Ideologies of civic participation in Central Asia: liberal arts in the post-Soviet democratic ethos

Abstract

Higher educational practices in post-Soviet Central Asia remain predicated on an authoritarian conception of expertise rooted in an objective and universal science. While the substance of such education has changed since the Soviet era, the form of education remains rooted in Soviet-era discursive ideological practices, practices that encourage civic passivity outside the classroom. The liberal arts model of higher education represents a significant challenge to prevailing education norms, but it is a model that is honoured more in name than in implementation by domestic and international reformers. The inability to articulate the broader societal significance of the liberal arts suggests a broader act of forgetting the civic inspiration of liberal education in established as well as developing democracies.

Liberal and vocational education: the Gordian encounter

“…As such, through the acquisition of liberal knowledge, students increase their creativity, judgment and ability to think and communicate (Hirst, 1965). Finally, Baker and Thompson argued (2010) that students who receive liberal education master intellectual skills that can be transferred to other contexts – which includes the wisdom to know when a skill developed in a particular context can actually be transferred.…”

Promising Futures? Education as a Symbolic Resource of Hope in Kyrgyzstan

“…For more on education as a resource of hope in the contemporary global context, seeFreyberg-Inan and Cristescu (2007),Giroux (2005),Lauder et al (2006),Robertson et al (2007) and SviShapiro (2009).4 I am thinking here of work by MadeleineReeves (2004Reeves ( , 2005, Alan deYoung(2002, 2007), and SafarovNiyozov (2006), which engage more directly with the cultural politics of education and the ethnographic study of and with educators in Kyrgyzstan. Norma Jo Baker and Chad Thompson have, individually(Thompson 2008) and together(Baker & Thompson 2009), also made important interventions in critically reconceptualising 'liberal education' in Central Asia.…”

Twenty Years After: Armenian Research Libraries Today

“…The importance of inquiry and active participation on the part of the learners was neglected, and in fact discouraged. As Baker and Thompson write, "[i]ndependent student work or choice is foreign to this process, and a direct challenge to the entire educational paradigm -a paradigm in which students have invested as heavily as their instructors" (Baker and Thompson, 2010). This inheritance continues to influence the educational pedagogy of Armenia and other post-Soviet states in the CIS.…”