Scope, approach, and sources

3This book aims to describe and move towards an understanding of the post-coup Myanmar education landscape over the course of the 2021 to the early 2024 period. Unlike previous work published by our (constantly evolving) team, which tackled narrowly defined topics (dealing primarily with language-in-education policy and its challenges in the pre-coup context),6 the scope of this book is wide, covering virtually the whole Myanmar education sector, including beyond the borders of Myanmar itself. Such a wide scope inevitably comes at a cost in terms of precision, details, and accuracy, particularly in extremely complex and fast-evolving situations, rich with new actors, shifting trends, and unpredictable outcomes. While being aware of these limitations, we have done our best to present accurate and comprehensive information, and we remain convinced that examining the ‘big picture’ is essential and beneficial for making sense of the numerous and complex ongoing dynamics within the Myanmar education sector. At several points in this book, we dive into case studies, including single-page boxes, in order to zoom in and provide more detailed information on specific actors, institutions, or geographies, thereby hoping to provide some insights on local situations, which more often than not remain complex, sensitive, shifting, and thus challenging to capture.

4As much as possible, we try to carry out a historical and geographical approach throughout this book. Although the 2021-2024 period has witnessed extremely rapid and dramatic developments, we strongly believe that keeping in mind the historical trajectories of different issues and actors is vital to understanding present-day situations and challenges. We thus have decided to include a dedicated historical background chapter, covering the main political eras of Burma/Myanmar’s history, including the colonial period – whose impacts on education and identity are in our opinion too often overlooked – as well as successive military dictatorships, and the 2011-2020 reform era, which certainly offers lessons on opportunities and challenges for education in a future federal and democratic Myanmar. We also attempt to begin the book’s different sections and subsections within other chapters by providing some historical perspective, before moving on to post-coup developments.

5In terms of geography and spatialization of information, as opposed to some of the work we were able to produce prior to the coup, the mapping of quantitative data often appears frustratingly impossible in the post-coup context. This information is missing, incomplete, or likely to be inaccurate, for reasons that include the impossibility of collecting it amid conflicts, as well as its political significance for the different actors involved. Nevertheless, as issues surrounding conflict and post-coup education in Myanmar are strongly grounded in diverse territories (notwithstanding the decisive implications of online education experience gained during the pandemic), we try to localize the information as much as possible and to mobilize a geographical outlook in our analysis. Given this perspective, we believe Map 1, produced by the Myanmar Information Management Unit (MIMU) and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in 2015 (and revised in 2019), is a useful visual to open this book because it presents both the political boundaries of the States and Regions composing the Union of Myanmar (as of the 2008 Constitution) and a sketch of the geographical dispersion of the main languages spoken in the country, including in neighboring regions beyond the borders of Myanmar itself. This is relevant to several issues discussed in this volume, most notably to conversations on ethnicity, education, and federalism prospects.

6The sources we have used for this book – as a direct consequence of both its wide scope and the security situation in present-day conflict-torn Myanmar – are mostly secondary. While few academic publications dealing with education in the post-coup environment are available at the time of writing, the vibrant realm of Myanmar media, including local and/or ethnic media focusing on particular groups and geographies, has extensively covered many aspects of the post-coup situation, including in education, through a seemingly infinite number of posts, articles, podcasts, and videos. This of course includes social media, with first and foremost the accounts of the institutions and actors involved in education that are featured in this book, rich with information, announcements, and illustrations of their activities. Moreover, numerous online conferences and webinars, including those organized by particularly dynamic Myanmar higher education providers created in reaction to the coup, have regularly offered precious insights into the rapidly evolving education landscape. In addition to the academic references, the footnotes of this book contain hyperlinks to more than 950 news articles, social media posts, websites, and other sources, which beyond their role in supporting our claims and analysis, we hope will be useful for further research undertaken by others.

