Unit 1: Historical Background on Education in Cambodia

Unit 1: Historical Background on

Education in Cambodia

The Cultural/Political Context

More than Westerners, the Khmer people have been conscious of reality of their past.
 They have existed as an ethno-cultural community in a more or less unbroken tradition for approximately two millennia. They trace their origins, embedded in Cosmo-magical myth to the Indianized kingdom of Funan, founded in the 1st century AD. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, their Angkor Empire attained a religio-political pre-eminence in much of mainland Southeast Asia. Central to the Angkorian concept of rule were Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist theories of divine kingship (devaraja and Buddharaja) where the ruler was seen as a divine mediator between a paradigmatic universal, or cosmic order and the order of human society. Since the fourteenth century, the Khmer-along with their Thai, Lao, and Burmese neighbours, have maintained a strong adherence to Theravada Buddhism. Unlike the priestly Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist additions, Theravada (‘Council of Elders’) Buddhisrn was popularly-based, monastic religion that stressed individual salvation gained through merit. It concept of political rule Centred on the Dhammaraja or righteous, dharma practicing king.

Since the fourteenth century, Therevada Buddhism and I dharma adhering monarch have been the twin pillars of traditional culture and society among the Khmer and the larger neighbouring peoples of mainland Southeast Asia west of Vietnam (see Heine-Geldern 1956). At the same time, the Khmer also maintained their ethnic homogeneity in a common language and indigenous belief system emrunonly known as neak ta, a folk religion of spirit and ancestor worship. Belief in the supernatural traditions, which also had their equivalents in the neighbouring countries and combined forms of animism, naturalism, and magical rites of propitiation, have deep historical roots in Cambodia (Ebihara 1966:189)

The urbanized, French-educated Khmer elites which emerged in Cambodia after World War II (included among them were the future Khmer Rouge leaders) considered this syncretistic belief system, tied to a rural way of life, antiquated and an obstacle to progress. But this system persisted as the focus of life in the Cambodian Village, the basic unit of Cambodian society, where 85 to 90 per cent of the population lived until the early 1970s (Delvert 1979). The l970-7S civil war swelled the population of Phnom Penh from half a million to nearly three million in an overall population of seven million.

Indigenous Education

Until the 1950s, Buddhism through its system of wats or temple monasteries, served as the main source of learning and transmitter of culture in Cambodia. Wats were located in the centre of each village and town and served not only moral religious, but also social, cultural, health, and education functions (Ebihara l988: l87) With the advent of Theravada Buddhism and its attachment to popular instruction, primary education was provided for all boys by monk teachers in wat schools. Some secondary Education was offered in large wats attached to princely palaces in the provincial capitals and the royal palace in the capital. The subjects taught, based on eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts, were reading and writing Khmer, principles of Buddhism, rules of propriety, some arithmetic, and various manual arts. During the period of French colonial rule (1863-1953), the French introduced secular state schools and tried with minimal success (and effort) to replace the temple school system. In the l920s, they succeeded in modernizing the temple schools with curricula and teaching methods used in the Franco-Khmer state schools located in the capital Phnom Perth and provincial towns.

Indigenous Khmer learning was rooted in an oral culture where palm leaf and later printed texts, consisting of didactic precepts as well as poems, fables, epic, and legends, were recited and memorized for recitation. Knowledge was valued for moral, not instrumental, reasons and education was limited to the task of developing moral character and transmitting the cultural heritage. Important non-formal aspects of the village-based education were religious festivals, Buddhist sermons, agricultural rites, and theatrical dramatizations with dance and music - which served not merely to entertain but also a ritual socialization function (see Keyes l977: 120-22).

Westernization after World War II

After World War II and in particular after independence in l953, the royal government under King Norodom Sihanouk promoted a modern education policy that retained and vastly expanded the French-based education system. The impact of westernization among the elites induced the Cambodian and neighbouring governments to inculcate a sense of ‘national’ or modern state identity through secular education (Keyes I977: l23). The institution of education, like the Buddhist sangha (community of monks) itself, became an instrument for nation-building directed by European-type state ministries and attendant criteria.

As part of the new education policy, the temple schools were incorporated into the national system and then allowed to phase out in favor of the state schools. By 1963, only 10 per cent of primary schools were temple-based even if most of the new state schools in the Villages were located within and used the resources of the wat compound (Nepote 1979:778). Although accompanied by a large post-war population increase (from four to seven million people by 1970), primary school enrolments jumped from 84,000 in 1947 to 243,000 in 1954 to nearly one million by the late l960s (UNESCO l958:199: Dremuk 1971:579). By 1967 primary education, which was now compulsory, coeducational, and taught in the Khmer language through all six grades, was available to most of the primary school age population. Nonetheless, no more than a bare majority of the five to fourteen year-old age group was actually enrolled in the late l960s. Also, the attrition rate was as high as 25 per cent between grades and highest between the primary and secondary levels, where instruction remained in the French language.

