Being and becoming ‘dropouts’: contextualizing dropout experiences of youth migrant workers in transitional Myanmar

Abstract

This ethnographic research examines the sociocultural and educational experiences of migrant youth living in liminality in urban Yangon. Their liminality exemplifies the interplay between poverty, social-choice of dropping out of school and the militant culture of schooling. The research argues that narratives provide comprehensive understandings of the complex and multidimensional aspects inherent to dropping out of school in Myanmar: poverty; poor learning environments; an inherently militant culture of schooling; and ultimately, the foreseeable failures of these young people. By better understanding the context of being ‘out-of-school’ and the process of becoming ‘dropouts’ from their viewpoint, the author argues that more educational research needs to reconceptualize the meaning of schooling in the ever-changing lives and learning of youth in rapidly transforming societies in Asia and beyond.

Keywords:

• Myanmar
• education
• lifelong learning
• dropout
• youth
• sociology of education
• anthropology of education

Introduction

After five decades of isolation and militarization, Myanmar has recently undergone a dramatic transition to a semi-constitutional democracy since 2012. At this time of dramatic socio-political change, reforms in education have been a critical driver of Myanmar’s ambitious yet daunting task of renewing national development, a new education reform was initiated with the National Education Strategic Plan 2016 ∼ 2020 (NESP) (Hong, 2018; Hong & Kim, 2019).¹ However, from the perspective of educational research, it is worth noting that because of the repressive conditions under Myanmar’s military dictatorship, information concerning the social and educational systems and related issues was inaccessible to the world until only a few years ago. Credible population censuses and educational data were unavailable or difficult to obtain due to the strict enforcement of restriction placed on accessing public information. More importantly, the military government had largely controlled, monitored, or often censored intellectual and academic freedom in and outside of academic institutions. Under these circumstances, education in Myanmar has been mostly under-researched and international scholars, in particular, were not permitted to conduct field-based ethnographic research for decades. Therefore, academic understandings based on the perspectives of Myanmar youth and their relationship to the power of educational institutions – here represented as formal schooling – have hardly been examined among international and comparative education scholars and researchers.

Research for this article is primarily based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Yangon conducted during the early years of the political, social, and educational transition following the change of government in 2012 (Hong, 2017). The narratives of twelve young people who dropped out of primary and secondary school between 2010 and 2016 were collected and analyzed from their viewpoints based on an ethnographic perspective. This ethnographic approach intended to examine and map the multidimensional contexts of their decisions to drop out of school beyond economic issues, and to map the dropping out pathways through recounting and analyzing their experiences. The research examines narratives on the process and meaning of ‘dropping out’ – rather than the end result of ‘being dropped out’. Further, it looks at the interplays between individual dropouts and their schooling within a social institution and how the individuals negotiate within and beyond these societal structures. Lastly, drawn from their life experiences within and outside of the school environment, this study re-theorizes the understanding of the complex aspects of ‘why and how’ dropouts have become a social and educational phenomenon in Myanmar’s contemporary society.

Following an introduction to Myanmar’s recent history of military dictatorship and the current social and education reforms following the introduction of democracy, the second section of this article reviews relevant international and national literature regarding dropout phenomena and proposes that a new conceptual understanding is needed. This will be followed by is an explanation on the methodological foundations and specific methods applied in the study. The third section presents the findings from the study, the focus being the life stories of the twelve young migrant workers in the period from the approximate time they dropped out of school until the time of the research. The final section presents the conclusions, positing implications for developing a more comprehensive conceptualization of the issues related to the issue of ‘dropping out’ in national and international education and development.

The poor, the vulnerable and the oppressed: the literature

Past and much of literature present on the topic concerning youth dropouts has been dominated by the discourse on the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. Most commonly expressed in the literature various governmental and non–governmental organizations and the popular media is the portrayal of out of school youth as ‘the poor others’ and ‘the victims.’ This poverty-driven discourse with its emphasis on socioeconomic status (SES) dominates writing on both educational practices and international educational development studies, featuring in numerous works such as Business Council of Australia (2002), Dalton, Gennie, and Ingels (2009), Entwisle et al. (2005), Lamb and Rumberger (1998), and Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (2000). Another way – possibly the more powerful way – to conceive of this perspective is to say that as political and social agents these young people are often oppressed and, as such, must negotiate their lives within pre-determinated socio-economic structures. Most of this newer academic literature has focused on the relationship between inequalities in education and socioeconomic status (Ellwood & Jencks, 2001), ethnicity (Persell, Arum, & Seufert, 2004), religion (Driessen, 2002), social class (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Stromquist, 2004), gender (Breen, Luijkx, Muller, & Pollak, 2010; Stromquist, 2005), and disabilities (Carrier, 1986; Peters, 2008). These demographic and background factors, often researched and highlighted in regards to the dropouts, have led to the most contested debates. Recent literature has highlighted potential predictors of early school leaving in regards to sex and gender (Rumberger, 2004; Business Council of Australia, 2003) as well as race and ethnicity (Bynum & Thompson, 1983; Ishitani & Snider, 2006)².

Another significant body of the literature on students dropping out of school focuses on ‘vulnerable youth’ who leave school and they are often blamed for engaging in ‘problematic’ behavior, and having their low academic achievements couples with emotional and/or psychological issues. These topics are well-researched and argued by Coffey and Farrugia (2014), Fine (1991), te Riele (Rizvi, te Riele, Gorur, 2015; Radhika & te Riele, 2015) Sullivan (2004) and among many others. In Myanmar’s the media for instance, youths are often portrayed as ‘troubled’, ‘potential risks to society’, unskilled and uneducated, dragging down the speed of national development. In reality, most of these migrant youth workers are devoted to their families, supporting them with wage finances and paying tuition for their younger brothers and sisters. It can be argued that these individuals should be portrayed as frontline contributors of national economic development rather than as unskilled dropouts, inhibiting the pace of national development. Although terminology varies, and ‘youth’ as a group have become a ‘matter of concern’ and they have also become the target of various policies, schemes, interventions and strategic attention (Rizvi, te Riele, Gorur, 2015, p. xi). The newer discourse constructing on ‘vulnerability’ and on certain individuals or groups as ‘at risk’ is inevitably interpretations of youth ‘at risk’ tend to construct ‘risk’, either as an individual attribute or as a condition of particular groups of young people (Dwyer & Wyn, 2001; Lubeck & Garrett, 1990; Natriello, McDill, & Pallas, 1990; te Riele, 2006).

