ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the interdisciplinary and historical literature and provides an understanding of why a Western model of education was implemented as part of planned national modernisation in the 1960s. It discusses the developments and influences on modern education in three key phases. The first phase began in 1961, when the third king commenced planned modernisation and began the process of building a modern system of education to support planned development. This period focused on the development of the physical infrastructure of education. From the second phase beginning in the mid-1980s, attempts were made to localise the curriculum through the New Approach to Primary Education (NAPE) initiative. The chapter describes how today in the third key phase the imperative to balance traditional and modern ways of knowing is at the fore in policy, curriculum, and new demands on teachers' pedagogy due to the GNH policy. It provides a background to the discourses on tradition, modernisation, and education in Bhutan.
