Comparison Essay

Korea, Japan, and Singapore have effectively implemented succinct, bottom-up education reform processes that have landed them as some of the world’s leaders in education. Each nation entered the reform process from a specific place of trauma and/or desolation, yet they have been able to utilize societal and cultural strengths to build up the education system while working around specific challenges each nation faces. Although all the systems are meritocratic in nature, the origin and manifestation of that meritocracy differs. Each nation has responded uniquely to globalization, but these three nations are similar in that they have all utilized a meritocratic system to create a high-quality, equitable education system, although this has sometimes

It is important to note that each of these nations entered the modern reform process out of a certain place of struggle. Korea started their reform process out of the rubble of the Korean War in the 1950s (Lee, 2012, p. 304). Japan started their reform process out of the rubble World War Two under American occupation (OECD, 2010a, p. 139). While Singapore did not undergo war in the same way that Japan and Korea did, they were under British rule until 1959 and had to build from essentially nothing beginning in the 1960s (OECD, 2010b, p. 160). Each nation took a bottom-up approach to reform, beginning with the most immediate of needs and eventually focusing on the quality of education as globalization has demanded an adaptable and skilled labor force, systems for innovation (including higher education), and up-to-date information infrastructure (The World Bank, 2006, p.

313). The three different regimes have created policy that increase the autonomy and diversity of schools while also making the system more equitable through adjusting allocation of funding and decreasing the effects of shadow education (Lee, 2012, p. 313). Korea has also taken a holistic approach to education, as appearant in the Ministry of Education’s 2008 54 Key Tasks, by prioritizing the health, safety, and equitable treatment of students. Similar to Japan, Korea has a high-pressure system in relation to test scores (Sung & Kang, 2012), however the communal focus is less pervasive than in