ABSTRACT
Educational reforms across the region have generally been in the direction of liberalization – a freer economy and a freer curriculum to meet new economic priorities. It might be expected that citizenship education, as a key component of the school curriculum, would be influenced by such changes. Yet this does not seem to be the case. Asian country case studies of citizenship education have shown consistently that citizenship education remains deeply rooted in the conservative values and priorities of nation states (Grossman et al. in press). As pointed out in the previous chapter, in most Asian countries there is likely to be an emphasis on moral rather than civic education, on traditional values rather than new globalized values (Kennedy and Fairbrother 2004). This suggests a dichotomy between public policy and private morality as Asian nations play a larger role on the international stage against a backdrop of value systems derived from tradition. A key issue for consideration, therefore, is how education systems will prepare young people to be international and local, traditional and modern, forward looking and backward looking. Currently, the liberalizing discourses of economic and curriculum reform sit side by side with the conservative discourses of citizenship education in Asian schools.