The language of ‘social safety net’ that has been widespread in policy discourse since the late 1990s, and has substantially weakened a broad sense of state and societal responsibilities which the state had once assumed (Radhika & te Riele, 2015, p. xi). As with many of the transnational states that have increasingly sought to shift these responsibilities to the market, the shift may be accompanied by the acquisition of new administrative skills and the technology for ‘managing’ vulnerabilities, rather than addressing them in the language of morality that was formerly prevalent (Rizvi, 2015; Romero & Walker, 2010). Likewise, transitional states such as Myanmar have also sought to give such responsibilities to the global market, to multilateral and bilateral partners as well as to non-governmental organizations, in this way leading the vulnerable to even greater vulnerability.

As contemporary Myanmar’s education is largely the product of poverty and past militarization for five decades military government in Myanmar, it would be convenient to focus on the discourse regarding the proliferation of poor and oppressed youth as a casual phenomenon. It is true that the macro political and social oppression of Myanmar’s modern history and their negative impacts on education prevail in these discussions. Inequalities have been and are currently being recycled through the education system and other social institutions in Myanmar, which were established under former governments and still structurally linger within contemporary Myanmar’s education system. For many, formal education during this period is seen as instrumental in not only reproducing but even intensifying inequalities within Myanmar society, resulting in political and socio-cultural stratification. Past ministries, municipality education offices, school principals, and teachers were delegated militarized authority, significantly impacting the youth being taught in the education system. In this regard, it is reasonable to say that Myanmar’s formal schools – as a public realm of power – became a place where children were exposed on a daily basis to inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity.

The resulting macro inequalities are still structurally present today. Those born poor and disadvantaged are likely to remain so, easily stereotyped as ‘foreseeable failures’ within the current education system and other social institutions. However, a distinction between a supposed problematic minority of the ‘dropouts’ versus a ‘standard majority’ (te Riele, 2006, p.129) in the context of Myanmar is false, since almost half (42.9%) of upper secondary school aged children were known to be out-of-school. There is a lack of both conceptual and applied understanding of how the part played by educational inequalities of in the decision-making process of ‘deciding’ to leave school, then moving to transnational and national locations to seek youth labor opportunities and living liminally. Research about dropouts in Myanmar that has tended to simplistically focus on the personal attributes of young people does not take into account the complex interactions between the individual and their family circumstances or the specific characteristics of schools and society.

Methodology

In the research, the issues of spatial and temporal boundaries (Dunne & Ananga, 2013; Hamersley, 2006), context as virtual in ethnographic research (Brockmann, 2011; Hamersley, 2006) as well as the relationship between ethnographer and the researched were taken into conceptual and methodological considerations (Mercader, Weber, & Durif-Varembont, 2015; Wang, 2013). In terms of space, time, and place, I paid close attention to the ‘transitional’ space of Yangon city as the urban center where fundamental and observable patterns of socio-political and education changes have been taking place.³ All ‘intentional’ fieldwork for the research was conducted in an area around Sule Pagoda and surrounding areas in the 29^th to 36^th streets in the central business district of Yangon, as well as in the traditional market area of the East Gate of Shwedagon Pagoda in the spiritual and cultural heart of Yangon City.⁴ The twelve became ethnographic research participants with whom I conducted participatory observations and in-depth interviews. In other words, all twelve research participants (see Table 1), who were all domestic migrants and casual laborers in two field sites in Yangon, were observed and interviewed for the research in the course of their work in restaurants, grocery stores, and construction sites.⁵ Although I did not control the demographic characteristics of the ethnographic research participants, they were all Burmese Buddhists (except one Muslim girl, named Mo Mo) and domestic migrants who were from Ayeyawady, Bago, Magway, and Bagan. All were over the age of 17, except for two boys (Aung Maw Khant and La Min Ko Ko) who were 15 years old and participated in the research without being directly quoted.⁶

Table 1. List of Ethnographic Research Participants*.

no	age	sex	occupations	ethnicity	religion	language	hometown	year left school
1	17	M	construction workers	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Bago	6
2	18	F	shopkeeper at grocery store	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Ayeyawady	5
3	20	F	shopkeeper in traditional market	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Bagan	4
4	19	M	shopkeeper convenience store	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Yangon	10
5	15	M	waiter at teashop	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Hinthada	4
6	15	M	waiter at teashop	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Thanlhyun	4
7	20	F	shopkeeper at shop	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Bago	10
8	16	F	shopkeeper at shop	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Shew Bo	10
9	20	F	worker at tea shop	Burmese/Myanmar	Christian	Burmese/Myanmar	Bagan	5
10	17	M	cashier at convenient store	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Ayeyawady	10
11	17	M	cashier at convenience store	Burmese/Myanmar	Buddhism	Burmese/Myanmar	Magway	10
12	17	F	maid	Indian	Muslim	Burmese/Myanmar	Dahla	KG

*All names are pseudonyms. Age reflects participants’ ages at the beginning of the study in 2016.

