international education campusreview. com. au
Myanmar rising
As political and economic changes resurrect higher education in the former Burma, Australia and other nations have their eyes on the new market.
By Christopher Ziguras
Long ago, so the story goes, young people in Singapore would travel to Rangoon( now Yangon) to study in one of the wealthiest and most advanced cities in South-east Asia. Visiting the Myanmar city today, after 50 years of military rule, the only hints of that past are the cluster of impressive but crumbling British colonial-era buildings encircling the once-thriving port and the lavish temples that boast of earlier Burmese empires.
The rate of change since the military regime agreed to a process of democratisation has been phenomenal, and governments and education providers from around the world are rushing in. There is intense jockeying for position in Yangon between the US, China, the European Union, Japan, Australia, and Myanmar’ s ASEAN neighbours, who are motivated to varying degrees by a range of objectives: to shore up democratisation; to promote sustainable development; and to gain early access to lucrative commercial opportunities.
Rebuilding the country’ s education system is a priority for the Myanmar authorities and foreign governments alike, so what can education providers in Australia and other countries do to help?
Those troublesome institutions The military regime was highly adept at social control but notoriously disinterested in social welfare. Schooling was primarily a means to promote loyalty to the nation and the government, rather than to impart useful knowledge and skills. Higher education fared much worse. Because university students had a habit of protesting against
Bagan Myanmar
the military regime, the country’ s universities were shut down entirely in 1988. Students were told to stay home and teaching staff were put on extended research leave. It marked a period of severe repression of all intellectuals, during which very many were imprisoned or forced to flee.
After many years, universities were gradually reopened, but only after they had been split into 63 different institutions, most with multiple campuses spread across the country. This fragmentation ensured that the number of young people on any one campus was not large enough to overwhelm security forces, but it now makes rebuilding functioning institutions all the more difficult. Most of Myanmar’ s universities and colleges are in a sorry state. Campus buildings are being repaired but there are few computers and IT infrastructure is almost non-existent. Students complete their secondary education around the age of 16 and are unprepared for advanced study.
One legacy of British colonial rule that will prove fortunate as the country opens up is that English has remained a feature of higher education. Whilst Burmese is normally the oral language of teaching and classroom discussion, handouts and assessment are normally conducted in English. In practice, many students struggle with English comprehension, listening and speaking, and what is assessed is students’ ability to reproduce memorised passages in exam conditions. Given this continued importance of English, demand for quality English language teaching will probably grow very quickly now that the country is opening up.
Outbound students Given this parlous state of tertiary education, resulting from the military’ s policies of deliberate neglect and destabilisation, it will take local institutions decades to rebuild. In the meantime, those students who can afford to study abroad will do so in ever-larger numbers.
This outward mobility is not a new phenomenon. For decades,
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