In the traditional system, only a handful of gifted pupils were advanced to Secondary levels of learning in select wat schools; in lay schools of administration and law in the palaces of mandarins and princes, or in master disciple apprenticeships in the venous functional arts, crafts, or practices (woodwork, magic, traditional, medicine, agricultural practices). After World War II, secondary school enrolments increased at an average annual rate of 25 per cent from 872 students in 1947 to over 13.000 in 1957 to over 125,000, comprising 20 per cent of the fifteen to nineteen year-old population, by the late 1960s (UNESCO 1961:3l2; Dremuk l97l:580; Nepote 1979: 778). French teachers drawn mainly from France as part of their national service obligation, vastly outnumbered their Khmer counterparts in teaching an essentially urban, French centred curriculum.

Higher education, also structured and taught in French, was begun in the 1960s with the opening in 1962 of the Royal Khmer University. While the university traced its origins to a medical facility founded in 1946 and the 1949 Institute for Legal, Political and Economic Studies, enrolments were modest - 208 in 1950 - until the 1960s. In 1968, there were 14,560 students reported enrolled in nine, including vocational, institution of higher learning (Dremuk 1971 :580).

Education in the 1970s

The convulsions of the 1970s, the wars, bombings, revolutions, genocide, famine, evacuations, brought education in Cambodia to virtual standstill. In the first year of the 1970-75 civil war, the primary schools in areas controlled; by the Lon Nol government were reduced to 20 per cent of the number that existed in the 1969-70 school year (Whitaker 1973: 114). About one-third of Cambodia’s 25,000 teachers resigned their posts at this time to join a well-financed military. The situation continued to deteriorate when, in early 1975, government education had all but ceased in the Lon Nol controlled areas (i.e, greater Phnom Penh). As the government lost its grip on the country after a decisive military defeat in the fall of 1971, the countryside came under the control of the Khmer’s Rouge's National Front of Cambodia, whose system of education was modeled on that of the North Vietnamese. In early 1972, a spokesman for the Front asserted that education in areas under its control was ‘free’ and in the Khmer language, that literacy classes were functioning, and that the curriculum of schools included ‘political economy and military and medical science’. The claim was made that instruction was also conducted in the arts and cultural subjects (Whitaker l973: 114).

During the period of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to January 1979, education as such did not exist. Education was mandatory for children between the ages of five and nine in a curriculum that was confined to literacy and some numeracy. But given the Khmer Rouge bias against education in general, this decree was left to local leaders to enforce and functioned only in some of the more prosperous and well-run districts. In the district village of Leach, in south western Pursat province, for example, children were given one hour of daily instruction before being sent out in work groups (Yathay 1979:303-04). The bulk of the instruction consisted in learning revolutionary 39 songs and dances based largely on traditional tunes (Ponchaud 1978:123). The songs, which were also frequently broadcast on the radio, praised the sacrifices of the revolutionary lighters; exalted the national cause; exhorted ideological vigilance; and incited the people to class vengeance. Children of middle and upper class urban parents were removed from their parents altogether for reeducation, while selected peasant children between the ages of ten and fifteen were taken to work in Phnom Penh. Those with artistic abilities were integrated into traveling cultural brigades performing revolutionary dramas and songs. In the area of secondary education, a low-level technical college, the Institute for Scientific Training and Information, existed in Phnom Penh. Most instruction for young and adult alike consisted of self-criticism and political indoctrination sessions. In the meantime, several hundred thousand school age children were massacred or died of starvation and disease in this period.

The social effects of the civil war and subsequent pathological destruction of Khmer culture and society by deracinated Khmer will take decades of cultural and educational reconstruction to repair. Most educated Khmer fell victim to the Khmer Rouge genocide or fled the country to rebuild their lives in the west. The question arises whether a meaningful educational vision and adequate human and material resources exist among the surviving Khmer and their friends in the international community. Many Khmer now outside Cambodia, whether in the Thai border camps or in western countries, remain demoralized, apathetic, or distrustful of one another. Others have increasingly been able to initiate cultural and education projects and build Buddhist temples in their new communities? Only a very few who have settled in the west have been able to extend their activities to assisting the displaced Khmer in the border camps. The latter represent a widow of educational opportunity and need as the prospects for their repatriation improve. A sense of the appalling psychological conditions of life there is a conveyed in a letter by Bob Maat SJ, an American Refugee Committee volunteer who has worked in the camps since 1979, to “Refugee Voices’ (Washington DC, January 1988):

The only true answer for that evil known as Site 2 is for people to go home. Just driving to Site 2 every morning I have a palpable sense of evil ~ very frightening and destroying people’s lives. [sic] ...The pain is acute and chronic out here and getting worse. As someone recently said here: these people have lost all the externals they used to be able to hold on to; now they are losing the internals that interiority that says life is worth living.