As an overarching methodology, an ethnographic approach was embedded in each phase of conducting this research - from building rapport with local people, learning Myanmar language, and sharing research findings with the research participants. Although all directly quoted data was collected during the participatory observations and interviews in 2016 and early 2017, my observations and understanding about society and education in Myanmar were also fundamentally influenced by my professional engagement with the country since 2012, in particular through teaching and learning experiences acquired during my engagement as a visiting professor at Yangon University in 2016. In practice, various methods were applied in the research process: a literature review of relevant sources in both English and Myanmar; field observations in mainly two locations in Yangon city; ethnographic research and collection of strategic life stories of the twelve selected young migrants through individual and group interviews in the natural settings of their workplaces; interviews with education experts, leaders and entrepreneurs; author’s reflections and initial writing-ups; follow-up individual interviews with the twelve young people; and the final writing-up.⁷

In particular, collecting life stories, an approach which posits that stories are a form of evidence, was a critical method for collecting the spoken accounts and personal reflections in recorded interviews on the subjects’ pathways - comparing their lives before and after dropping out of school in the broader context of space, time and place. This approach was adopted as a means of recording the social aspects of those whose lives are often omitted from conventional historical record. These collected ‘strategic life stories’ focus on the oral sources of youth describing their own experiences as young contemporary urban migrant workers. Their memories of school form an intrinsic part of the rapid political, social and educational transformation of contemporary Myanmar since 2012 with the overthrow of the military government.⁸ When it comes to interpretation of ‘social structure’, my methodology adopted the definition of ‘socially organized activities, forms, or orders that are experienced in an array of overlapping and sometimes incongruous sites such as schools, homes, workplaces, and neighborhood’ (Camarot, 2004). In summary, building upon the contributions of prior qualitative research in sociology and anthropology of education regarding dropouts. This study, however, does not only pay attention to the social structure within which Yangon youth are situated, but also takes an ethnographic approach and prioritizes youth accounts of living in-between and discussing their narratives about dropping out of school and out of the ‘social structure’.

Findings

Schooling can imprint positive impressions for many, but most school dropouts in Myanmar are unlikely to recall their school days fondly as my research findings confirmed. As Myanmar’s schools are often perceived by the Out-of-School-Youth (OSY) as symbols of the old political system, dropping out is a way of breaking away from formal schooling and oppression of the past. Therefore, dropping out in the middle of the semester or the middle of the school year does not seem to be an unusual event for those I interviewed. In some cases, classes in lower and upper secondary schools have up to half of the students missing, with many students absent on a regular basis. For the Myanmar youth I have formally and informally met since 2011, leaving school and moving away to find work in the large cities of Yangon, Bangkok, and Kuala-Lumpur seemed an integral part of growing up and living life.

International migration has long been utilized by the people of Myanmar as a survival strategy for securing safe refuge from past political oppression and seeking a better livelihood (International Labour Organization, 2014, 2015). Those who have migrated not only support themselves but also have internally remitted money to their families and communities while living outside of Myanmar (International Labour Organization, 2015). Among migrants, a large group comprises youth, although the exact numbers have not been identified in major studies. Regardless of their social status based on ethnicity, location and gender, these youth have left their homes and formal schooling and become both ‘victims’ of poverty and, at the same time, acted as active contributors to family and community livelihoods. Since 2014, the migration patterns in Myanmar have changed notably. Before 2014, Myanmar’s immigration was reported as being a fundamentally internationally connected phenomenon. As it is shown in the 2014 Myanmar Population Census, 70.2% of all migrants had settled in Thailand⁹ However, in response to recent major transitions, new patterns of internal migration – internal migration - are also developing. Various reports from the International Labour Organization showed that there was increased work available in manufacturing in urban centers, drawing young people to new industrial zones such as the new Special Economic Zones. Migration movements of children, girls into domestic work, boys into tea shops and other casual manual work to urban centers of Myanmar have always existed, but the scale of international migration have increases significantly (International Labour Organization, 2015; 2018; 2019).

All of the research participants in this research are these internal migrants who have been migrating into situations of sub-standard working and living conditions, with a smaller percentage migrating into situations of forced labor and trafficking. In considering the makeup of these participants, seven worked as shopworkers in traditional markets and convenience stores and were identified as ‘legal’ migrant youth. This was because they were all above legal working age with some form of consent regarding migration and work between their parents and the business owners before their departure from their home towns and villages. Legal and semi-legal migrants worked together. In one teashop a 20-year-old waiter at a teashop appeared to be ‘legal’, whereas two younger waiters were only ‘semi-legal’ due to their age (15 years old). In addition to being ‘under-age’, they were not free to stay in the job because of created family’s debts during the recruitment process. Other participants included a young construction worker and a young female domestic worker who were living in the most challenging conditions. Although both refused to identify the recruitment process from their hometowns (Bago and Magway) to their destination in Yangon, it was they were working illegally and that as a result their conditions were unregulated. Regardless of the migration status of the new migrants, immigration itself has become a significant economic and social trend in contemporary Myanmar. It has also become an integral part of the daily lives of Myanmar’s secondary students in rural areas (Helvetas, 2015; International Labour Organization, 2014, 2015; Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT), 2016).

Dropping out of school in order to find work in big cities occurs in various ways with different consequences. Some dropouts who become migrants in new working environments go through traumatic experiences of shock, fear, and loneliness in their new circumstances of harsh employment. However, more individuals experience an initial excitement of living in a new city like Yangon. It was observed that some individuals, particularly girls in this research, had become an intrinsic part of the social and cultural lives of the owners of the business employing them. In the case of the boys observed and interviewed, they expressed their excitement and pride in now working for a living. They also heavily criticized their schools, emphasizing their satisfaction at their separation from the past. This research highlights the most direct narratives about their experiences of being poor in school and their disappointments and frustrations with formal schooling - with their teachers, with their interactions and relations with other students, and with the teaching and learning styles. Their critical dissatisfaction and rejection of formal schooling were forcefully expressed, devoid of regret for the choice they made.

‘I Got to know that I was poor’: Leaving school in poverty

Poverty was the most fundamental and apparent reason for leaving school, indicated in previous literature on school dropouts as well as the experiences of the individuals who participated in this research study. Migration patterns across the regions that youth come from provided a lack of year-round income generating opportunities locally. In the school environment, the interviewees’ experiences of being poor were freely verbalized by the Yangon’s youth. Mo Mo (17), Myo Myint (17), and Zhin Min (17) come from the low-income families that could only survive with communal supports such as sharing food, sharing child-rearing duties and receiving small amounts of cash from relatives. However, regardless of receiving some communal help, their families were not able to afford any educational costs. Further, all the young people interviewed either explicitly mentioned or hinted that school was a place where they ‘re-discovered’ their poverty. Mo Mo, for instance, who left school at grade 10, shared her unhappiness about being poor at school. She also described ‘a kind of invisible inequality’ in schools that become visible through various school donation ceremonies where local companies, leaders, families, and parents of students donate in the public sphere.

