ABSTRACT
Given the results of several large-scale international assessments, the academic excellence of students in Asian societies has become widely acknowledged. However, although the high academic performance of those societies has inevitably caught worldwide attention, it has been mostly interpreted as a peculiar cultural tradition such as Confucianism, which attaches great importance to education. This type of cultural reductionism tends to become tautological since it describes nothing more than high achieving countries’ ingrained cultures that produce high academic performance. Only a few exceptional studies based on detailed field research succeeded in capturing the characteristics of education in Asian countries (e.g., Cummings, 1980; Rohlen, 1983). Yet these were rather more descriptive than explanatory, and were primarily intended to introduce conditions in Asia to Western audiences. Thus, we are still unsure about the distinctive characteristics of Asian education as contrasted with the West, and thus at a loss to understand the potential contributions to general theories in sociology of education.
