Consuming the Promise of Freedom:
What Burma’s Education Reform Can Teach Us
Jennifer Otting
Faculty Associate, Department of Education Policy Studies
UW-Madison
From September 2010 to February 2021, politicians, development organizations and academics believed that reforming all areas of Burma’s education system was instrumental to the democratization process. My research focuses on how the higher education reform represented both Burma’s liberation from the military’s violent control and a pathway for the country to achieve its future democratic aim. The higher education reform wanted to provide for greater economic freedom by expanding the number of non-state, for-profit higher institutions and by promising a decentralized public higher education system. A key component of the decentralizing process was to provide academics and students greater autonomy and individual choice. My talk will focus on how the image of freedom, promised by reforms, sold by private venders, and sought out by educators, parents and students was deeply paradoxical. The image of freedom represented in the reform rendered a different form of control over academics and students. As freedom became equated to the idea of choice, professors and students were shaped by present competition and future expectations. The educational reform that was instituted to promote greater freedom in the future actually curtailed liberation in the present reinforcing the very control the reform sought to eradicate.
Jennifer Otting is a Faculty Associate in the Department of Education Policy Studies where she teaches classes on U.S. School and Society, Human Rights and Education and Comparative Education. Her prior experience as a teacher in the United States and overseas informs her research which examines the intersection of democracy development agendas and education policy in democratically transitioning countries. Past research projects include an examination of higher education reform during the democratic opening in Burma/Myanmar (2018-2019) and the implementation of citizenship education in Kosovo (2013-2014). She first traveled to Burma in 2008-2010 as an English Language Fellow with the U.S. State Department and has continued to work with educational organizations and individual educators during the last fourteen years. More recently, she completed a teacher wellbeing training project with the National Unity Government, and a teacher education research project with the Inter-Agency Network for Education and Emergencies. She continues to support the fight for democracy and social justice in Burma working with educators and students with the Radio Free Burma project.
A recording will be available on the CSEAS YouTube channel following the event.