7In addition, we have extensively relied on the networks and access of our team, several members being based full- or part-time in different regions of Myanmar during the course of this research, and all of them directly involved in the education sector in many different ways. We obtained the approval of the Mahidol University Institute of Population and Social Research’s Institutional Review Board (IPSR-IRB) before starting our research, but in the process of framing the work, we chose to conduct only a few formal interviews for reasons that are now both familiar and obvious to people working on sensitive issues in post-coup Myanmar.7 The security of our team members and of the people they interact with being an absolute priority, primary data was collected through observation and informal conversations, often in order to confirm information found online. The anonymity and security of all the participants have systematically been prioritized over the course of this work, which inevitably affects the precision of some of the references to data collected through interactions with individuals involved in education activities. Keeping in mind that some of this information would need further investigation and that situations are often rapidly evolving in such a context, we remain cautious when presenting this data, both in the main text and in the footnotes.

Map 1: Main languages spoken across the sub-national administrative boundaries of Myanmar and its borders with neighboring countries

Quantity, Quality, and Identity (QQI)

8In order to try to make sense of the highly disrupted, complex, and rapidly evolving Myanmar education landscape, and to be as systematic as possible in our coverage of the education provided by a multitude of actors, we have chosen to use a simple, three-dimensional transversal lens throughout this book: quantity, quality, identity. This lens has already been used, explicitly or implicitly, in some of our previous works,8 and we believe its efficiency in covering the main stakes surrounding education, particularly in its political dimension, largely makes up for its lack of poetry.

9Quantity is relatively easy to define. It refers to the magnitude of education systems, typically in terms of the number of schools, students, and teachers. It can also entail quantitative data regarding access to education, literacy, and the proportion of students reaching a particular grade level or passing a particular exam. This type of information constitutes basic data to describe any education system and typically features among the very first elements provided in diverse types of publications, often converted into impactful maps and graphs, and regularly included in the titles of media articles dealing with education.9 These figures, however, often carry great political significance, as a mathematical articulation of a system or a policy’s reach, momentum, success, or failure. As much as order of magnitude is fundamental to making sense of the Myanmar post-coup educational landscape, it should be noted that in such a disrupted and disputed context, figures are often extremely challenging to produce, and particularly likely to be ‘rounded up’ in different directions by different actors, including but not limited to the military, in order to support different political agendas.

10The definition of quality in education is much more complex and subjective; different groups of people in different contexts would use different values and criteria for its assessment. Quality can be measured by international standardized tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) or the South East Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM), by the recognition of the credential offered by an education system to pursue further education, or by the value of these credentials in the job market, in local, national, or international contexts. Teacher training offers important leverage in terms of improving the quality of education, and in Myanmar these conversations often revolve around the issue of a teacher-centered approach and rote learning, a heritage of monastic education re-enforced by decades of dictatorship and underinvestment in education. This is in contrast to a student-centered approach and the development of ‘critical thinking’ skills, which involves different educational practices in which students are given more leeway in the process of building their own body of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, as much as these two seemingly opposed conceptions of education (as well as society at large) are useful to describe the different practices prioritized by different education systems, the key concepts underpinning them can at times also be little more than catchwords, primarily used in ‘ticking boxes’ when dealing with a variety of external organizations.

11Finally, education conveys different elements in terms of identity. All around the world and through a myriad of unique situations and trajectories, states, as well as political movements striving to mobilize national aspirations, use education in general and schooling in particular in the perspective of nation-building. Key elements of these projects include language-in-education policies (medium of instruction, classroom language, as well as languages taught as subjects), national narratives (included first and foremost in history textbooks), morning school assemblies to pay respect to a particular flag and/or singing a particular national anthem, religious symbols, religious activities and/or religious content, as well as other more or less ritualized and explicit practices and messages attached to a specific conception of the nation and the society that can be conveyed by the curriculum and other aspects of the education institution’s life. In Myanmar’s post-coup political context, allegiance to the SAC versus to the NUG and/or other actors associated with the resistance is, of course, absolutely relevant to this identity dimension of education, regardless of possible similarities in other aspects of the content of education.

Figure 1: Simple representation of our lens and the interactions between its three dimensions.

12As represented in Figure 1, the three dimensions of our lens directly interact with one another. Education institutions must assess their priorities when using their budgets, and make choices that often involve tradeoffs between quality and quantity. Increasing the reach and enrollments in an education system with a constant budget generally means that fewer resources are available per capita, which almost inevitably comes at a qualitative cost. There is for instance an inverse correlation between the number of students for a teacher in a classroom and the quality of the education that is likely to be provided, the training of any kind of participatory pedagogy becoming increasingly challenging as the number of students increases beyond a certain threshold. Similarly, investing in the training of large numbers of teachers, in the context of limited resources, may come with tradeoffs in terms of the length and quality of their training. Institutions in charge of education also make choices in terms of decreasing or increasing the difficulty of an exam, such as the matriculation exam in the Myanmar context, with direct implications on the quantity of students successfully obtaining the credential.

