1. Dynastic Myanmar

2Early Western visitors to what is today known as Myanmar, between the mid-fifteenth and the early eighteenth century, were generally struck by local populations’ high literacy rates, apparently superior to those observed in India, but also to those in their own Western societies at the same period (Scott, 1906; Lieberman, 1984; Furnival, 1931). This situation was largely due to the vigor of monastic education among (mainly lowland) Buddhist populations and the custom of sending young boys to learn at least basic literacy and mathematics at the monastery, with the primary aim of giving them access to religious knowledge (Than Htut, 1980; Thaung Htut, 2000).11

3The monasteries and their educational activities constituted a powerful legitimizing force for the Buddhist monarchy. Burmese kings, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, strived to establish control over the Sangha, particularly through the introduction of State-sponsored exams (Mendelson, 1975; Dhammasami, 2004). However, despite similitudes in the content of education, the political concepts and material constraints of the time did not allow nor encourage the establishment of a strong administration over the territories under the authority of the king; the content of monastic education remained largely uncentralized, with programs composed locally by abbots for their own monasteries (Than Htut, 1980; McDaniel, 2008).

4Despite the existence of different versions of myths involving the loss of an ancient written culture (stories involving parchments or books, lost or eaten), schematically it is likely that populations living in the highlands regions of what is today Myanmar did not possess written languages, let alone schooling as we think of it today, before their encounter with Western missionaries (Hanson, 1907).12 Rather, their cultures were largely based on rich oral traditions, an orientation that is sometimes described as an element of an overall willingness to keep the lowland States at bay (Scott, 2009; Michaud, 2020).

2. Education under colonization

5Like for many countries in Southeast Asia and around the world, the impact of colonization on what will be known as Burma/Myanmar, which occurred in three phases throughout the nineteenth century, can hardly be overstated. Among other developments, this era witnessed major steps toward the emergence of a modern state (including its demarcation by linear borders instead of fluctuating relations between centers of power) as well as decisive steps in the reification of multiple ethnic identities. Similarly to other colonized countries (or countries facing the threat of colonization, like Meiji’s Japan or Chulalongkorn’s Thailand), the colonial era constituted a critical step in terms of direct involvement of the State (as well as multiple non-state actors) in formal education matters. In many ways, the legacies of colonization resonate to this day in Myanmar’s political and educational landscape.

6Between 1835 and 1845, the East India Company, seldom interested in education during its new conquests, permitted the American Baptist Church, led by Adoniram Judson (who arrived in 1813) to open schools in Moulmein, Tavoy, Kyauk Phyu, and Akyab (Sittwe). This freedom given to the missionaries was aligned with a policy to train a class of English-speaking elites in order to rule the colony, and maybe one day finally succeed in elevating ‘inferior civilizations’. As Burma was until 1937 a province of the British Indian Empire, Lord Macaulay, president of the Committee of Public Instruction, stated in his 1835 minute that:

A Single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. […] We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinion, in morals and intellect.13

7Willing to modernize education, King Mindon (1853-1878) encouraged the implantation of these missionary schools, and an increasing number of students were sent to Europe. Meanwhile, as education was progressively elevated to one of the key values of Victorian society around the mid-nineteenth century, the desire to set up a proper education policy for the masses progressively materialized. Inherited from Sir Arthur Phayre’s vision, the Department of Public Instruction, established in 1866, concluded that the most efficient and resource-effective strategy would be to rely on the already-existing monastic school system, which simply needed to be modernized in order to improve the quality of education, through some degree of centralization and the introduction (or strengthening) of secular subjects such as geography, history, natural sciences, and arithmetic. Implementing this project proved to be much easier said than done. Almost half a century later (as captured in the 1912-13 Report on Public Instruction in Burma), convincing the monks to centralize and modernize their teachings was still a project, rather than a reality:

If anything can be done to encourage the monks to take a greater interest in secular education, which they might easily do without interference with their religious duties, Burma will possess a system of vernacular education such as exists nowhere else in the East.14

8While still impressed by the Burmese education system in quantitative terms, colonial administrators were often very critical of its quality. Stating in 1897 that the monks were “very ignorant, very bigoted or both,” 15the Department of Public Instruction often criticized the pedagogical consequences of monastic education’s primarily religious purpose, including the practice of rote-learning.

