Reform, restructuring and rehabilitation: post-secondary education from the mid-1990s to 2010

Reform, restructuring and rehabilitation: post-secondary education from the mid-1990s to 2010

The devastation of Cambodian culture and infrastructure since the 1960s has been the subject of in-depth and well-documented research; its legacy is a country who’s economic, health, justice, transportation, and education systems are in need of wholesale reconstruction. A number of useful historical and descriptive studies have focused on the rehabilitation of general pedagogy, curricula, teacher education and higher education in Cambodia. For example, Le Thac Can surveyed Cambodian higher education in the context of regional reforms in Vietnam and Laos, Sophal Ear considered educational development initiatives and their relation to Cambodia’s economy from 1953 to 1970, and Fergusson, Le Masson and Bonshek examined both the pre-1979 and 'postliberation' phases of higher education and teacher education in Cambodia. There remains, however, a distinct need for comprehensive analysis of the present conditions in Cambodia’s post-secondary education reconstruction efforts in order to better understand the country’s overall socio-political and economic development.

This chapter, written by Lee Fergusson and Michael King in 2011, was designed to fill this gap in knowledge and, as Tan Kim Huon, Sophal Ear and others have noted of educational reforms in Cambodia and other Asian nations, there is a significant and irrefutable link between the realities of educational decision making and policy development and the socio-political and economic state of a nation.

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