambodia is still recovering from one of the most horrendous experiments in the eradication of diversity that the world has seen. There, the key markers of identity were not so much religion or ethnicity as class and education, with the bulk of the country’s educated, literate population exterminated in the “Killing Fields” of the 1970s.

That history is the context for subsequent attempts to reconstruct a higher education system in Cambodia, essentially from scratch. Ros and Oleksiyenko here reflect on the progress of such efforts, by examining how “excellence” is understood in the Cambodian academic community. They depict a system curiously rootless in ethical and cultural terms – overwhelmingly focused on the fostering of “human capital,” with minimal resourcing of teaching and research in the social sciences and humanities. Scholars elsewhere in Asia and beyond have experienced in recent years a significant squeeze on research in areas seen by governments as economically “unproductive,” but Cambodia seems to have provided laboratory conditions for an extreme experiment in neo-liberal higher education – market-driven and starved of public funding – designed for re-export to other developing countries. As Ros and Oleksiyenko remark, “In the absence of a free and well-resourced environment for research and communication, a fine balance of intellectual and ethical perspectives is unachievable.”

In the case of Cambodia, a rich and diverse cultural heritage has not translated into an embrace of diversity as a positive attribute in education at any level. Hayhoe’s paper on the legacy of Indian traditions of higher learning was inspired by their influence on ancient Cambodia, as witnessed by the stunning remains of temple complexes near our conference venue at Siem Reap. But in Cambodia’s schools and colleges today, conversations amongst diverse ideological or ethical perspectives are sidelined by the narrow pursuit of “human capital”.

Meanwhile, back in South Asia itself, tolerance of diversity is challenged by the polarization of the region’s societies around rival narratives of communal victimhood – as noted above in the case of India’s BJP. In our final paper, Haidar and Fang discuss how the legacies of colonialism have profoundly influenced language education in South Asia, by contrast with the case of China. In Pakistan, for example, the colonial inheritance complicates the identity of English as a “foreign” or “native,” language whereas for China, with its different history, English is generally regarded as unequivocally “foreign”. But in both Asian societies what Haidar and Fang see as an ideological assumption that English ultimately belongs to its “native” speakers still prevails. Following scholars such as Pennycook, they argue that in a globalizing world, such a view is increasingly problematic. The English language itself is diversifying as it is increasingly appropriated by speakers in various societies. They conclude that approaches to teaching English should reflect the language’s role as a shared tool of communication, rather than continuing to treat it as an artefact of Anglo-American culture. They appear thus to advocate a de-cultured approach to English.

But is this viable or even desirable? Foreign and second language education is important not just for equipping students with communication tools, but also for promoting an understanding of how different cultures think and talk about the world. To attempt to detach learning about language from learning about culture risks impoverishing the potential of foreign language education as a vehicle for promoting greater transnational and intercultural understanding. The literature that students read when studying English need not be British or American – it could be Irish, Indian, Pakistani or Ghanaian. But also, foreign (or second) language education across Asia need not begin and end with English. The fact that it typically does so is intimately intertwined with the difficulties that so many Asian societies encounter in coming to terms with their domestic diversity, or managing relations with their neighbours (MGIEP, 2017).

Of course, none of the challenges posed by diversity for national education systems are unique to Asia. The intertwining of nationalist intolerance with discourses of victimhood that complicates attempts to address such challenges is starkly evident elsewhere too, not least in Europe and the United States. In many Western societies, a particular flashpoint for controversy over diversity in recent years has been immigration and the integration of diaspora communities – issues that also affect many Asian societies (and their education systems) in ways barely touched upon in this special issue. Nor do the articles here offer clear or entirely consistent answers to the questions raised at the outset of this editorial. In one sense, it would be strange if they did: tackling diversity through proposing a one-size-fits-all, uniform package of “solutions” would seem paradoxical, to say the least. But while acknowledging that different education systems, rooted in different cultures and traditions, will inevitably differ in their responses to diversity, we also need to beware of specious claims that respect for other cultures mandates respecting intolerance and oppression as culturally mandated practices. Engaging in comparative analysis of education’s relationship with diversity requires constant reflection on the appropriate balance between universal ethical imperatives and the claims of particular, local value systems. Above all, it requires a commitment to ongoing dialogue amongst scholars and educationalists across boundaries of culture, language, ethnicity and religion – something which is at the heart of CESA’s mission. We hope that readers of the APJE from across Asia and beyond will join the conversation at our next biennial conference in Kathmandu, in September 2020.