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Counting the full cost: Parental and community financing of education in East Asia
478
BOOK REVIEWS
inequalities in society. Chowdhury’s chapter on Pakistan and Jayaweera’s chapter on Sri Lanka are similarly well-written and informative. The chapter on South Korea is the most disappointing. The discussion is limited largely to female participation in the manufacturing workforce, and nothing is mentioned about the impact of education on women’s family roles. Several major themes emerge through the various chapters. First, female participation in education at all levels has increased in the post-World War Two period. Secondly, there is still considerable female under-representation in vocational and technical education and certain courses of study such as engineering. Thirdly, gender segregation in the labour market continues to a large extent, with females concentrated in less prestigious, low-wage occupations. Fourthly, cultural and social attitudes and mores are crucial in determining the extent of women’s participation in education and the workplace. Patriarchal attitudes towards women’s societal roles persist even in economies as advanced as Japan and Singapore. The book is worth reading for insights into the ways in which economic, social, and political factors affect women’s participation in education. There is also a helpful 17-page bibliography at the end of the book. However, a few chapters fall short of expectations by not dealing with the interrelationship between increased female education levels and their family roles and political participation. The book would also have benefited from an additional chapter to summarise major trends and issues, and to suggest further areas for research. JASON TAN Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Counting the Full Cost: Parental and Community Financing of Education in East Asia: Mark Bray, The World Bank in collaboration with UNICEF, Washington DC, 1996. ISBN O-8213-3827-7,84 pp., US$20. This book has been published at a time when the fact of over 400 million non-school-going children in the school-aged population in the developing world continues to challenge the 1990 Jomtien pledge by 155 countries to get all primary-aged children into school by the end of the century. The study identifies one of the major hurdles: the extent of assistance that poor households need if the objective of ‘education for all’ is to be achieved. The book focuses on nine East Asian countries, namely Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. One all-pervasive feature among themany important points raised by the book is its departure from the routine of measuring the cost of education by looking only at government expenditures. This book is among the first serious attempts to use country case studies, and perhaps the only one to cover the whole of a geo-economic region, to drive home the enormity of the cost that parents and communities bear in the education sector. Including the important factor of out-of-school private tutoring, between 20 and 75% of the full cost is met by communities at the level of basic education. The two sponsors
-the World Bank and the UNICEF-have been inspired to admit, in a Foreword, some self-criticism. They have said that the policies and actions of many governments and international agencies have ‘unfortunately’ shown little awareness of the magnitude of the burden revealed to be borne by the poorest households as compared to the wealthiest ones Part of the strength of the study lies in its sources of data. The study is based on published and unpublished data collected by UNICEF and the World Bank, supplemented by other materials, by questionnaires completed by UNICEF offtcers engaged in education in the countries concerned, and by the author’s field work in each of the nine countries. Another element of the strength lies in the interesting comparison of three groups of countries: socialist (China, Laos and Vietnam), former socialist (Cambodia, Mongolia and Myanmar), and longstanding capitalist (Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand). Yet even the socialist states have moved to market economies. In China, for example, the first commercially-oriented private school was established in Sichuan Province, home of the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping, shortly after a tour of the province undertaken by Deng in 1992; and as reported in the book (p. 1I), by 1994 nearly 22,000 private kindergartens and primary and secondary schools had been established. One strong message of the study is that governments aiming at education for all must consider costs and benefits at the household level. The resulting policies must focus not only on supply but also on demand for education, the latter incorporating complex considerations of quality as well as the price of education. In this context, Bray could have usefully clarified that of the two variables studied, namely parental financing and community financing, the former’s domain is mainly concerned with the demand for education whereas the latter is more concerned with the supply of education. Concerning the changing economicscenario, however, Bray must be granted accolades for highlighting the dilemmas facing the East Asian economies, leading in many cases to advocacy of partnership rather than outright privatisation. More than this, while primarily focusing on the nine East Asian countries, some of which have remained on the margins of educational research interests of outside scholars, Bray’s findings have clear parallels with experiences in other parts of the developing world. Bray has thus brought forth the bigger dilemma of choosing between two well-known dicta, namely ‘if education is costly, try ignorance’ and ‘ignorance is bliss’. Coming out of the dilemma, by correctly assuming that the two ignorances are of different kinds and both avoidable, Bray’s book has paved the way for further research to determine the proportions of parental and community financing in the full cost of education in different societies, and the implications of the findings for policy. The first step for individuals and institutions interested in pursuing the line is to get hold of the book, because not all of them would be lucky like me to have been asked to review the book and keep the copy as part of the bargain. BINOD KHADRIA Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
