Sullivan, Keith (Ed.) (1998). Education and Change in the Pacific Rim: Meeting the Challenges. Reviewed By Wing-Leong Cheung, The University of Queensland

Sullivan, Keith (Ed.) (1998). Education and Change in the Pacific Rim: Meeting the Challenges. Oxford: Triangle. Series Title: Oxford Studies in Comparative Education. Pp. 270. $40      ISBN 1-87392-733-9 Reviewed By Wing-Leong Cheung The University of Queensland September 26, 2000             Education and Change in the Pacific Rim presents the different challenges facing the Pacific region and the responses of particular governments or educators. In addition to the introductory chapter, this book contains 11 other chapters. These chapters focus on current education issues in Canada, USA, Peru, Kingdom of Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). Each chapter provides a general description of each country and the context for discussing specific issues. They focus on one central theme: challenges and responses. The unifying premise is that globalization has produced challenges. The actions or reactions of local governments and educators are the responses. Globalization has changed the nature of education and these changes have become mainstream within the various nation states addressed in this book.             Geographically, the concept of the Pacific Rim is used to indicate the region surrounding the Pacific Ocean. This region includes the world's largest economy, the United States, and the country with the largest population, China. In addition to these giant and influential nations, the Pacific Rim includes some “economic miracle” countries, such as Japan and the Asian Tigers. This region also contains over half of the world's population consisting of a wide cultural, religious, economic, and political diversity.             In terms of political economy, the emergence of the Pacific Rim has meant a change in the center of gravity during the late twentieth century. Asia has displaced Europe as the major partner for America in trade, if not politics. The world economy is no longer monopolized by the European and North American nations. Thinking in this vein had been reinforced by the suggestion that the twenty first century will be the dawning of the Pacific Age or could be the “Pacific Century”, a notion which confers causal powers to an arbitrarily defined area and postpones scrutiny of the influences behind world patterns of growth that are attracting attention (Heron and Park, 1995). It is acknowledged by both economists and politicians that the Pacific region will be the center of the next century, even though some of them suspect the possibility of its integration (Castells, 1998). Accompanying the accelerated economy and co-operation and development in the region are the challenges posed by globalization. Simultaneously, these new challenges cause a variety of profound impacts on the education systems in this region.             In this book, the authors deal with two very different types of challenges. The first type of challenge is the conflict between the global and the local. The second type is the result of marketization of education. The first type of challenge is the globalized market which initiates cultural impacts on indigenous peoples. These kinds of cultural impacts are the result of the mainstream culture, which has replaced the mother culture as the dominant culture of the indigenous people, especially indigenous youths. It raises the question of how indigenous peoples preserve their cultures within the mainstream education system. In Chapter two, McApline analyses the significance of an Aboriginal teacher training program in Canada which reflects this kind of cultural impact on Canadian indigenous young people. Wolforth's chapter is also concerned with indigenous teacher training in Peru. The main difference between these two countries' training for indigenous teachers relates to the difficulties in Peru that stem from the extreme isolation of some tribes across Latin America. In addition to the chapters on Canada, chapters on New Zealand (Sullivan and Irwin) and Tonga (Koloto) are also concerned with the preservation of Aboriginal cultures through education. The global trend, the authors argue, makes the education system work in favor of the mainstream, or the majority, leaving minorities struggling for cultural survival.             There are some educators, including the non-indigenous, who try to preserve the cultures of some minority groups by continuing to use indigenous languages as the instruction medium in classrooms. Instances of this include the Mohamk and Cree in Canada (Chapter 2), the Andes in Peru (Chapter 5) and Maori in New Zealand (Chapter 8). However, these educational enthusiasts envisage challenges from parents, and to a certain extent, from their governments. As McAlpine indicates, some parents in the Mohamk community had reservations about the effect of using the indigenous language on the development of children's literacy skills in English, as competence in English language represents the gateway to join the economically successful mainstream. Another example is given in Koloto's article (Chapter six) which argues that education is often motivated by the need to reach international standards rather than to meet local needs, because of the Tongan government's intention to join the international community. Finally, it appears that the wishes of educators, who want to preserve the Aboriginal cultures, usually tend to give way to global reality. Initially, they want students to manage indigenous language fluently. However, the dynamic of globalization usually dismantles their efforts. Hence, education and language planners of these types of programs are left with the hope that the use of indigenous languages in school may help to maintain the identity of the Aboriginals.             The chapters mentioned above demonstrate that globalization is a complex interaction of globalizing and localizing tendencies. There is the conflict between particularistic values and universalistic values (Scott, 1997). On the one hand, a lot of governments are trying to reform their education systems in order to cater for global changes. On the other hand, far from the center of these governments, some people are struggling to preserve their nearly extinct cultures with limited support from government or the community. The editor of this book does not share optimistic views about the preservation of indigenous cultures. He cites Watters and McGee's (Chapter 1) suggestion, as follows: “There are two major ways of conceptualizing the Pacific Rim, first as a steamroller of economic, cultural and geopolitical (and by inference educational) integration where any local resistance is doomed to collapse under the weight of global forces.” (p.30)             The second type of challenge posed by globalization results in the marketization of education. On key aspect of globalization is the realization of economic deregulation and the lowering of social costs within national communities (Scott, 1997). Hence marketization requires deregulation to release its dynamism. Deregulation does not mean that governments totally remove their interventions from the market, but it does mean the elimination of government-aid in the public sector, resulting in the notion of user- pays. Educational institutions, especially in higher education, endeavor to find more users under this condition. Consequently, the education markets are today full of competition, thereby promoting the dynamic of the market. Obviously, this is an oversimplified representation of marketization. Different effects will be found when marketization occurs in different contexts.             The dynamic of marketization has led to a series of educational reforms in different countries. The tasks of these reforms are (1) to increase the competitiveness of the educational institutions in order to catch up with the radical economic competition across the world, and (2) to help improve equality of access to education. Apple's chapter, Under the New Hegemonic Alliance gives an exclusive analysis of the alliance among Neo-liberals, Neo- conservatives, authoritarian populists and the professional new middle class. He shows how this alliance has launched varied education reforms to re-create educational markets in U.S.A. Similar conditions can be found in Australia. During the Hawke-Keating Labor administration, the Australian government initiated radical education reforms. As a consequence of these reforms, education is today no longer public service but commodity.             There is one commonality shared by the contributors of this volume. They argue that marketized education “lacks concern for the humanistic issues of equal opportunity, social justice and the social contract” (Sullivan, Chapter 1). In some countries, education is completely a commodity, with students and parents are the consumers. Places in school are goods that can be bought and sold. Yet education markets also construct positional goods, for instance, private schools, that is favor the well-to-do class. Public schools are inclined to become the safety net of the whole education system. Even worse, public education is a choice-of-better-than-none, for the marginalized groups, Under this condition, the freedom of choice in education is nowadays a kind of negative freedom. Parents and students do not have the freedom to create the choices, but only the freedom to choose from whatever the authorities supply to them (Marginson, 1997). Policy makers have been swept along by the “blind faith” in markets and competition that permeated government. This implies that the more competition that is introduced in education, the more difficult it is for the disadvantaged groups in the societies to access quality education. This kind of user-pays rationale has dominated not only capitalist governments, but also the largest communist country in the Pacific Rim, China. Chinese universities have also started to charge tuition fees in the 1990s. Bai writes in Chapter 12: “In this chapter the 'metamorphosis' is identified as the change in China's higher education system from a 'social institution' to an 'enterprise' under the influence of the market-oriented economy.” (p.241)             The example of China evidences ubiquitous influences of marketization, even a communist country cannot avoid adapting to it because marketized education is conceived as the gateway to economic growth. Education has been used for promoting economic development for a long time, not only in China but also the other Asian countries around it. Morris and Sweeting's chapter, The Little Asian Tigers: identities, differences and globalization and Suzuki's State Policy on Innovations for Education illustrate how governments and enterprises steer the direction of education to help industrialization. Morris and Sweeting argue that at least two of the four tigers, Taiwan and South Korea, had already decided that vocational training and technical training should have significant roles prior to their industrialization.             In addition to the economic change, globalization, along with marketization, has put other social issues into the forefront, for example the transnational social movements of human rights and freedoms (Roseneil, 1997), which poses other challenge to educators. Responding to these appeals for human rights and freedoms, Governments in different countries introduce particular laws in order to promote and protect the rights and freedoms of their citizens. However, the effects of marketization lead to social collapse on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other. The socially disruptive nature of the market is so strong that localized relations of reciprocal obligation are dampened by markets in which transactions are mediated through monetary exchange and in which social relations are regulated by contract (Scott, 1997, p.9). Examples of this argument are found in the third and seventh chapter of this book.             Black-Branch (Chapter 3) analyses the impacts of the series of litigation that happened after the passing of the Canada Charter of Right and Freedom. This Charter raised the challenge for educators within which the old adage of 'teacher knows best' was no longer sacrosanct (p.69). Some 'traditional responsibilities' of school, for instance the responsibility to maintain order and discipline in school, are now confronted with students' and parents' questioning. They proclaim that some actions of the school are legally against their rights that are enshrined in the Charter. Litigation is not only launched by students and parents against schools, but also by teachers against schools, and sometimes by the school against the local/state government. Sullivan's chapter, The Great New Zealand Education Experiment and the Issue of Teachers as Professionals, gives examples of other types of confrontation between teachers and the government. The New Zealand government threatened the professionalism of teachers after they had put education into the market place since the marketized education system places teachers under surveillance, and jeopardizes the co-operation between teachers and other members of the society. These two examples evidence Alan Scott's (1997) claim that market forces are destroying community and solidarity.             Apple's words sum up this phenomenon, whereby "education is a site of struggle and compromise" (p.79). There are struggles between progressive, globalization-oriented governments and minority groups, as well as between marketized education and disadvantaged peoples. Settling these struggles depends on negotiation and compromise. Different interest groups may join in the struggle and in the negotiation processes. Naturally there is sometimes compromise among these interest groups. Nowadays, managing educational institutions is akin to managing conflict within commercial organizations. Powerful and complex external factors are affecting education system, making education no longer simply a matter of teaching and learning.             This volume is strong on breadth rather than depth. Readers, who expect any elaborated discussion, especially on the influence of the concept of the Pacific Rim on educational reform, will be disappointed. In this volume, most chapters do not go far, in terms of addressing the concept of the Pacific Rim, and discussing its implication in education. Furthermore, some chapters do not deal with latest educational changes within this region. For example, Sweeting and Morris' chapter describes the history of the education development in the Four Little Tigers rather than an investigation of their educational problems under the influence of globalization.             However, this book provides a "big picture" of how societies around the Pacific Rim are reconstructing their education systems under the influences of globalization. Each chapter has systematically explored the challenges that have arisen in different countries. As the editor claimed, this volume creates a "series of educational windows to a variety of interesting educational policy contexts"(p.16), giving snapshots for educational policy in Pacific Rim countries. The book is useful for both experts and laymen in contexts within and beyond the countries discussed. About the Reviewer Wing-Leong Cheung is completing his PhD in the Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia. His area of interest is the roles of education in the processes of national development in East Asian countries. References Castells, M. (1998). End of millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Heron, R. L. and Park, S. O. (Eds.), (1995). The Asian Pacific Rim and globalization. Aldershot: Avebury. Marginson, S. (1997). Markets in education. St Leonards, NSW.: Allen and Unwin. Roseneil, S. (1997). The global common: The global, local and personal dynamics of the women's peace movement in the 1980s. In A. Scott (Ed.), The limits of globalization: Cases and arguments. London: Routledge. Scott, A. (Ed.), (1997). The limits of globalization: cases and arguments. London: Routledge.