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The old project of modernizing madrasas has acquired a new zeal in South Asia after September 2011, whereby madrasa reform programmes became an acknowledged soft tactic of the war on terror. With 9000 Aliya (reformed) madrasas, the Bangladesh madrasa modernization programme has been identified as a potentially useful model for the neighbouring states of Pakistan and India who have made slower progress in implementing similar programmes. In this paper I argue that, although the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh has succeeded in integrating secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, in reality this modernization project has failed in its underlying ambition to generate a ‘modern discourse’ on Islam—a discourse that is compatible with the demands of western modernity. The right to speak for Islam is still primarily exercised by the ‘ulama and graduates of the Qoumi (unreformed) madrasas. Aliya madrasas today compete with the secular schools not with Qoumi madrasas. The growth of the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh, instead of bearing testimony to the popular appeal of the modernization agenda, demonstrates the preference of Muslim parents for increased Islamic content in the school curriculum [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critiques current academic usage of the analytic category of ‘civil society’ in recent studies of contemporary China. The problem is not the lack of good empirical work (which abounds), but rather the way in which understandings of ‘civil society’ as applied to China have remained insulated from wider theoretical debates emerging from other parts of the world which have queried the productive utility of these understandings. Specifically, recent studies of China continue to define civil society through its alleged autonomy from the state. This definition has led to unsettling discrepancies between theory and empirical knowledge about Chinese society. Moreover, it has caused researchers to pay little attention to the equally complicated question of whether there are sufficient horizontal linkages among various social actors to constitute a civil society in China in the first place. This paper will argue that lessons learned from the rich civil society tradition and scholarship from other parts of the world may be adapted fruitfully to generate more meaningful and nuanced analyses of Chinese associations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The exaltation of achievement as a measure of collective and individual worth and moral agency has been one of the defining features of Asian developmentalism. Yet in today's age of globalized neoliberal attainment monitoring, the question of who and what an achiever actually is within an achievement-conscious society is far from straightforward or uncomplicated. In Vietnam, the notion of doing well and creditably for self and nation can be deeply problematic for those called upon, either officially or by living and ancestral kin, to embody qualities of attainment and creditable life-course functioning in ways recognizable to those who reward and monitor aspiring achievers. Building on recent fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper explores the ways young Hanoians have engaged with a rapidly changing set of ideas about how the country's tightly regulated schooling and examination system can both unleash and constrain the potential for new and ‘creative’ forms of attainment on the part of the nation's most promising and productive citizen-achievers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines changes between 1992 and 2010 in Japanese junior high school history textbooks’ representations of imperial Japan's colonialism and aggression in Asia, using documentary study and interviews with actors in the textbook production process. Following a trend to increase textbook material on Japan's wartime aggression in the mid-1990s, after 2000 publishers approached this topic in contrasting ways, some expanding and some reducing their coverage, with dramatically varying results in terms of market share. Publishers’ decisions on content were related to their market position and to changes in local textbook adoption procedures that have increased the decision-making power of appointed boards of education at the expense of teachers. Increased market share since 2000 is associated primarily with a progressive pedagogy in tune with recent curriculum reforms. The recent spotlight on textbook adoption has exposed weaknesses in the system, such as inadequate representation of the local community and insufficient guarantee of teachers’ expert input in the adoption process. With the introduction of new textbook approval criteria requiring their conformity with the patriotic emphases of the revised Fundamental Law on Education of 2006, the content of future textbooks will clearly be strongly influenced by both approval and adoption processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines female education, marriage and honour among upwardly mobile Dalits. Using data collected during fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2004–2005) in a Dalit community in rural Andhra Pradesh, I describe how families who constitute the upper strata of Dalits are educating their daughters in order to marry them ‘upwards’ within their caste to a groom with prospects of employment. Education allows these Dalit girls to become housewives, escaping a life of demeaning agricultural labour, colloquially: ‘hard work in the hot sun’. But as educated wives they must have middle-class virtues to match. Unlike their labouring counterparts, their language, dress, movement and manners must convey shame and modesty. As their responsibility for maintaining family honour increases, they are progressively more scrutinised and controlled. I explore this heightened emphasis on honour among traditionally egalitarian Dalits and suggest reasons for the increasing concern about female sexuality. Education for girls is seen as a particularly risky business: on the one hand it provides opportunities for sexual encounters, but on the other hand it holds the promise of hypergamy. Given their already precarious circumstances, many Dalits choose to cut short the education of their daughters, rather than take the risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the 'problem of migration', but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines often ignored 'minority entanglements' forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an ethnography of a contemporary residential madrasa for teenage Muslim girls in a North Indian town undertaken by a team of two researchers. We focused on different aspects of the overall study, with Sanyal conducting participant observation within the madrasa and Farah interviewing a select number of graduates and former students in their home environments. The result is a comprehensive picture of the madrasa's transformative role in the socio-religious lives of its students, which highlights the importance of the connections between the madrasa and the home. Of significance are the religious and denominational orientation of the madrasa—Barelwi Sunni Muslim—as well as the working-class status of the girls and their parents' low level of education. With limited resources, the madrasa inculcates in the students, and by extension their neighbourhoods and wider communities, a new awareness of religious duties and mutual obligations, and gives its students confidence and a voice within both their families and communities. The long-term potential impact of madrasas such as this one appears to be significant in contemporary North India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines education and knowledge interaction in India, c. 1880-1915, through Christian missionary schools. It focuses on the network of schools, their goals, orientation and the degrees to which they depended on Indian agency. It is observed that in the Anglican mission schools in north India, the Indians showed that they could guide and direct these educational enterprises.

The article explores the way of mothering among middle-class families and how early years education has impacted the lives of women in Calcutta, India. Preschool education has taken a significant influence in the role of women as consumers and their outlook towards politics and modernity. Formal education on the other hand has been credited as part of reformist and nationalist elites in the ideals of colonial elites.

Evaluates the social impacts of the public welfare lottery in Taiwan. Determination of greater distributional burden on the poor; Citation of inverse relation between higher levels of formal education and lottery purchase; Examination of attitudes and beliefs concerning the lottery in social welfare's perspective.

Focuses on the education of temple priests in Tamil Nadu, India. Agamic religious schools for priests in Tamilnadu; Teaching systems in the Agamic schools; Use of books in Agamic schools.

Reviews the characteristics and the educational climate of the schools for the children of the Malaysian plantation workers. Focus on the educational status of the workers; Data on enrollment rates, drop-out rates and achievement rates; Causes of the low educational status.

Examines the attitudes, policies and practices of the Brooke government of Sarawak, Malaysia towards Chinese education and the reactions of the Chinese community. Analysis of the Chinese vernacular school system; Brooke's laissez-faire attitude towards education; Staunch China-centric attitude and outlook.

This article considers the relationship between Islamic religious education and democratic education in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It offers a particular examination of Pakistani parents who choose to provide their children with an Islamic education, based on 750 interviews conducted by the author between 2003 and 2005. The author argues that issues of religious and sectarian diversity among Pakistani populations must be addressed for Islamic religious education to effectively promote democracy.