Table

[In an individual interview, 25/10/2016]
Mo Mo	Schools have a lot of festivals and events. [During] most of (the) important days, there are donation ceremonies. When I grew older, then I noticed things.
Researcher	Noticed? What did you notice?
Mo Mo	Some students from rich families donate a lot. Many times, a year. Have special speeches and blessings also. You know, the principals, teachers and … (pause) money. Schools are very poor so donation ceremonies are important. […]

Indeed, for many youths, poverty was the most critical and visible driver for dropping out of school. Throughout their interviews, just as in the case of Mo Mo, many participants noted that they had started noticing that structural inequalities were very much present in their daily lives in the formal schooling environment. Another research participant, an 8th grade dropout migrant, Myo Myint, expressed satisfaction with the work he had found as a fruit-seller after being a tea shop waiter in and around the famous historical site of Sule Pagoda. This was in contrast to the frustration he expressed about his schooling and the decision to leave school. Throughout the individual interviews, he readily expressed the frustration that he felt with his schooling and the decision to leave school.

[In a group discussion, Field Note: 28/10/2016]

Table

Myo Myint	At one point, my family could not pay anything. Nothing. Simply nothing. One day [I realized that] all of us – my younger sister, younger brother and I did not pay the annual school fees. Then, I knew that we were poor.
Friend X	(Giggles) Oh, that happened to you, too?
Myo Myint	I thought that was just a one-time thing. But [when] I saw my younger sister cry [after] her homeroom teacher scolded her for the money in front of the whole class, (with a very firm voice) I decided not to go to school.
Friend X	Yes! That’s it!
Myo Myint	We always had enough to eat. We were not starving but my mother clearly couldn't send us to school. I still don't understand why my mother didn't have money for school. Anyway, I was useless so I left at grade 8. I left school because I am a Man (spoken with confidence in his voice). Now I earn for my family and myself.
Friend X	(Touching My Myint’s head) That’s the Man!
Uncle Y	Sayama! (addressing a teacher in Myanmar language) I [was] listening in [to what you were saying]. One thing [you] do not understand. Who wants to pay when you know your children will fail and not have a paper [certificate] after all the years of going to school? Without certificate, it is not easy. But now it is okay. No problem at all!

Mo Mo strongly expressed that she ‘discovered’ that pursuing further education by students from poor backgrounds are not well accepted among peers. In the interview with Myo Myint, he mentioned that he had ‘got to know that he was poor at school’. His friends and ‘uncles’ interrupted the conversation by stating that ‘quitting school is a man thing to do’ and ‘all (that) matters is that they are making money now.’ As this incident shows, the expressed sense of fulfillment of one’s education is closely linked to students of low socio-economic status who commonly cannot afford the same opportunities as their peers from slightly better- off families, regardless of their academic ability or desire to learn. Barriers like the cost of education, but also subtler cultural cues in daily life at school undermine the promise of education as a means of providing equal opportunity. In other words, the narratives of Myo Myint and Mo Mo express the concerns of school dropouts regarding structured or limited opportunities in schools that are intrinsically connected to their economic backgrounds, rather than their educational aspirations and capabilities. The situation leading them to drop out of school was not only about school accessibility issues such as ‘no money for fees,’ ‘school too far,’ or ‘lack of transport, as explained in the introduction, but more about economically and socially structured and constructed learning.

Issues of quality education

Inquiring about the detailed school experiences of dropouts who are often perceived as the failures, underachievers, or outliers in society, fundamentally leads to negative perspectives on their formal schooling experiences. One striking aspect that occurred throughout the participant observations and interviews was that the youths themselves recalled their experiences at school, examined their experiences of dropping out and then conceptualized the value (or lack thereof) of continuous schooling. Their narratives are another saga of economic poverty and lack of learning opportunities within and outside the school system, but they also present critiques of the quality of education in Myanmar’s formal schooling. For example, Zin Zin Htet, an intelligent 17-year-old who left school in grade 10, described his experiences in this way.

Table

Interview with Zin Zin Htet becomes a Casual Group Discussion. Field Notes: 25/11/
Zin Zin Htet	[The] good thing about going to […] private tuition is pretty clear. In grades 9 and 10, you need to study with teachers who are strict, but they deliver skills and some knowledge. Well, we will never go back to formal school. Never.
Friend X	Yes, who wants to go back to school? Schools are useless. School teachers only recite. I was so bored.
Zin Zin Htet	I went to grade 10 at the beginning of the year. So I know that you can learn something
Friend Y	Oh, did you go to grade 10? That is a waste of time (the three boys giggled altogether)
Friend X	Grades 8 and 9 are a waste of time too
Zin Zin Hter	(While giggling with his friends) One time, [I realized that] I could not catch up with anything. So, I took private tuition in grades 4 and 5. Then, I wondered why I have to study the same things twice, as studying is not my favorite thing. Anyway, no one explained anything at school!
Friend Y	See. All that time for nothing!

Now working in relatively easy jobs at convenience stores, he and his friends enjoy relatively good work experiences and earn a decent living. His case shows how social interaction with peer groups reinforces these young people’s perceptions regarding the importance of having jobs and the uselessness of continuing further studies. Often laughing loudly while they talked about their previous experiences in school, he and his friends rejected schooling and mentioned that they often tried to persuade their peers to understand how ‘useless’ it is to go to school. During these discussions, the boys started comprehending that the reasons they dropped out of school were ‘somewhat necessary’ or ‘already destined.’

