by Jeff Plantilla, HURIGHTS OSAKA

This paper is highly incomplete due to the difficulty of getting information from a number of countries. The items that have no substantial information are omitted. It is hoped nonetheless that a broad picture is provided here that may be useful for the discussions in the meeting.

Regional context

During the last decade, the education systems in Asia seem to be in a state of flux. Change seems to be occurring in various forms.

Even old irritants among states appear as education matters. Disputes over history textbooks exist between Thailand and Burma, China and Japan, Pakistan and India. The government’s promotion of a single identity for its people such as the concept of Hindu nation (Hindutva) in India or Islamic state in the case of Pakistan leads to the promotion in the formal education system of the concept of inequality by not recognizing diversity among its people. 

In many countries in the region, there is a general desire to reform the education system in order to gain the knowledge and skills appropriate to a changing world. Globalization and the era of free market stress the teaching and learning of information and communication technologies in addition to stressing even more mathematics, science and foreign language subjects. To many countries, it is important to be competitive in a highly competitive world.

In Vietnam education reform followed after Doi Moi was launched in early 1990s. While Doi Moi caused some shock, it “soon wore off (tan bien) [and people] began to see opportunities in the newly opened marketplace and believed that education held the key to unlocking these opportunities.” (Thanh, 2004).

Competition has become the formula for success. Government schools (especially higher educational institutions) are now being reformed to become competitive by weaning them away from public support and making them autonomous entities that are run like private corporations.  More private schools are being allowed to operate at the same time. The privatization of the education sector has been advocated by the World Bank and supported by many governments in both developed (such as Japan) and developing countries.

Asia is a growing society with increasing number of students going to schools (with the notable exception of Japan and to a certain extent Singapore). This fact, and the government education-for-all campaign, strains the capacity of schools to absorb more students. While more teachers are in demand, there may not be enough funding to recruit them or there may not be distributed evenly especially to remote areas. This uneven distribution of teachers is a problem in a number of countries in the region due mainly to the difficult situation remote areas offer to those in the teaching profession.

There is likewise an alarm raised a few years back about the declining status of teachers. This problem led to lesser number of students entering the education field, which also means that “better” students are not anymore attracted to becoming teachers. This prompted the Ministry of Education of Thailand to establish the Royal Academy of Teachers as a non-governmental, professional body created by law that enjoys subsidy from the government whose main responsibility is to enhance the prestige and dignity of the teaching profession and to protect teachers’ interest.

The initiation of education reform in the early 1990s was also premised on the unsatisfactory quality of education caused by lack of teaching/learning materials, inadequately trained teachers, ineffective teaching methodology, inadequate school facilities, lack of program to upgrade teachers’ knowledge and skills.

It is in this context that teacher education is being re-examined. A number of countries are looking at ways to get the right teachers in order to have the desired education.

Survey

1. Structures or institutions that conduct

(a) pre-service teacher training

Pre-service teacher training is mainly undertaken by the following institutions:

In Thailand, teacher training institutes are known as Rajhabat. They are government institutions established in different provinces in the country. A similar system existed in Indonesia with the IKIP (Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan or Institute of Teacher Training and Education) that were established in various parts of the country. The Rajabhats and some of the IKIPs however were converted into universities and authorized to offer courses beyond the education field.

Some teacher training institutes are designated for particular students. Some are designated for training those who will teach in primary schools, while others are for those who will teach in secondary schools. In Laos, the Institute Universitaire de Pedagogie in Vientiene and Dongkok and extension centers in Savannakhet and Luang Prabang provide training for those going to teach as upper secondary school teachers. In Pakistan, those who want to teach in primary schools can enroll in “high schools” to get the Certificate in Teaching. These high schools are probably equivalent to junior colleges.

(b) in-service teacher training/professional development

In-service teacher training or professional development, on the other hand, is handled by the following:

As examples, the following specialized education institutes are involved in teacher training:

There are also universities that provide graduate courses for teachers. In Sri Lanka, for example, the universities of Colombo, Peradeniya, Jaffna and the open universities offer post-graduate and masteral courses for teachers.

Open universities and correspondence schools are identified in a number of countries as institutions for the professional development of teachers.

2. Institutions responsible for ensuring the quality and effectiveness in

(a) pre-service teacher training

In a number of countries, specific government agencies are tasked with monitoring teacher education in addition to teacher training institutes and relevant divisions in the Ministry of Education. These bodies may be dealing with higher education institutions (as in the case of Commission on Higher Education in the Philippines) or teacher certification agencies (such as Office of the National Education Commission in Thailand) or research division (Balitbang or Research and Development Office in Indonesia).

5. Effective practices

Decentralized pre- and in-service teacher training program is a good candidate for effective practice of teacher training. This takes the form of local institutions giving pre- and in-service teacher training. The Rajabhats of Thailand and the IKIPs of Indonesia are precisely aimed at spreading the opportunities for pre-service teacher training to different parts of the country. In Sri Lanka, “100 Teacher Centres” were established to make sure that each zone in the country has a teacher training institution that addresses the needs of local teachers. In Japan, the local education boards develop in-service training program suitable to the local conditions.

It is assumed that in the decentralized training program the local training centers have the needed facilities and trainors to be able to effectively function as planned.

7. Strengths existing for including human rights education 

For both pre- and in-service teacher training, the commonly found goal of upgrading upgrading the level of competence of teachers to have higher level of quality education in many countries is a big plus for teacher training. This can be seen in the enthusiasm for training teachers on mathematics, science,  and ICT, as well as the proliferation of foreign assisted projects on these areas. Japan, Australia, and the Asian Development Bank and World Bank figure quite frequently in these activities.

In Southeast Asia, the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) with its centers of excellence in almost all countries in the subregion has been active in providing technical assistance including training on specific areas of education. It expertise in a wide field of interest is a huge resource for the school system.

This environment of catching up with the global education standard is good for teacher training in general and hopefully for human rights teacher training as well.

8. Weaknesses

Many reports in late 1990s decry the problems of teacher training in many countries. (NIER, 1999) The problems may be represented by the list of woes expressed in a report from Malaysia.

Problems of teacher education

There is also apathy toward in-service training among many teachers.

Some training activities are carried out without proper and systematic planning

Thus while the interest on teacher training in line with the goal of getting quality education is a positive element, the lists above show problems of implementation. Uncoordinated and disparate training projects may not be useful from the perspective of teachers.

In-service teacher training programs in some countries suffer from

9. Opportunities for human rights education

Countries that have laws or national action plans for human rights education (and also those with laws or national action plans for human rights in general) have the opportunity of lobbying pre-and in-service training institutions to consider including human rights in their programs/courses in line with these laws or national government plans.

Japan, the Philippines, Pakistan and Taiwan have national action plans for human rights education. Japan, the Philippine s, and Lebanon have laws requiring the study of human rights in the formal education system. India, Indonesia, Thailand, Mongolia and South Korea have action plans for human rights with provisions on human rights education.

As part of education reform, curriculum reform in some countries led to the integration of human rights into the curriculum. In India, educators consider human rights as already part of the existing curriculums in view of the National Education Policies of 1986 and the Plan of Action of 1992 (and also based on past education committees’ recommendations), while in Sri Lanka the concept of human rights is a learning unit in the curriculum. (Panda, 2005, Pandey 2005, and MOE Sri Lanka 2004). In other countries, human rights education is considered part of a general subject that covers various “educations” such as moral education, health education, peace education, values education, and art education. The Makabayan subject in the Philippines, Integrated subject in Japan, and Environment subject in Sri Lanka are examples. These curriculum reform measures require training activities. Thus the training on human rights education can be  added into the planned teacher training activities.

(a) pre-service teacher training

In line with education reform, some countries are revising the pre-service teacher education curriculum. This revision process is an opportunity for the inclusion of human rights in the curriculums of these teacher training institutions. In the Philippines, human rights constitute a subject of the course curriculum for teacher colleges. Some countries, especially those that adopted either a law or national action plan on human rights education, have the opportunity to introduce human rights education at the pre-service level.