BOOK REVIEWS
inequalities in society. Chowdhury’s chapter on Pakistan and Jayaweera’s chapter on Sri Lanka are similarly well-written and informative. The chapter on South Korea is the most disappointing. The discussion is limited largely to female participation in the manufacturing workforce, and nothing is mentioned about the impact of education on women’s family roles. Several major themes emerge through the various chapters. First, female participation in education at all levels has increased in the post-World War Two period. Secondly, there is still considerable female under-representation in vocational and technical education and certain courses of study such as engineering. Thirdly, gender segregation in the labour market continues to a large extent, with females concentrated in less prestigious, low-wage occupations. Fourthly, cultural and social attitudes and mores are crucial in determining the extent of women’s participation in education and the workplace. Patriarchal attitudes towards women’s societal roles persist even in economies as advanced as Japan and Singapore. The book is worth reading for insights into the ways in which economic, social, and political factors affect women’s participation in education. There is also a helpful 17-page bibliography at the end of the book. However, a few chapters fall short of expectations by not dealing with the interrelationship between increased female education levels and their family roles and political participation. The book would also have benefited from an additional chapter to summarise major trends and issues, and to suggest further areas for research. JASON TAN Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Counting the Full Cost: Parental and Community Financing of Education in East Asia: Mark Bray, The World Bank in collaboration with UNICEF, Washington DC, 1996. ISBN O-8213-3827-7,84 pp., US$20. This book has been published at a time when the fact of over 400 million non-school-going children in the school-aged population in the developing world continues to challenge the 1990 Jomtien pledge by 155 countries to get all primary-aged children into school by the end of the century. The study identifies one of the major hurdles: the extent of assistance that poor households need if the objective of ‘education for all’ is to be achieved. The book focuses on nine East Asian countries, namely Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. One all-pervasive feature among themany important points raised by the book is its departure from the routine of measuring the cost of education by looking only at government expenditures. This book is among the first serious attempts to use country case studies, and perhaps the only one to cover the whole of a geo-economic region, to drive home the enormity of the cost that parents and communities bear in the education sector. Including the important factor of out-of-school private tutoring, between 20 and 75% of the full cost is met by communities at the level of basic education. The two sponsors
-the World Bank and the UNICEF-have been inspired to admit, in a Foreword, some self-criticism. They have said that the policies and actions of many governments and international agencies have ‘unfortunately’ shown little awareness of the magnitude of the burden revealed to be borne by the poorest households as compared to the wealthiest ones Part of the strength of the study lies in its sources of data. The study is based on published and unpublished data collected by UNICEF and the World Bank, supplemented by other materials, by questionnaires completed by UNICEF offtcers engaged in education in the countries concerned, and by the author’s field work in each of the nine countries. Another element of the strength lies in the interesting comparison of three groups of countries: socialist (China, Laos and Vietnam), former socialist (Cambodia, Mongolia and Myanmar), and longstanding capitalist (Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand). Yet even the socialist states have moved to market economies. In China, for example, the first commercially-oriented private school was established in Sichuan Province, home of the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping, shortly after a tour of the province undertaken by Deng in 1992; and as reported in the book (p. 1I), by 1994 nearly 22,000 private kindergartens and primary and secondary schools had been established. One strong message of the study is that governments aiming at education for all must consider costs and benefits at the household level. The resulting policies must focus not only on supply but also on demand for education, the latter incorporating complex considerations of quality as well as the price of education. In this context, Bray could have usefully clarified that of the two variables studied, namely parental financing and community financing, the former’s domain is mainly concerned with the demand for education whereas the latter is more concerned with the supply of education. Concerning the changing economicscenario, however, Bray must be granted accolades for highlighting the dilemmas facing the East Asian economies, leading in many cases to advocacy of partnership rather than outright privatisation. More than this, while primarily focusing on the nine East Asian countries, some of which have remained on the margins of educational research interests of outside scholars, Bray’s findings have clear parallels with experiences in other parts of the developing world. Bray has thus brought forth the bigger dilemma of choosing between two well-known dicta, namely ‘if education is costly, try ignorance’ and ‘ignorance is bliss’. Coming out of the dilemma, by correctly assuming that the two ignorances are of different kinds and both avoidable, Bray’s book has paved the way for further research to determine the proportions of parental and community financing in the full cost of education in different societies, and the implications of the findings for policy. The first step for individuals and institutions interested in pursuing the line is to get hold of the book, because not all of them would be lucky like me to have been asked to review the book and keep the copy as part of the bargain. BINOD KHADRIA Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi