Myanmar's Higher Education Reform: A Tool for Ethnic Minority Exclusion?

• In Event: The Janus-Faced Nature of Higher Education Internationalization: Racialization, Xenophobia, and Ethnic Exclusion

Abstract

International governing bodies consider fragile states, categorized as ineffective, illegitimate and/or weak, to be one of the most serious security threats facing the world (OECD 2015, 2006). As a result, peacebuilding and state-building agendas that foster social cohesion and develop an active citizenry have become a central component to development initiatives, such as the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (Kirt 2007, Davies 2006, Novelli 2010, Debiel 2005). To transform fragile states, higher education systems initiate reforms that produce competitive and democratically-minded students. Derived from a larger ethnographic research project in Myanmar, this paper focuses on how marginalized ethnic populations are being mobilized and their identities shaped through global democratic education initiatives.

In Myanmar, formerly Burma, the government and development organizations have prioritized reforming the higher education system. Decades of strategically neglecting the nation’s higher education system and targeting students and professors, engaged in a pro-democracy agenda, as enemies of the state have left the system in tatters. Thousands of ethnic minority students have been unable to access higher education due to failing peace processes, on-going political violence, systemic exclusionary citizenship practices, and growing human rights abuses. Myanmar’s current higher education reform addresses these issues by expanding opportunities for ethnic groups to access higher education for the purpose of producing the democratically-minded student needed for Myanmar’s successful transition (Ministry of Education 2016).

I utilize a Comparative Case Study approach (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017) to follow the political processes of the higher education reform across micro, meso and macro levels; to compare how the reforms are unfolding in public, private and ethnic minority non-profit institutions; and to trace how historical understandings of the relationship between education, fragility, and political socialization popularized by Western states have spread and changed over time. My research examines how the increase of development experts”, the diffusion of best-teaching practices, and the proliferation of private, for-profit universities are shaping the identities of ethnic minority students along Western, neoliberal economic sensibilities.

Schooling historically has been positioned as a site to strengthen Western notions of liberal democracy (Fagerlind and Saha 1989, Mundy 1998, Tikly 2004), and in fragile contexts, education is used to develop an active citizenry that will decrease political manipulation and corruption (Davies 2006). My ethnography shows that the democratic principles of critical thinking, dialoguing and diversity, stipulated in the reform, (Ministry of Education 2016) have not been used to challenge current social and ethnic injustices. Instead, these principles have been co-opted as marketing tools by the private sector and development agencies. As critical thinking does not engage with historical and current injustices, the idea of critical thinking as it relates to democracy continues to sideline ethnic minority issues. My research shows how the practices and logic of the education reform, which are intended to develop democratic ideals to address fragility, actually perpetuate fragility conditions. By deflecting attention away from the wider structural and power issues and masking social and historical injustices, the reform policies have enhanced exclusionary forms of belonging that sustain the conditions of fragility.

Author

• Jennifer Otting, University of Wisconsin - Madison