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Publications in comparative education are often prompted by major histor-ical events and take many forms. The first of the two books being reviewed,edited by Bray and Koo, was compiled to mark the 1997 transfer ofsovereignty of Hong Kong and Macau, from the UK and Portugal respec-tively, to Special Territories of the Peoples’ Republic of China. The secondvolume, edited by Townsend and Cheng, is a millennial stocktaking ofeducational reforms in 23 states of Asia and the Pacific. Wellover half ofthe countries described are island states or territories, of which the majorityhave very small populations. Some rank among the world’s high-incomenations (Australia, Japan, Singapore) and are discussed over many pages.Others merit no more than a paragraph (Niue, Cook Islands and Kiribati).

While both volumes were developed in association with conferencesand workshops over a period of five or six years, they adopt distinctiveapproaches to comparative educational research. Common to each is anemphasis on formal aspects of educational systems, primarily schoolingand higher education with little attention paid to non-formal modes ofdelivery or informal learning. Inevitably, questions arise for the reviewerabout how the contributors to the two volumes conceptualize the distinctiveobservations they make about educational trends in East and South EastAsia, and the extent to which their analyses are informed by regionallyspecific, indigenous, colonial and post-colonial influences.

The volume edited by Townsend and Cheng is to be understood in rela-tion to the concerns of the school effectiveness ‘family’ of researchers ofwhich the contributors are members. Given its role in educational reformin all parts of the world, the editors dedicate the volume to policy-makers,administrators and teachers committed to global educational improvement.To this end, they set a scene in their introduction which aims to locateeducation in the Asia-Pacific region in relation to the norms of educationfrom 1000 AD until the present. They differentiate between what theydescribe as second and third millennium thinking. Without specifying, theyclaim that every person on the globe must have the skills and attitudesnecessary to take us to the next level of development. In their concludingchapter, the editors review the country by country experiences of educa-tional reform and development in the Asia-Pacific region that have beenprofiled. They present an array of typologies which refer to disciplinaryperspectives on educational functions at different levels of analysis andtheories regarding the case for school-based management versus externalcontrol of educational institutions. Acknowledging the difficulties exper-ienced with educational reform in different countries of the region, asdescribed by their contributors, the editors elaborate upon their vision ofdecentralized, quality-assured schooling with innovative information tech-

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nology (IT)-based curricula, partnerships with families and communitiesand relevant teacher education.

While a reviewer may wonder at many of the assumptions and claimsmade in these editorial passages, most of the chapters present a briefhistory of educational development in the countries concerned, with refer-ence to the growth of the system and its economy, usually with reference tolocal political history. Most are concerned with providing a snapshot whichhighlights concerns and approaches to their resolution in the 1990s, someexplicitly with reference to school effectiveness. For example, Cheng onHong Kong. Xiaojie and Xiaoyu, writing about China, provide brief viewsof successive aspects of educational provision from primary through topost-tertiary education, almost as an inventory, focussing on the changes,since the political reforms of the mid-1980s. In Taiwan, Wen-Jing Shanand Chien-Chen Chang discuss the fight for democracy and resistanceto centrally planned educational services and the growth of commitmentto out-of-school as much as school-based learning. In Thailand, it is thefluctuating economic fortunes (Hallinger et al.) to which reference is made,while Suzuki argues that the challenge in Japan is to the mechanisticinorganicism of society and the problems it generates. Lee contextual-ises her analysis of change in the policy and practice of education inMalaysia over the last 20 years. With a detailed review of the changingmulticultural political economy, which is responding to globalization, sheforeshadows a shift from achievement to values and interpersonal rela-tions along with a simultaneous strengthening of corporate culture, ITand English within the education system. Gopinathan and Kam strugglelikewise with the influences of globalization on a multi-cultural societyundergoing constant change in their analysis of Singapore, while YoungHwa in describing reform in Korea also stresses the importance of IT.Townsend’s lengthy chapter on the challenge to change in Australiadiscusses the neo-liberal political changes of the 1990s and their implica-tions for educational management, resourcing and social equity. Fromhere, he examines in considerable detail the implications of the central-ized control of a decentralized system for the standardization of provisionand the loss of diversity in the light of his models of education in thethree millennia and changing social and economic trends. Wylie providesa similar, less detailed analysis of the experiences in New Zealand.

