National Education Systems

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the rise of national education systems in Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It draws on five countries by way of example: Japan, China, Iran, India, and Malaysia. The chapter examines, in turn, the particular circumstances in each country that propelled it toward the establishment of national education, as well as the myriad actors, on both the national and the local level, who had a hand in implementing educational reform. It emphasizes the universal concerns and challenges faced by each country, in particular how to incorporate foreign models of education with indigenous, including local religious, values and methods in its quest for modernization, self-determination, and the creation of a citizenry with a common ethos. Finally, the chapter points out that countries that were colonized had a somewhat different trajectory of educational reform than countries that were not.