13Identity is also liable to interact with quality. If the quality of education is defined in terms of developing analytical and ‘critical thinking’ skills, the prioritization of nation-building objectives is likely to come at a cost, with critical thinking being used mainly against the nation’s designated enemies or oppressors, while the uncritical adoption of the national narrative promoted by the education system tends to be encouraged and rewarded. Links between identity and quality also include the language of instruction, with proven educational benefits of starting education in one’s mother tongue, rather than in a (national) language which is not always mastered by children belonging to ethnic minorities. This, however, also leads to a number of questions related to which particular language(s) and writing system(s) should be used in which schools, with more or less intricate and politically sensitive local linguistic situations, and as educational arguments may be at times easier to advocate than underlying nation-building agendas.

14Finally, identity and quantity are likely to interact, as choices in terms of identity content may have implications on the reach and efficiency of education systems. The overall curtailing of ethnic minority languages and promotion of a Bamar-centric national identity in public education under successive military regimes, for instance, has likely contributed to limited enrollments and increased drop-outs among ethnic minorities, for reasons that include language barriers and reluctance towards the military’s nation-building project. Similarly, ‘ethnic’ education providers10 may be confronted with difficult choices in terms of promoting a wide, ‘common’ particular ethnic identity, aiming at mobilizing a larger population but with potential tradeoffs in terms of erasing the diversity within vis-a-vis focusing on a more local, specific, and possibly more homogenous identity that corresponds to a smaller, and ultimately less mighty and influential nation.

Outline of the book’s structure

15Following this introduction, Chapter 1 provides a historical background for the subsequent post-coup educational developments in Myanmar. It examines the country’s successive political eras, namely the dynastic, colonial, parliamentary, BSPP, and SLORC/SPDC periods, and ending with the 2011-2020 Thein Sein/NLD reform decade up until the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on education within the framework of our QQI lens.

16Chapter 2 describes the coup itself, and its overall impact on Myanmar in general and on the education sector in particular, including through the CDM phenomena. We then move on to describe the evolutions of the state education system under the SAC’s control and amidst the boycott, before describing the NUG’s Federal Democracy Education Policy, as well as some of the newly formed education systems and institutions working with, under, or in general alignment with this parallel government, both online and on-the-ground, in basic as well as in higher education levels.

17Chapter 3 focuses on ethnic education, which has gained momentum following the coup as one of the alternatives to SAC-controlled government schools and universities. This entails both ‘historical’ education providers that predate February 2021, many of which are in general alignment with the revolution, and newly appearing institutions and networks, particularly in the regions most impacted by the coup, including but not limited to Chin and Kayah/Karenni States. Examining the provision of education by these actors is of particular importance, not only because they are often the only source of formal education amidst conflict-affected regions, but also because this process is immediately relevant to the conversations dealing with a potential federal future for the Union of Myanmar.

18Chapter 4 deals with other alternatives and complements to SAC-controlled government education, which largely operate in regions under the control, or within the reach, of the military (as of early 2024): namely monastic, private, and Chinese education. These education providers, who typically cater to different groups and social classes, have also seen overall increasing enrollments, and often face new challenges in the post-coup context as a significant share of the population has been striving to boycott military-controlled education through their services.

19Chapter 5 focuses on the consequences of the coup on education beyond Myanmar’s borders by looking at different types of migrants (such as refugees, workers, and students) in relation to education, and with a dedicated section on Thailand, which is by far the main destination country. Migration has surged following the coup, with populations looking to escape Myanmar’s conflicts, economic crisis, and lack of opportunities and prospects. Education is often an important aspect of these projects, either as a goal in itself or as a necessity for the migrants and their children in the host country.

20Finally, in the Conclusion we outline the main consequences of the 2021 coup on the realm of Myanmar education through a historical and geographical perspective, as well as according to the quantity, quality, identity lens presented in this introduction, and discuss some of the great stakes in relation with education for Myanmar, under and beyond the SAC.