Assumptions and implications of cross‐national attraction in education: the case of ‘learning from Japan’

Abstract

This article deals with the assumptions and implications of the Malaysian policy for ‘learning from Japan’. The article explores the ways in which this policy has effectively been operated in drawing a new geography of ‘Asia’, dislodging colonial legacies in the region and countering the consolidation of other regional blocs. Cross‐national educational interaction has increasingly been a key issue in international relations. After the end of the Cold War, the traffic of people, commodities and information is blocked less and less by the barriers of state political ideologies, and has begun to hinge on new notions of boundaries. Free trade blocs are formed by agreements among ‘neighbours’, sharing economic advantage and the quality of basic values, such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. Such communal values play a powerful role in the redefinition of ‘us’ and the legitimisation of regional societies. The vigour of cross‐national educational transfer in the past two decades, as will be argued, has effectively been used for the formation of new identities of individual nations and for the promotion of new aspirations for the regional alliances.