The problems and challenges of formal schooling were endlessly addressed throughout the interviews and informal chats. Most of the school dropouts’ concerns were not mere complaints, but critical commentary on Myanmar’s issues relating to quality of education. While they were dissatisfied with the general quality of education, most of their dissatisfaction lay with their teachers’ instructional style, lack of supervisory support and lack of assistance for students with special needs. Education activist U Win Min also criticizes the quality of education in Myanmar, saying in an interview, ‘[The perception of everyone is] that schooling means teaching, memorizing, presiding and repeating. That [has been our] way. That’s the education of now. No place for playing, no place for creating, [that’s our] education environment]. What are we going to be about?’

Not only education critics such as U Win Min, but also various national and global education reform initiatives have continuously emphasized the following concerns: a lack of decentralization of education governance, the need for investing in school resources and improving classroom environments, greater and more effective investment in teachers, emphasis on teaching and learning processes, improving access and equitable learning simultaneously, and monitoring progress in learning outcomes. In the context of Myanmar, the psychological and social aspects of classroom and learning environment are highlighted. These concerns and criticisms regarding Myanmar’s public education system were confirmed through the interviews with Yangon’s ‘out of school’ youth and expressed in their accounts of their dissatisfaction and experiences in the public-school system: specifically, the low quality of education and their reasons for thinking that life out of school would be a better option.

Structured failures and the matriculation exam

The issues of poverty, accessibility, and quality of education are mostly notably discussed in relation to the national matriculation exam. While many in Myanmar assume that this exam is a milestone for youth in their future life, the actual pass rate is devastatingly low. The dropout phenomenon, the need to repeat school years, and failures in the matriculation exam are consequences of the flawed high school education system. Other drawbacks include a limited access to examination centers outside of Yangon that cause difficulties in taking the exam for the most of upper secondary school students outside of Yangon. In this context, many Myanmar youths feel pushed out of school and are likely to never finish their secondary education.

Some of the ‘street smart’ youth workers in central Yangon, where large-scale construction of luxury apartments is occurring, clearly understand their decision to abandon their high school education as a ‘realistic choice’ in the evolving economy. In particular, the school dropouts who started grade 10 but failed the matriculation exam, or those who started grade 10 but did not sit for the exam, openly expressed the concerns they had felt at this point in their education. One of the interviewees, Lun Thu, a 17-year-old who left school in grade 10, is a case in point. Well-dressed and listening to very loud music on his LG mobile phone with a fancy set of white earphones, he was a vocal participant. In a conversation that revolved around his and his younger brother’s failures in school he stated that attending all the classes in grade 10 had seemed ‘irrelevant’ to matriculating and getting a job. Some of his friends made of their peers who attended grade 10, referring, for example, to ‘the one with no brain and no real-life strategy.’ The reasons for such a characterization became apparent when he explained that ‘there is no point in continuing grades 9 and 10 if you cannot pass the matriculation exam at the end grade 10. You really need to invest a few years in private tuition to be able to pass it. […] Anyway, all of my friends did not go to the exam or they failed it anyway […].’ Then, sounding genuinely concerned he asked, ‘What is the point of all that high school education anyway?’ Similar views were echoed by Zin Tun Tin, a young 20-year-old girl, working at an ice cream stall near where Lun Thu works, who also emphasized that passing the matriculation exam is fundamentally about finances.

[In an individual interview with Zin Tun Tin, 22/11/2016]

Attending all the classes in grade 10 seemed irrelevant. The curriculum and what we [did] at school are separate. Some of [our] friends who [came] to all the classes at grade 10, we call[ed] them – one with no brain with a good heart. I think [the] results of [our] national matriculation exam [are] related to [family] financial problems. You really need to invest a few years in private tuition to be able to pass it. […] There is no point in continuing grades 9 and 10, if you cannot pass the matriculation exam. Anyway, all of my friends did not go to the exam or failed it anyway. […] I really hope that Myanmar people can finish their education without spending too much extra money. I want to change this because children become a kind of sacrifice [in] this situation.

No way to return

Although all of the youth interviewed experience the process somewhat differently, separation from schooling in their hometowns and transition to the everyday flow of activities involves a passage through liminality into a ‘real world,’ which leaves some of the youths in a vacuum of security, growing and education. In particular, those not exposed to any learning opportunities at all were removed from everyday opportunities leading to the growth of well-rounded development in adolescents. In the interviews, harsh criticisms were frequently expressed about their school lives: their personal economic situations, the quality of education, and the school culture. It seemed that in order to break away from the past, they highlighted these problems, often with very colorful and occasionally aggressive expressions when describing the exam system and their continuous failure within it. On the other hand, they all showed empathy toward their families when describing their financial status, some seeming to be unaware of their extreme poverty until they were interviewed. What also came out were the gender-based recollections of their school experiences - strong rejection in the case of most of the boys or great nostalgia in the case of the girls.

In the liminal phase of living in ‘out-of-school’ space and time, Yangon’s migrant youth have discovered ‘opportunities’ represented by the successful people and role models in their daily social lives such as business owners, shop and construction managers who are referred to as ‘uncles’, ‘aunties’, ‘elder brothers’, and ‘sisters.’ With this rejection of traditional structure of formal schools or active embracement of anti-structure – liminal or often illegal workplaces, Yangon’s migrant youth in liminality are placed in the middle of this anti-structure which has a deep mistrust of public education, (expressed as the ‘uselessness of schooling’) and is seen as a representative symbol of ‘authoritative’ teachers, the state, and military governments.

Is going back to formal schooling even a possible option for migrant youth? Is it even necessary? The youth who participated in the interviews had these serious questions, their uncertainties confirmed and reenforced by comments like the one made by an acquaintance during a regular field observation in Sule Pagoda. ‘Sayama (female teacher in Myanmar language), school is no use. There is no way I will ever go back to school because of my busy schedule. Teachers should come to me. Teachers should come to teach me. That’d be a change!’ Thus, it is almost inevitable that youth working full time without any opportunities for learning will suffer from educational and social barriers to advancement for themselves and their families.