[…] that instruction is of the poorest possible description and is usually limited to reading and writing, taught merely as a means to the one end of religion. 16

To the monastic school is due the high standard of literacy, higher than in any other province, yet they seem at first sight to constitute a serious obstacle to any systematic extension of education.17

9In the final years of the nineteenth century, a group of monks declared that including secular subjects in monastic education constituted a violation of the Vinaya, and in 1891 the Thathanapaing, the highest authority in Burmese Sangha, forbade these teachings. While its successors were slightly more flexible, they continued to firmly oppose any content – most notably in history and geography – that would contradict the teachings of Buddhism.18 In the context of the fall of the Burmese monarchy in 1885, most monks did not accept being under the direct authority of the colonial State, largely perceived as supporting Christian missionaries’ activities. They did not wish to have teachers certified by the Department of Education sent to their monastery, and in 1924 fewer than 1,200 monasteries (mostly in Lower Burma) among the 20,000 in the country were recognized by the Department of Public Instruction. The overall project was abandoned the same year (Dhammasami, 2004; Kaung, 1963; Mendelson, 1975).

10The colonial education system that materialized during these decades was three-tiered: English and Anglo-vernacular schools, in which missionaries were largely involved, while constituting only a small fraction of the schools and children enrolled in the country,19 attracted and trained the elites. An English language education was increasingly seen as the primary means to maintain or increase social status in the colonial system, either through administrative positions or business activities (Bagshawe, 1998). In contrast, Vernacular schools, but also monastic schools which continued to operate relatively independently, catered to the masses. The latter, once praised for Burma’s high literacy rates, were now deemed out of fashion and associated with poverty and rurality. When it came to higher education, university students represented only a small elite of less than 1,000 individuals, and only Yangon and Mandalay had universities, teaching subjects mostly related to law, arts and sciences, medicine, and engineering (Hellmann-Rajanayagam, 2020 ; Proserpio, 2022).

11One of the main objectives of the colonial education system was to inculcate loyalty to the British crown, often conceived as the promotion of a double-layered sense of patriotism: “Burma for the Burmans, within the Empire” (Cady, 1958; Chakravarti, 1971; Taylor, 2009). The ‘Committee to Ascertain and Advise How the Imperial Idea May be Inculcated and Fostered in the Schools and Colleges of Burma’, which convened in 1916 (partly inspired by France’s Third Republic utilization of schooling for patriotic purposes), recommended displaying the King’s portrait in schools, to celebrate the birthdays of the royal couple, and to use history and geography textbooks, as well as readers, to transmit a sense of belonging to the British Empire. The report also recommended singing the British national anthem each time the Union Jack was raised: in its original version in English schools, and in Burmese in Vernacular schools.20 A 1927 geography textbook states that:

Burma has become a member of the great family of nations, the British Empire. Burma shares in the peace, protection and prosperity the mother country brings her children – natural or adopted. Burma is one of the adopted children. Without protection, there might not be peace; without peace, prosperity suffers. Burma needs these; Britain, the mother country, brings them.21

12This rapidly evolving educational landscape under colonial rule had multiple and profound effects on society, contributing to overall increasing schooling opportunities for women (Ikeya, 2011) but also largely altering the fundamental meaning and functions of education itself and contributing to a humiliation to the Burmese/Buddhist identity which, unsurprisingly, triggered a nationalist reaction.

13Explicit debates surrounding quantity, quality, and identity in the realm of education were certainly taking place in colonial Burma. Emerging in the first years of the twentieth century, Burmese nationalist movements, led by monks and later on by students, sought to restore the tarnished Burmese pride, notably through education. 1920 marked the beginning of what would become a well-entrenched tradition of student protest, with the strike against the Rangoon University Act, which established an institution with a curriculum designed to train elite civil servants; a small number of highly qualified persons for eventual recruitment into colonial bureaucracy or leading commercial firms (Silverstein, 1968). Although the strike was not successful in itself, the National School movement was created in its wake.