The contributors to this book are writing to broad guidelines, withsome flexibility. Chapter after chapter provides charts of national educa-tional systems and basic statistics of enrolment and levels of investment ineducational activities. In many cases, the reader has to cope with largefrequencies, only a few of which have been transformed into percent-

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ages to facilitate interpretation. Flexibility is apparent in the papers thatallude to opportunities for lifelong learning and other modes of out-of-school education. Welcome are the references to education for marginalgroups and mobile populations, but there is a very limited discussion ofhow indigenous culture informs the development of these globally modernsystems. Although Suzuki translates the anglicised names of governmentauthorities, there is no hint at their meaning or derivation in Japanese.Only the paper on Thailand by Hallinger et al delineates the problemsencountered by the educational reform movement, in terms of the culturaldissonance and lack of comprehension it provokes in those responsible forits implementation at school levels. Thai norms of ‘obedience’ to one’selders mean an obligation to accept and implement government reforms,but there are concerns about the lack of ‘sincerity’ on the part of those whoare ‘encouraging’ such practices and a lack of ‘moral support’ from themas a group. This produces a lack of ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘heart feltcommitment’ to the process. This leads to a degree of cynicism about theprocess on the part of school leaders, particularly because it is occurringin a context of considerable ‘uncertainty’. Providing the Thai vocabularythat underpins these experiences reveals clearly how late 20th centuryeducational reforms may represent a challenge to institutionalized culturalexpectations. The individual country case studies are interesting, althoughit is largely left to the reader to develop a comparative analysis from theirjuxta positioning.

In contrast, each of the contributors to the first section of the book editedby Bray and Koo examines a single level of education, from pre-primarythrough to higher education, in the context of both Hong Kong and Macau(Wong, Adamson, Li and Kwo and Yung). This pattern continues throughthe succeeding sections. These examine selected aspects of education inrelation to political, economic and social issues and their implications(Leung, Hui and Poon, Ma), curriculum policy and processes (Lo, Tse, Tanand Tang), questions of comparative methodology (Bray) and its implica-tions for understanding processes of continuity and change in the twoterritories (Bray).

The introduction briefly outlines the similarities and differencesbetween the two island nations, their colonial histories and recent politicaland economic change (Koo). From here Wong shows how under Britishcolonialism, pre-school education in Hong Kong was much less well-developed than in Macau, where under the Portuguese it was seen as anintegral lead into the primary stage. Adamson and Li find considerabledifferences in the development of primary and secondary education in spiteof the similarities of history, geography, ethnicity and post-colonial fate.

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These they attribute to different metropolitan interests in the territories,which also leave the provision made in each case quite different from thatin China. Li and Kwo trace the limitations of teacher education and waysin which both territories are striving to raise the quantity and quality ofpostulates. In the chapter on higher education, Yung examines its structuraldevelopment in relation to the increasing range of knowledge and qualifi-cations offered and shows how movement between the two territories andbetween China and Taiwan are influencing the specialisms available inan information-based world. These themes are elaborated later, firstly byHui and Poon and then by Ma. Hui and Poon focus on the history of fourinstitutions in each territory to explain the patterns of elitist higher educa-tion in terms of distinctive patterns of imperialism. Ma gives an accountof labour market development and the need for highly qualified humanresources and trends towards academic education combined with special-ised vocational skills. Leung suggests that the length of the period ofpolitical transition explains the flexibility of the churches’ response to thetransition to Chinese authority and, on the part of the Chinese government,to the Christian churches’ influence on schooling in the territories. Movingto curriculum, Lo hypothesizes distinctive assumptions about technicallyrational and stimulus-response pedagogies before and after the transitionof sovereignty in the two territories. Tse suggests that the limited changein civic education imitates experiences elsewhere in the transition fromcolonialism associated with the essentially conservative institutional struc-tures of the territories. Again through empirical case studies in fourschools in each territory, Tan examines colonial influences on the historycurriculum, showing little variation in centralized Hong Kong and consid-erable differences in orientation in non-centralized Macau, which allowedpro-PRC, pro-Taiwan and pro-Lusocentric variants to co-exist. Likewise,Tang attributes the variabilities of the mathematics curriculum to thecomparative stability and change of the two territories.

The two concluding chapters by Bray review the achievements of thebook in relation to the evolution of theories of comparative education andto the comparative education literature on continuity and change in EastAsia over recent decades. In this he draws particularly on Bereday’s fourstages of comparative analysis, according to which the authors preparedtheir contributions, and then on Thomas and Postlethwaite‘s 1983 studyof schooling in East Asia, positioned specifically in relation to MargaretArcher’s work on the social origins of educational systems. This allowshim to examine development in the region in the intervening period. Inthis way, the different studies in this book are well located within anunderstanding of the contemporary political economy of South East Asia.

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Their position has intellectual, regional and global coherence, illuminatingthe history of colonial cultures, their post-colonial transformation and theinfluence of China throughout. The editors are to be congratulated for whatis a considerable achievement.

For the reader unfamiliar with education in East Asia, the book editedby Townsend and Cheng would be a good starting point to obtain anoverview of the systemic educational developments in the region towardsthe end of the millennium. Bray and Koo would be for those withsome familiarity of multi-disciplinary theories of education, colonialismand international development over the last 50 years and the ways inwhich imaginative approaches to comparative research can enhance under-standing. As a pair the two volumes go well together and are certainlytimely. They are to be castigated for excluding gender from their analysis,but deserve praise for bringing so many Asian writers to a global audience.

ROSEMARY PRESTON

International Centre for Education in DevelopmentDepartment of Continuing EducationUniversity of Warwick Coventry, CV4 7ALUKE-mail: r.a.preston@warwick.ac.uk