Possible Policy Borrowings from Korean and Japanese Educational History? Feasible? Desirable?

• In Event: Power and culture: studying the frontiers of educational change and cultural reproduction

Proposal

NOTE: If it is better to transer this to the General Pool, please make that judgment and do so without asking. We frankly did not know which would be the best way to get our paper discussed.

Purpose for presenting
To seek advice on whether the message is on target or of interest to others. We are particularly interested in how to dialogue with development partner institutions and governments of lower-income countries about the issues we have analyzed.

Motivation
The motivation for this paper was field-based (as well as policy-document-based) observation of development partner behavior and recommendations, in view of the history of successful countries. During fieldwork, the authors noticed how many development agencies, particularly bilateral ones, tend to recommend actions, or problematize the issues, in terms of what is of interest in higher-income countries today, rather than what the lessons drawn from their own history suggests, from periods when their own countries were more similar to the lower-income countries today.

Congruence with the theme of the CIES 2023 conference
As will be noted below, one of the characteristics of the higher-income countries whose history we have chosen to examine, was the centrality of a focus on educational equity as a way to develop the nation and be able to respond to colonization or the perceived economic and military threats from the West.
The research is comparative at its essence, as that is the main theme: comparing history to present, and key early-reformers to the current situation in lower-income countries.

Methods, Data, and Results
The method used is a historical analysis of the route through which education in Japan and South Korea was framed, and then implemented, in the period starting in 1870 (approximately) in the former and 1945 (approximately but especially after the Korean war) or so in the latter. We analyze both policy intention as in various laws, decrees, and policies, as well as implementation. Debates around equality, the interpretation of Western ideas as filtered by each country’s history, are covered. Original policy documents are analyzed as well as literature on the educational history of both countries, including educational and pedagogical issues. Long-term historical statistics and cliometrics are also employed mostly to compare context and results, rather than methods.

South Korea and Japan are chosen because they are, today, high performers both in terms of average achievement and, even more importantly, equality, who went about their reforms with clear intentionality and purpose, and where there were distinct historical pivots that can be pinned to a specific decade or even a single pivotal year. Other high-achieving countries in the West more or less evolved into their systems. Even countries that are often cited as examples for the lower-income countries to emulate, such as Finland, did not set about fundamental reforms with the clear purpose and intentionality that South Korea and Japan did. Side references are made to other cases where intentionality was key, and where there was a clear purpose and bureaucratic organizational effort, such as Prussia. Similar insights are raised through an analysis of speeches and writings of pan-African independence leaders in the 1960s regarding the centrality of education to the nation-building project.

Emerging themes that could be of interest to lower-income countries today include: a) the focus on education as fundamental to national purpose, not just as an abstract commitment to numerical goals such as the MDGs and SDGs (without denying the utility of such goals), b) an intense focus on education as a way of redressing class (as in “education should not just be for the samurai class”) and colonization issues (as in “education is key to help us resist undue economic and military power from the West”) from the past, and hence a focus on equality, c) an intense questioning of what could be learned from the West rather than just acceptance and simple borrowing, and d) a relentless focus on bureaucratic efficiency, planning, and investment discipline in terms of not expanding higher levels until lower levels are universalized (for the sake of equality and quality). The focus is largely narrative and qualitative, but historical statistics are used to document the results obtained, such as the very high degree of equality and also efficiency achieved (in fact, signaling how efficiency and equality may have been helpful to each other), whereby even low-income segments of the population benefit from quality education. The contexts, not just the results, are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

A framework of policy borrowing derived from the literature is used to analyze what South Korea and Japan did, as well as to suggest limits as to how much could be borrowed, by lower-income countries today, from their experience. The paper includes a comparison of the lessons learned from South Korea and Japan against the standard recommendations of development partners, and more specifically KOICA and JICA.

The paper may end up being a shorter version of a longer monograph. Both are intended to be published, the paper as a peer-reviewed paper in a journal, the second as a monograph sponsored by an academic or semi-academic institution or think-tank. Aside from CIES, we plan to disseminate the ideas in other venues.

We expect that by February 2023 we will have a fairly finished version of the paper, not just a PowerPoint.

Authors

• Luis Crouch, RTI

• Deborah Elaine Spindelman, University of Cambridge