14The National Schools were seen as a patriotic alternative to colonial education (labeled “slave education system” – ကျွန်ပညာရေးစနစ် – by the nationalists). Under the leadership of figures such as U Phoe Kya, this schooling system gave priority to Burmese language, literature, and history, as well as the study of Pâli and Buddhism (Aye Kyaw, 1970; Mya Han, 1997; Thaung Htut, 2000). In the history textbooks created for these schools, Burmese historians (such as U Phoe Kya, U Ba Than, and U Thein Maung) presented their own patriotic accounts of the country’s glorious history, with the royal chronicles as a central source of inspiration (Fig. 2 and 3, Salem-Gervais and Metro, 2012). The movement also succeeded in securing from colonial authorities the right to use Burmese as the main medium of instruction in Anglo-vernacular schools. Interestingly – especially in regard to more contemporary debates regarding language-in-education policy – the central argument of the Burmese nationalists for this shift was that being educated in a language other than their mother tongue in early years of schooling could hamper the students’ intellectual and linguistic development (Than Htut 2005a, 2005b; Myo Oo, 2009). Although most National Schools had closed by 1922 because they lacked sufficient funding and recognition from the Department of Education, from 1920 onwards the students were an emerging force in Burma’s political life (Silverstein, 1968).

15The 1930s also witnessed the direct and confrontational involvement of students in the struggle for independence. Most notably, in 1936 students went on strike following the expulsion of two future major figures of the country’s history, following the publication of an article critical of British rule in Oway, the magazine of Rangoon University Student’s Union (RUSU), of which Aung San and (U) Nu were respectively Editor and President. They founded the All Burma Student Union (ABSU) the same year.

16Burmese nationalist movements famously reaffirmed the position of their language as a critical identity marker (most visibly through the slogan of the Doh Bama Asiayone: “Burma is our country! Burmese is our literature! Burmese is our (spoken) language! Love our country! Appreciate our literature! Respect our language!”22) along with Buddhism and references to the great kings of the past. This posture, largely influenced by Western ideologies of ethnicity and nationalism (Renard, 2006; Thant Myint-U, 2001), was first and foremost directed against the colonial power but also, inevitably, contributed to alienating the minorities and some of their English-educated elites, who often already possessed their own nationalist aspirations, organizations, leaders, and historiography.

Figure 2: Cover of Myanmar Pride’s Heroes, textbook published by U Phoe Kya (1927).

Figure 3: Cover of A Brief Modern History of Burma, textbook published by U Phoe Kya (1937).

17The colonial period in general, and the realm of education in particular, contributed in several ways to the reification of multiple ethnic identities (Taylor, 2006) through an axiomatic vision of the past (Lieberman, 1978), present, and future of the country through the prism of discrete ethnic categories, unequivocally understood as ‘races’ in the colonial context. Within this worldview, which sought to describe societies through discrete essentialized racial categories, theories of ethnicity formulated by linguists became particularly influential after 1900, and language came to be considered the primary marker of, if not equated with, ‘race’ (Leach, 1954; Sadan, 2007; McCormick, 2016; McAuliffe, 2017). Colonial administrators produced censuses, entailing distinctions between ‘alien’ and ‘indigenous’ ‘races,’ and in doing so decisively contributed to the reification and crystallization of racial (and later ‘ethnic’) categories, despite administrators themselves witnessing first-hand the fluidity of language and self-identification practices. Bennison, the author of the 1931 census report, in striving to approach the “true racial classification” of the “indigenous races of Burma” including through “physical appearance, body measurements, culture, customs, technology and the temperament of the tribesmen,”23 noticed that:

Some of the races or tribes in Burma change their language almost as often as they change their clothes. Languages are changed by conquest, by absorption, by isolation and by a general tendency to adopt the language of a neighbour who is considered to belong to a more powerful, more numerous, or more advanced race or tribe.24

18The missionaries, arriving from the sixteenth-century onwards and extending their reach into the territory during the three phases of the British conquest, created orthographies for some of the local languages in order to spread the Gospel within animist and non-literate ‘backward races’. Schooling was often the main draw towards the missions and local elites insisted on the inclusion of English education in the syllabus (Sadan, 2013a). Parallel to the loss of prestige of monastic and Burmese language education described earlier, individuals originating from the mountainous peripheries, which used to be perceived unequivocally as backward and lacking in educational opportunity, were progressively able to reach important positions in the colonial system, notably thanks to their English language skills and access to western education (Tinker, 1961; Taylor, 2006). Some groups, including Kachin and Karen, had tangible elements of nation-building projects in the making, including their own schools, languages in the process of being standardized, newspapers, and scholars writing history according to their own national aspirations. While the National Schools celebrated the great Burmese kings, for instance, Saw Aung Hla’s Karen history, published in 1932, describes the British arrival as a liberation from the Burmese and allowing a re-emergence of Karen culture (Cheesman, 2002; Thako and Waters, 2023).

