Int Rev Educ DOI 10.1007/s11159-014-9416-2 BOOK REVIEW
Education in South-East Asia By Lorraine Pe Symaco (ed.). Bloomsbury, London, 2013, 349 pp. Education Around the World series. ISBN 978-1-4411-0141-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-1-44117334-8 (PDF e-book), ISBN 978-1-4411-8311-8 (EPUB e-book) R. Murray Thomas
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2014
The common feature shared by ten of the nations covered in this book is their membership in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The eleventh country in the book’s offerings, East Timor (Timor-Leste), had applied for ASEAN membership in 2012 but had not yet been accepted into the coalition. Frequently books of this sort, which focus on a cluster of nations within a region, are built around a common theme that enables readers to compare the countries in terms of that theme. Such is not true of Education in South-East Asia. The authors of all sixteen chapters were apparently free to choose whatever they wished to write about. As a result, the collection is a potpourri of diverse perspectives towards education. A further unusual characteristic is that five of the nations have two chapters (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore) while each of the remaining six has one chapter (Brunei, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, East Timor, Vietnam). The chapters not only vary markedly in focus but also in length – from 19 pages (Myanmar) to 50 pages (Cambodia). The volume was edited by Lorraine Pe Symaco, who is the director of the Centre for Research in International and Comparative Education at Malaysia’s University of Malaya. Twelve of the 22 authors are citizens of the nations they described. The remaining 10 authors are foreigners, mostly Australians. A sense of the diversity of topics addressed in this volume is reflected in the matters featured in particular chapters, such as • • • • •
Information communication technology (Brunei, Philippines) Foreign influence on educational planning (Cambodia, East Timor) Higher education quality (Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines) Religious education (Indonesia, Myanmar) Financing education (Laos, Thailand)
R. M. Thomas (&) University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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R. M. Thomas
• • • • •
Language of instruction (Malaysia, East Timor) Catering to ethnic differences (Malaysia, Singapore) Coping with mass immigration (Malaysia) Military versus secular control (Myanmar) Equity and quality (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam)
Several chapters include a brief sketch of the nation’s schooling history (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia) and/or an overview of the schooling structure, from preschool through to university (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam). Perhaps the most important service that this book offers readers is that of identifying critical problems that South-East Asian nations currently face in providing universal, high-quality education that will equip each country’s peoples to live healthy, satisfying lives as they contribute to their society’s economic welfare in a high-tech world. As Education in South-East Asia suggests, the specific nature of those problems often differs from one nation to another.
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