ABSTRACT
The usefulness of these points of comparison are several. These additional studies provide insights into other distinct Asian cases and emphasise the diversity of the region, but they also show reverberations from regional contexts and thereby underscore certain factors that were influencing Asian education at the end of the millennium. For instance, the struggles of the teachers’ union movement in Korea illuminates key issues in the reform process in other sites - teachers in all the contexts have to struggle with systems that produce feverish competition for tertiary entrance examinations, for example. In the central study of South Korea, and in each of the additional micro-studies, the focus is on teachers as social actors and in particular on the collective actions and organisations which teachers form in order to articulate and press their claims for reform, often in opposition to governments.