19Beyond the sole realm of education, recruitment of soldiers among upland populations in the process of being Christianized, described as “martial races” and perceived as more “loyal” than the Burmans (Callahan, 2003b; Taylor, 2007; Sadan, 2013b), doubtlessly contributed to the post-colonial culture of armed conflict along ethnic lines and the “divide and rule” approach of political affairs.

3. Education in independent Burma (1947-1962)

20Inaccurate or partial descriptions of the past can be major obstacles to a truthful assessment of contemporary and future challenges. Regarding education, many, including politicians, journalists, and scholars, rapidly describe the parliamentary (1947-1962) period – in contrast to the subsequent dictatorship years – with a short sentence along the lines of “Burma/Myanmar once had (one of) the best education system in (South-East) Asia.” This leaves the reader to imagine some kind of golden age, during which the whole of Asia envied Burma, seemingly a land of wise and educated people. This simplistic and partial assessment of the past is problematic and has been constituting an enduring obstacle in measuring contemporary and future challenges.

21The Japanese occupation (1943-1945) saw the beginning of a “de-Westernisation” of the education system on Burmese nationalists’ terms, with a suppression of the three-tiered school scheme set up by the British and the beginning of its replacement by a Burmese-speaking homogeneous system, free and directly controlled by the State. Burmese nationalists and ethnic minorities often fought in opposing camps during World War II, and after the Panglong Agreement, the country gained independence under great instability. A multitude of armed groups, including the Kuomintang, and Mujahideens, but also within the Communist Party of Burma and among the Karen and Mon ethnic groups, were operating in many parts of the Union’s territory, including the outskirts of Rangoon. The government thus had little choice but to give priority to the defense sector, and the education budget remained very low.

22At least until the mid-1950s, access to schooling remained extremely scarce, even in the center of the country (Tinker, 1961; UNESCO, 1951; Thaung Htut, 2000). In 1959, despite very significant improvements compared to the years immediately following independence, and an eight-fold increase of the education budget over a decade, only 13% of the total state schools’ population was in middle school and 3% in high school. According to Sai Kham Mong (2004), during this same period less than 10% of the children in rural areas of Shan State finished primary school. According to a 1959 Ministry of Education report, in addition to instability, overall poverty was the main culprit for that situation.25

23This scarcity of basic education for the masses, the rural population, and the poor contrasted with the educational opportunities for urban elites. Private schools, including the ones run by missionaries, trained tens of thousands of students, mostly from upper classes and particularly at high school levels. These private schools were widely perceived as dispensing an education of better quality, with more discipline and better English language skills than government schools. In most cases, they obtained better results on national exams, despite the matriculation exam being available in Burmese only (as opposed to also in English) after 1955. Burma’s elite English-medium education was renowned beyond its borders, and those who obtained a medical degree from Rangoon University could, for instance, pursue their education directly in England, which was not necessarily the case in Indian universities (Steinberg, 2001).

24With diminishing instability, enrollments increased sharply in government schools during the 1950s, leading to the massive hiring of teachers: the increase was more than tenfold in a decade (2,500 in 1945-1946, against 30,000 in 1956-1957, Thaung Htut 2000). Teacher Training Colleges were progressively opened in different cities across the country, but this explosion of enrollments also had tangible consequences at the teacher training level: in rural schools, primary school teachers frequently did not themselves possess middle school education (Kyaw Win, 1959; Tinker, 1961). In higher education too, while the standards remained rather high, Tinker (1961) notes a similar tradeoff in quality for quantity, as enrollments increased drastically. This tradeoff was actually an explicit concern of student movements, who mobilized in 1953 against the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) government’s efforts to win voter support in the national election by opening new colleges. Demonstrations were repressed using force, with students being injured, imprisoned, or expelled from universities (Silverstein, 1968, Chiu, 2024).