Discussion

Multidimensional causes of dropping out

In its investigation of the multidimensional causes of pupils dropping out of school, this research has explored the serious educational and socio-cultural challenges facing pupils in the formal education system: the interplay between family poverty, structural failures in an authoritarian, hierarchical school culture and the poor quality of the education provided, all these factors leading to pupils’ academic failure and dropping out of the formal education system. Invisibly but systematically pushed out of the social structure of schooling, Yangon’s dropout youth also based their decision to leave school on the family’s ‘social’ choices which are rooted in their poverty. The interplay of these factors can be seen in the views expressed by the participants in their interviews when describing their experiences in ‘formal’ schools, their reflections on dropping out of school and their conceptualization of the reasons for doing so. As it is shown in the cases of Myo Myint and Mo Mo from the area around Sule Pagoda, and Zhin Min and Lwin Mon from the Mahabandoola Park area, the completion of one’s education in school is closely linked to the pupils’ socio-economic status, not to their educational aspirations and capabilities.

A critical aspect of the dropping out phenomenon is that youth in liminality is well aware of this socio-cultural and educational context. Many realize that the pass rate in the matriculation exam was lower than one-third of their classes for those who ‘survived’ the lower and secondary school years to complete their schooling What the youths are not aware is that their concerns and ‘foreseeable failures’ can be confirmed in recent data. According to the Myanmar Times (2016a), only approximately 300,000 make it to grade 11 in high schools. Of these students, only one-third (just above 100,000) are able to pass the matriculation exam required for high school completion and access to university when the education reform started (Myanmar Times, 2016b; 208). From the lengthy interviews conducted for this research it was observed that Myanmar’s young generation is very aware of the complex reasons for dropping out of school – family poverty linked to the necessity for largely inaccessible private tuition, their own academic failures, the militant, old-fashioned culture of schooling and the poor quality of education leading to their foreseeable failures. In particular, the quality of education was identified as being one of the critical aspects of the decision-making process. Their lack of satisfaction about formal schooling was also involved with layers of complexity, but the causes all point to systemic failure in Myanmar’s approach to education.

Becoming dropouts

The youth in transitional Yangon have shown that their perceptions about Now and Then are full of contradictions in their interviews. On the one hand, new policies and the relatively liberalized media constantly promote the importance of being educated and consistently promote new opportunities for better education. On the other hand, the participants in the research not only cannot afford tuition fees but their day-to-day social structure values laboring of youth over schooling. From their point of view, the social arrangement from the Past (i.e. their time in formal schooling) is perceived as unfair, unjust, and even without legitimacy. They feel that they have escaped this part, which was filled with experiences of unfair and unjust hierarchical relations with teachers and the authoritarian school system that many cases are perceived as illegitimate.

In the course of the interviews one of the participants, Zin Tun Tin, supported by friends and colleagues, stressed the uselessness of formal schooling. In the period he was still settling into his workplace, his ‘older brother’ (referred to as a brother, although he is actually his work colleague) was feeding comments to him such as ‘schools are useless,’ and ‘you are the man who supports your family. No time for study and shit’. In interviews his new colleagues portrayed his past back in school and his hometown as ‘the time you looked a bit like the poor boy with no money’, constantly contrasting this with his now being ‘a Man’. Another interviewee, Myo Mint commented that ‘going to school was useless for me’ and stressed how important it is to leave school and fulfill one’s duties as a Man. His friend X reinforced this approach with ‘yes, that’s the Man!’ One of the older brother figures (called ‘brother’ although really his work colleague) commented, ‘Sayama Moon! I am listening in. One thing. One thing you do not understand. Who wants to pay when you know your children will fail and they will not have a paper (high school certificate) after all the years of going to school? Without the certificate, it can be difficult. But now it is okay. No problem!’ In this way, he made very clear, not for the researcher, but to the newbies, that their ‘choice’ of dropping out of school was reasonable and responsible. Their rejection of the importance of diplomas, credentials, or formal schooling showed stark similarities with Paul Willis’s classic ethnography, Learning to Labor (Willis, 1981 and 2004).

Upon arrival in Yangon, the interviewees tended to highlight what they initially perceived as glamorous city life, full of job opportunities and ‘wonderful’ relations with colleagues and middle managers, who ‘educated’ them and offered ‘real knowledge and skills.’ Their perception is ironic because they often ignore or downplay the harsh daily realities such as their employers’ retention of identity documents, withholding of wages, debt-based bondage, excessive overtime, and harsh working and living conditions. Their perceptions of ‘life choices’ are ironic because of the overwhelming experiences of socialization upon arrival at the workplace in Yangon. As described in this article, they were all being actively re-educated about the uselessness of education by their so-called ‘brothers’, ‘sisters’, ‘uncles’, and ‘aunties’ within the system of work migration and, in reality, their ‘life choice’ were becoming even more restricted.

It is noteworthy that while the streets of Yangon are full of booksellers, newspapers, magazines and even community organizations that have started offering learning opportunities, for young dropout workers the process of daily reeducation in their workplaces teaches that education itself has become ‘a thing that is obsolete to life’. These perceptions are risky for migrant youth workers in Yangon because their day-to-day social relations suggest that higher status, privileges, and high school certificates and similar rewards are ‘earned’ by individuals, not related to any system that may push them away. Therefore, the youth workers think that they are the only results from their individual positions - being poor, having a lack of talents, and even being stupid. This individualization of perceptions is culturally critical for the mindset of Myanmar’s youth and the people around them. Despite differences of process, breaking away from the Old - symbolized as old fashioned, authoritarian schooling back in their hometown - and the transition to the everyday flow of activities involves a passage through a threshold state or limen into the real world, leaving some in a vacuum of insecurity, a lack of growth and education. Specifically, those not exposed to any learning opportunities due to the exaggerated workplace conviction regarding the uselessness of completing any education were removed from everyday notions of personal growth as an outcome of education.

Schools should come to me!

