Foil to the West? Interrogating Perspectives for Observing East Asian Higher Education

Abstract

After absorbing Western knowledge for at least one and a half centuries, East Asian higher education has made some remarkable achievements in recent decades. Throughout the region, a Western-styled higher education system has been well established. The region has become the world’s third great zone of higher education, science, and innovation, alongside North America and Western Europe/UK, with research powerhouses, and the fastest growth in scientific output. While East Asia’s achievement has been widely acknowledged, assessment of its future development is not. The strikingly contrastive assessments among scholars are often due to their perspectives employed consciously and unconsciously in their research. This chapter attempts to delve deeply into the theorization of perspectives for observing higher education development in East Asia. After some methodological inquiries into research perspective and frames of reference, it critiques the current English literature and calls for multiple perspectives for studying East Asian higher education. It concludes that current conceptualization of East Asian higher education development relies almost entirely on Western theoretical constructions and argues that the perspectives that give weight to the impact of traditional East Asian ways of cultural thinking on contemporary development are badly needed.