25The 1947 Constitution attributed a “special position” to Buddhism and did not mention languages other than Burmese. The education system set up after independence was indeed much more centralized than what Aung San suggested in the years and months preceding his assassination, when he had repeatedly asserted (among other statements that may appear contradictory to one another) that each ethnic group should have its own schools.26 Schooling was seen as a critical tool to build the nation and, despite some efforts to develop an inclusive discourse about the “Union,”27 Buddhism was a central component of the identity content conveyed by the schools (Nash, 1963; Thaung Htut, 2000; Smith, 1965).

26In theory, ethnic languages could be taught as subjects in public schools, up to Grade 3 (Thaung Htut, 2000). In practice, the presence/absence of particular languages in government schools was contingent upon many factors, including the socio-linguistic situations and readiness of the different groups. The lack of teaching materials and trained teachers, the necessity of inventing scripts or standardizing dialects, the complexity of ethnic settings, and the local balance of demography and power between groups often constituted enduring obstacles to the introduction of these languages in formal education (Kyaw Yin Hlaing, 2007; Sai Kham Mong, 2004).

27Some groups were thus more advanced than others in the process of including their languages and cultures in government schools and other forms of formal education. The Mon, for various reasons (including the perceived importance of their place in the country’s history, their relative linguistic homogeneity, and their early formation of cultural organizations) managed to obtain the teaching of their language up to Grade 7 in some public schools, as well as in a few high schools, as part of the discipline of archaeology (Kasauh Mon, 2008). By 1954, some schools had the possibility to include Mon as a subject for the primary exams (Aung Myint, 2007; Ministry of Education, 1956). Following the opening of Karen mission schools as early as 1840, and the advancement of Karen literacy through schooling and the development of print media, several hundred Karen schools were operating, with both ties to American and British foreign missions’ societies and receiving funding from the Ministry of Education in Rangoon in the 1950s (Thako and Waters, 2023).

28Among other groups, throughout the 1950s Shan elites produced Shan language readers up to Grade 5, with the emblematic tiger heads on their cover, in the context of a project of standardization and simplification of the language and explicitly aimed at preserving the Shan nation (Perrin, 1958, Fig. 4 and 5). In some remote regions such as Chin State, private mission schools using some of the local languages remained influential, and the prospect of passing the matriculation exam in Burmese was often a significant challenge for the small number of students reaching high school.28

Figure 4: Cover of Tai Num / Rangoon University Tai Youth Magazine, published by the Shan Literacy Society (vol. 1957-1958)

Figure 5: Cover of one of the “Tiger heads” Shan readers, for Grade 4, published by the Shan Cultural Committee in 1962.

4. The Burma Socialist Program Party and education (1962-1988)

29The first “caretaker” military government experience (1958-1960), following a split in the AFPFL (the ruling political party led by U Nu), was immediately met by student protest, with several leaders arrested following confrontations with the army (Aung Saw Oo, 1993). The early 1960s were marked by renewed political instability, with among other issues the prospect of Buddhism becoming the State religion decisively contributing to the foundation of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) by a group of Kachin students, which had previously established a Kachin Literature and Culture Committee at Rangoon University. The capital’s university was also the laboratory of Shan nationalist movements, among others, publishing patriotic content such as the Shan Literacy Society’s magazine Tai Num (Fig. 4).

30Aiming at easing the minority’s disappointments regarding the functioning of the federal State and demands for more autonomy, U Nu organized a conference in Rangoon in early 1962 (following previous meetings in Taunggyi) in order to discuss the constitutional amendment proposals put forward by several ethnic leaders, which included Sao Shwe Thaik, former President of the Union. In total opposition to this prospect, and invoking the risk of disintegration of the Union, the army led by General Ne Win staged a coup, interrupting the conference on March 2, arresting U Nu, Sao Shwe Thaik, and other leaders attending the conference, suspending the 1947 Constitution, and proclaiming a Revolutionary Council, which gave Ne Win full governmental powers.

31During the first years of the Burmese way to socialism, the State’s administration underwent a centralization process, major companies were nationalized, and written production was submitted to systematic censorship. As universities were well known as hotbeds for political dissent, the Revolutionary Council imposed tight regulations on campuses. As soon as July 7, 1962, following a dispute over curfew, soldiers opened fire on students, officially killing 15 of them (actual deaths are likely to be much higher). The Rangoon University Student Union (RUSU) building, despite its glorious history in the struggle for Independence, was blown up the morning of the next day. Another major incident involving the killing of students took place in 1974, following the refusal by the military regime of State funerals for former United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, and of students’ subsequent demands for establishing a mausoleum at the very emplacement of the RUSU building, blown up twelve years earlier.

