ABSTRACT
The rationale for selecting ‘Asia’ as a unit for the comparative analysis of the relationship between schooling and politics lies primarily in the common history of attempts to build modern nation-states in resistance to the threat of Western imperialism from the nineteenth century onwards. The experiences of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and Persia/Iran in undertaking programmes of modern state formation or ‘self-strengthening’ in reaction to the European challenge also deserve to be discussed in any historical overview of the politics of schooling in modern Asia. ‘Asian values’ and the East Asian developmental state – globalisation and the politics of state formation in Singapore Singapore constitutes an unusual instance of a state in which a sense of national identity has been consciously created by the political elite within living memory. This chapter concludes with a consideration of the implications of state-directed efforts at identity formation both for internal social and political stability, and for inter-state relations throughout Asia.
