Exploring contemporary issues and challenges facing education in South-East Asia, this Handbook covers the 10 member states of the ASEAN and Timor-Leste.

This book focuses on education and power in Southeast Asia and analyzes the ways in which education has been instrumentalized by state, non-state, and private actors across this diverse region. The book looks at how countries in Southeast Asia respond to the endogenous and exogenous influences in shaping their education systems. Chapters observe and study the interplay between education and power in Southeast Asia, which offers varying political, social, cultural, religious, and economic diversities. The political systems in Southeast Asia range from near consolidated democracy in Indonesia to illiberal democracy in Singapore and Thailand to the communist regime in Laos to absolute monarchy in Brunei. Structured in three parts, (i) centralization and decentralization, (ii) privatization and marketization, and (iii) equity and justice, these themes are discussed in single-country and/or multi-country studies in the Southeast Asian region. Bringing together scholars from and focused on Southeast Asia, this book fills a gap in the literature on education in Southeast Asia.

Prior to the era of globalization, education in Southeast Asia was viewed in the context of the national state and it was deployed in the service of state and nation-building and national economic development. States monopolized education, and public-funded centralized education systems were established to teach literacy, transmit national cultures and promote social cohesion, and to produce literate workers. Globalization forces, however, dramatically impacted in varying ways and degrees the national education systems across the region. As states begun to see their citizens as resources to enhance the countries' competitiveness in the global market, it, among other things, led to the increasing demand for highly skilled and qualified human capital. The accompanying neoliberal ideology led to varying degrees of decentralization, privatization and internationalization of education, especially of higher education, in Southeast Asia. The chapters in this volume focus on a number of issues and challenges confronting the education sector in Southeast Asia, including: (i) the contrasting language in education policy in Singapore and Malaysia; (ii) the introduction of an English-medium private education sector in Malaysia; (iii) the internationalization of Thai higher education; (iv) access and quality issues in the massification of Malaysian higher education; (v) secondary school quality and higher education participation in Indonesia; (vi) equity, access and retention in primary school education in Malaysia; and (vii) reforms in the primary and secondary education in Myanmar.

How particular has Southeast Asia’s experience of educational development been, and has this led to an identifiably distinct Southeast Asian approach to the provision of education? Inquiry into these questions has significant consequences for our understanding of the current state of education in Southeast Asia and the challenges it has inherited. This book contributes to a better understanding of the experience of educational development in Southeast Asia by presenting a collection of micro-historical studies on the subject of education, policy and practice in the region from the emergence of modern education to the end of the twentieth century. The chapters fathom the extent to which contest over educational content in schools has occurred and establish the socio-cultural, political and economic bases upon which these contestations have taken place and the ways in which those forces have played out in the classrooms. In doing so, the book conveys a sense of the extent to which modern forms of education have been both facilitated and shaped by the region’s specific configurations; its unique demographic, religious, social, environmental, economic and political context. Conversely, they also provide examples of the sorts of obstacles that have prevented education making as full an impact on the region’s recent 'modern' transformation as might have been hoped or expected. This book will be of interest to academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, Asian Studies, education, nationalism, and history.

Over the last decade, many local students have preferred to study overseas. This has caused governments to announce the creation of programs and developments in the higher education sector to upgrade South-East Asia to a leading education hub. Moreover, many governments declared that they would work on the insurance of learning to increase the quality of the degrees and the teaching itself. This has led many to question the results of these declarations. Higher Education Challenges in South-East Asia provides an overview of what has been happening over the last ten years in higher education in South-East Asia. It also works to solve the challenges in modern education such as the impacts of digitalization, globalization, and Generation Y and Z learning styles. Covering topics that include globalization, educational technologies, and comparative teaching, this book impacts academic institutions, policymakers, government officials, university and college administrators and leaders, academicians, researchers, and students.

This volume tracks the complex relationships between language, education and nation-building in Southeast Asia, focusing on how language policies have been used by states and governments as instruments of control, assimilation and empowerment. Leading scholars have contributed chapters each representing one of the countries in the region.

In Indonesia, as elsewhere in Asia, education will inevitably play a key role in the national development experience as the twenty-first century unfolds. Not much international attention is paid to how the education sector is faring in Indonesia, but that is not because nothing is happening. The past decade has seen major changes in the structure of the education system and in the schooling trajectories of Indonesian children and adolescents. The administration of primary and secondary education has been decentralized to the regions. A new paradigm of school-based management has been introduced. Public spending on education has finally reached one-fifth of total government spending, as required by law. But although enrolment rates at all levels continue to increase, the quality of education remains low and has not improved, and the tertiary sector continues to experience problems of autonomy and unsatisfactory performance.