 (b) in-service teacher training/ professional development

The employment of child-centered systems in education is an opportunity for in-service teacher training on human rights. In Thailand and the Philippines, the adoption of child-friendly school system led to the training of teachers on child rights. The Philippines, with the help of UNICEF, developed a simple manual on how to monitor the application of CFSS in schools. (DepEd and UNICEF, undated) In Thailand, also with UNICEF support, the Child-friendly School project reached 90 schools in 76 provinces that are considered remote and serving disadvantaged communities. The project has a teacher training component focusing on child rights. (Moonkool, 2004)

The trend toward the application of new teaching and learning methodologies opens another in-service teacher training opportunity. In Thailand, training on child-centered teaching concept was expected to involve thousands of teachers. (Charupan and Leksuksri, 1999). Child-centered teaching concept can easily relate to the rights of the child, thus teacher training on this issue can provide training on human rights education.

Also, the focus on gender equality (especially regarding  rights of girl-children) opens  opportunity for in-service teacher training. In Sri Lanka, the gender-responsive Education-for-All plans led the MOE to train education planners. (MOE Sri Lanka, 2004) The implementation of these plans would require obviously the training of teachers.   

Beyond the MOE programs, the opportunity for in-service teacher training on human rights education is wide open. In a number of countries, teacher training is done by a number of institutions:

They sometimes establish joint teacher training projects. Some also work with the MOE.  (See Human Rights Education in Asian Schools at www.hurights.or.jp for various documented experiences in the region.)

In a few cases, the private corporate sector is also playing a role on human rights education. Private corporations may sponsor the printing of teaching materials (as in the case of materials produced by Human Rights Education Programme in Pakistan), or provide incentives to teachers to pursue further studies.

At the regional level, teacher training is supported by some institutions such as the Asia-Pacific Centre on Education for International Understanding (APCEIU) which has a yearly teacher  training program, the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center (HURIGHTS OSAKA) which holds pilot teacher training workshops once in a while, and the Asia-Pacific Resource Center for Human Rights Education (ARRC) which holds training workshops that can include teachers.  

10. Threats/obstacles for human rights education in

(a) pre-service teacher training and

(b) in-service teacher training/ professional development

The basic problem faced by human rights education in the formal education system is the misunderstanding of its meaning. There is still a sense of reservation on the part of educators (teachers included) and education officials on the value of training teachers on human rights/human rights education.

This may explain for example why the Japanese MOE does not have a clear program on training teachers on human rights education despite the law and the national action plan on human rights education. This may also explain the reluctance of MOEs to provide regular funding to human rights education. This left the supporting activities (from training to development of teaching materials) to outside institutions such as UNICEF, national human rights commissions (where they exist) and the NGOs.

Due to the intermittent training programs, there is a question of availability of people within the MOEs with the knowledge and experience in giving training to teachers on human rights education. Thus the development and sustainability of such training programs are in doubt.

There is also a problem with the view that human rights are already contained in subjects like moral education, values education or civic education.  These “educations” certainly contain principles related to human rights. The principles may not however be presented as human rights but as obligations to the country or duty to society and other people. Teacher training should therefore make clear the distinction between teaching duty to society or country and human rights. Otherwise, human rights will not be properly understood by the teachers. Stressing the understanding of human rights instruments – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child at least – would help in this regard.

With all the projects present in some countries that deal with teacher training on human rights education, a gap in their coordination exists. The resources poured into these separate projects may be maximized if only they are organized by some mechanism within the country.  This is especially true for UN projects that are implemented without coordination despite the existence of the so-called UN country team system.

Finally, the idea of the country becoming globally competitive can be an obstacle when it is oriented towards economic development only. Mathematics, science and ICT are the favorites of MOEs, foreign supporting institutions as well as parents. In fact, in some cases, parents complain when schools teach human rights instead of the science and math that they want their children to excel. While math and science are not in conflict with human rights, that is not how many people see it.