Flexibility and mobility are typically viewed as endemic features of late modernity, leading to increased emphasis on the importance of transitions during one’s life. Maybe some have been optimistic about the future in Myanmar in terms of economic prosperity, social and cultural changes leading to better lives with opportunities to finish secondary school and get into technical colleges or universities. However, among the twelve research participants - all migrant youth workers and school dropouts with low-income family backgrounds and not belonging to any formal education institutions or community centers - previous experiences of ‘failure’ are particularly damaging. All the participants showed great reluctance to put themselves back into past situations where they had previously experienced failure in their schooling. Although their collective histories can be seen as the result of an enforced social and cultural construct determining their lives. Young people such as Myo Mint, Zin Min Htet, Mo Mo, Lun Thu, and Aung Maw Khant accept the socio-culturally valued path of quitting school, becoming ‘dropouts’ and eventually ‘productive’ sons and daughters of their families.

As the observations and discussions continued, it became increasingly evident that economically marginal within Myanmar’s concept of family responsibilities, the work, the sense of being looked out, and the warm social relations with shop owners and ‘aunties’ in the traditional market are often turned into strictly business-oriented approaches, especially when it comes to young women expressing their wishes for having any forms of learning in communities for future jobs. Not only is there no positive response to the interest shown in furthering their education and development, but schooling is looked down upon, graduation is portrayed as useless, and educational aspirations seen as mere stupid fantasy. While business owners might make certain recommendations offering advice to improve the lives of the young people working for them, these are generally made to benefit themselves and not their workers. An example of the general attitude to education can be seen in an incident that took place during an interview with one of the participants, Zin Zin Htet. The interview was interrupted by a passing tea shop worker who overheard the conversation about reading and the possibilities of going back to formal schooling. He thought that the researcher, called Samaya - a teacher in Myanmar – would never understand the busy schedule of tea shop boys. Instead, he suggested that education should come to where the workers are located, saying, ‘School is useless. There is no way I would go back to school because of my busy schedule. Teachers should come to me. Teachers should come to teach me. That’d be a change!’.

Implications and conclusion

It is difficult to explain how youth from low-income families in Myanmar decide to drop out of school and why they let themselves do so. It may be too simplistic to argue that they have no choice at all - to state that the social structure - here represented by Myanmar’s formal schooling – is the reason these young people are pushed out of education because the very nature of schooling is a means of reproduction, claimed by Aronowitz (1981). However, as shown in my research, these young dropouts are not invisible, regardless of how poor they and their families are and how much their social setting continually reinforces the ideas of ‘useless education’ discourse. In fact, the increasing number of dropouts and the growing visibility of these migrants in central Yangon is leading to a questioning of the current model of public education that is clearly in need of revision. Since the election of the new government in 2013, there are growing markets and more opportunities for youth employment, followed by increasing urbanization, neoliberal market growth, and greater youth employment as well as larger scale internal and international migration. With resulting transitional democratization and notable social change, the choice facing youth - whether to remain in malfunctioning public schools or to leave for new job opportunities – is complex and multi-dimensional.

In summary, the narratives of the twelve participants in this research are representative of many among the millions of young people who have dropped out of school in transitional Myanmar. They share similar patterns in this process - leaving school due to poverty, experiencing a lack of quality in education, the militarized culture of schooling, family issues – all leading to the decision to migrate, both inside and or outside the country. Once they drop out of formal schooling, they have very few opportunities to continue their education. This pattern is especially apparent in the case of lower secondary and upper secondary dropouts with low manual skills. The youth who participated in the research were unaware that their busy working life and resettlement in Yangon was not preparing them for better and safer working opportunities; however, education experts and youth leaders interviewed throughout the research were becoming increasingly concerned that most dropout youth lack any accumulated knowledge, work skills, or adequate communication capacity required for maintaining or seeking future employment. It is critical to note that if these school dropouts remain in their current circumstances, they will not be able to adapt to rapidly changing and increasingly connected labor environments, and therefore will not be considered employable in the emerging Myanmar internationally connected market economy. These concerns highlight the uneasy and challenging picture of Myanmar’s contemporary education that pupils now find themselves in.

The ethnographic exploration of becoming youth migrant workers would provide three theoretical and conceptual contributions.¹⁰ First of all, placing the theme of becoming at the center of the anthropological and educational debate will allow more multi-layered, open-ended, and even ‘radical analytical openness to the complexity and wonder’ study of the dynamism of social phenomena and agency (Biehl & Locke, 2017, p. x). This forms a contrast to the ways of international and national policy and academic research in the field of education, youth, welfare studies and social development that often discuss and interpret society and its relations to the lives of people, which often rely heavily on simplification, causality and determinism. The second conceptual contribution could be the possibility of changing discourse in regards to the victimhood of ‘the poor youth.’ Instead of viewing the youth in terms entirely bounded by structure, the anthropology of becoming attends to youth transformations, and to how ‘power itself is shifting and contingent and constantly punctured and put to flight by people's becomings (Biehl & Locke, 2017, p.6). In relation to the ethnographical nature of this research, the ideas and concepts of becoming are more related to ideas developed throughout the field research and derived from the critical work, ‘Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming' by Biehl and Locke (2017). By creatively exploring and employing the formation of Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 1995) in dialogue with Felix Guattari (Deleuze & Gattari, 1987), Biehl & Locke offer an integrative relation between philosophical theory and anthropological thought on becoming. The strategic life stories of the twelve youth correctly acknowledge how power and knowledge form their identities and meanings of their lives and educational ‘choices’, and how inequalities disfigure living while refusing to reduce people to the workings of such forces. This study confirmed that the concepts of becoming that emphasized the process or state of change about time and space and this ‘conceptual space’ allowed me paying closer attentions to highlight the youth's rejection of their militarized formal schooling. The last conceptual dimension is to de-center the northern theories that assume the universality of phenomena related to school dropout such as a weakening of familial ties, peer pressure, the vulnerability of youth - and the often-simplistic perception of school leaving in the south with its focus on the poverty and economic oppression. In this regard, this research has attempted to bridge between ethnography and critical theory in education in terms of understanding this current moment of political and epistemological uncertainty in Myanmar society and the shifting lives and learning of Myanmar’s migrant youth.

At this time of socio-political change, the study appreciates that education is being taken seriously for the first time in fifty years, dealing with the critical issues of increasing school accessibility, providing quality education, and democratizing school culture. Providing more equitable and flexible education in both public schooling and communities can only start from understanding the contexts of being and becoming youth dropouts. Preventing dropout and encouraging a return to formal schooling in this sense requires targeting the specific conditions of youth who manifest the temporary and permanent dimensions of dropping out. Engagement aimed at preventing dropout should focus on the specific social, economic, employment, and educational ‘contexts’ that lead to leaving formal schooling early. Both national and international educators and policymakers should recognize that while long-term dropout cases may require different approaches to prevent their occurrence or to encourage a return to formal education, youth who are significantly over-age and see themselves as permanent ‘dropouts’ may not be interested in returning to the classroom but are instead seeking possibly transnational migration to better their lives and engage in ‘real-life’ learning out of formal school systems. In this sense, more qualitative examinations are needed to be transnationally and translocally explored to ascertain processes of schooling and the shifting lives of youth in numerous urban and peripheral urban centers in the rapidly changing societies of Asia and beyond.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to thank all youth participants who shared their experiences of life and learning and often personal experiences in uneasy transitions. As this paper is a revised version of the unpublished PhD Dissertation (2017, Seoul National University), I am grateful to Sung Sang YOO, Dong-Seop JIN, Dae Joong KANG, Bong Gun CHUNG (Seoul National University), Min KIM (Soonchunhyang University), Mya Mya Khin, Than Pale, Aye Aye Aung, Lwin Mon (Yangon University) for generously sharing their time and providing precious feedback at critical moments of research. For an international and comparative researcher, working between various languages such as English and is an integral part of research. In this regard, we are indebted to Lilian Cohen, Kristina Dziedzic Wright, and Daw Ni Ni Aung for language advice and verifications of some translated manuscripts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moon Suk Hong

Dr. Moon Suk Hong is a lecturer of Global Education Cooperation Program, Seoul National University, and a visiting professor of the Graduate School of Pan-Pacific International Studies, Kyung Hee University, the Republic of Korea. She has taught global and comparative education theories and methodologies as well as mobility and development of Southeast Asia, including serving as a visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology, Yangon University. She holds a Ph.D. in global education at the Seoul National University (SNU), and a M.A. in social anthropology and development at the Australian National University (ANU). She has extensively worked in East and Southeast Asia in the areas of development and education for more than ten years. Her areas of research include theories and practices of anthropology and sociology of education, international education and development as well as qualitative research methodologies with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia.

Notes

1 The details of overviews of policy directions of the education reform in Myanmar can be found in the Comprehensive Education Sector Review (CESR) (2012), Myanmar Education for All 2015: National Review (2014) and the National Education Strategic Plan 2016-21(2016).

2 It is critical to mention that there some contradictory evidences on education inequalities with ethnicity found in recent studies (see Balfanz & Legters, 2005; Cataldi, Laird, & Kewal Ramani, 2009; Dalton et al., 2009; DesJardins, Ahlburg, & McCall, 2006; Entwisle, Alexander, & Olson, 2004; Entwisle et al., 2005).

3 At the time of research between 2012 and 2017, Yangon had provided opportunities for many youths that could further lead to significant changes in labor and mobility of the landless. While international migration has always been prevalent in Myanmar, on the issue of domestic migration - the moves of young people - as a catalyst for economic transformation and its contribution to economic growth (International Labour Organization, 2015; International Labour Organization, 2019; Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT), 2016) and these changes were receiving growing interest by international organisations (International Labour Organization, 2015; International Labour Organization, 2019). In this context, I have lived in a city center in order to be exposed ‘naturally’ to the space, time, and place of the field sites as much as possible.

4 Since my professional engagement with Myanmar had already started in 2011 and I worked as a visiting professor in Yangon in 2016, my observations about society and education in this research were fundamentally influenced by my experiences prior to 2016.

5 Of course, a lot of different stories could be told about any situation, each one placing it in a different temporal and spatial context (Hamersley, 2006; Hammersley & Gomm, 2005). In this research, in particular, all of the participants and their social activities as well as conversations in regards to education and learning, were situated in and through particular processes of social interactions – constructing the narratives of lives and learning while working, taking breakings, and conversing with ‘aunts’, ‘uncles’ and peer groups in their own workplaces.

6 Strict protocols of research consent to their participation in the research were applied and their full consent was obtained for the ethnographic participant observations and recorded conversations. The most important and strict consents, including a permission from their guidance were prepared in regards to the two youth who were 15 years old at the time of research.

7 In terms of quality assurance of the translation, there were both pre-discussions on the style of interviews and certain critical terms and vocabulary and post-discussions with interpreters. In regards to enhancing the validity of translated data, the on-site research was ensured through oral translation. Two methods were applied to ensure the validity of written translations. The first involved revision by professional Myanmar national English professor. In addition, the technique of random reverse translation by a third party was undertaken when there were key transcripts, in particular, all directly quoted conversations in the research.

8 Obtaining official permission to research inside of the schools was strictly limited at the time of research. Given the limitations, the life stories were collected strategically by focusing on circumstances of ‘quitting’ school, the process of dropping out and the early stage of settling in new locations as workers. The experiences and events described in the subjects’ formal schooling were based on their memories from no later than 2017.

9 According to the recent ILO study (International Labour Organization, 2015), while the majority of Myanmar immigrants moved to Thailand in 2014, smaller but still significant numbers of migrants are working in Malaysia, China and Singapore. The census did not specifically include South Korea, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, but the people of Myanmar are known to move to these countries as well.

10 See more detailed anthropological discussions in relation to becoming from the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (see Deleuze, 1995) in dialogue with Felix Guattari (Deleuze & Gattari, 1987) that provided multiple theoretical and disciplinary lineages that work with and from the plasticity and inventiveness of people. In philosophy, the concept of becoming is, in general, connected with two others, such as movement and evolution. In this research, the overall idea of becoming emphasizes the process or state of change about time and space.