32Unsurprisingly, education was seen as highly strategic for the advent of a socialist society. Private schools – perceived as a vestige of colonialism that contributed to the differentiation of social classes and were largely controlled by missionaries as well as Indians and Chinese – were not trusted to guide the youth toward the “correct thinking” (မှန်ကန်သည့်အတွေးအခေါ် ) of the Burmese way to socialism. All schools were nationalized by 1965-1966, and Western missionaries were expelled from the country, which in Kachin State, for instance, profoundly contributed to the resentment towards a central State perceived as primarily Burman (Jaquet, 2015). Private tuition subsisted, but under strict laws, as the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) feared that these classes could become a space to articulate political dissent (Bray et al., 2020). Ne Win did not trust the monks either regarding the education of the youth: the “Ba Ka” program (monastic schools following the government’s curriculum, Chapter 4.1) was suppressed as soon as 1964 (Dhammasami, 2004; Than Htut, 1980).

33In quantitative terms, it should be noted that while the majority of students still did not progress beyond primary education, the number of schools, teachers, and overall access to schooling seem to have increased very significantly during this period (in the context also of a rapidly increasing population) with a three-fold increase in the number of schools (from about 10,000 to close to 30,000 between 1962 and 1988) and a similar trend in enrolled students (from 1.5 million to about 5 million in primary schools, according to official figures, Thaung Htut, 2000; Steinberg, 2001; Taylor, 2009). Literacy campaigns (အသုံးလုံး – the Burmese version of the “3Rs”, Fig. 6) were also organized, through sending teachers, as well as high school and university students, to the countryside in order to teach basic reading skills during the school break months. These campaigns contributed to a significant drop in illiteracy, but also to a much lower extent in the States (typically more remote, mountainous, and largely populated by ethnic minorities) than in the primarily Burmese-speaking Divisions, with respectively 57.5% and 81.5% literacy rates according to the 1983 Census.

34Although often described a bit too simplistically, the shifts in language-in-education policy initiated by the BSPP, underpinned by a postcolonial Burmese nationalist perspective, did entail considerable setbacks in terms of using languages other than Burmese. From 1964 on, the number of weekly periods dedicated to Burmese in the school timetables increased from 10 to 15, and it was announced that all subjects were to be taught in Burmese in the universities. Efforts towards elevating Burmese to the rank of a national language were pursued, through the production of the first monolingual dictionary (1978) and a reference grammar (1985). Language-in-education policy was not without shifts and inflections under the BSPP: in 1981 English was reintroduced in primary schools (5 periods per week, Than Oo 1999), allegedly because of the failure of Ne Win’s daughter to pass the entrance exams at the Royal Medical School in Great Britain. School teachers, however, rarely possessed themselves the language skills necessary to effectively teach this subject.

Figure 6: “Let’s break the dark legacy of the slavery era, let’s study with interest and benefits”, illustration promoting the အသုံးလုံး literacy campaigns (1972).

Figure 7: “Let’s break the dark legacy of the slavery era, let’s study with interest and benefits”, cover of (Tai Long) Shan reader (1985).

35As far as ethnic minority languages and education were concerned, the 1974 Constitution stated that “Burmese is the common language. Languages of the other national races may also be taught” (Art. 152b). In practice, however, the nationalization of all schools in State-controlled areas decisively contributed to the marginalization of ethnic minority languages in education, most notably among the Christianized minorities inhabiting the mountainous peripheries of the country. In government schools, in theory, a handful of languages, perceived as the “main” ethnic languages of each State – including Mon, Tai Long, Jinghpaw, Pwo and Sgaw Karen, and Hakha Chin – could be taught in schools, as subjects, up to Grade 3. Although several textbooks for these languages were indeed produced throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Fig. 7), in practice actual possibilities to teach these languages may have been very different from one region, or even one school, to another, depending on factors such as the proximity of conflict, local MoE administration’s priorities and instructions, availability of teachers, and willingness of the local population to formally learn these languages during slots within school hours.

Figures 8 and 9: Mon and Shan characters supporting the idea of a historical unity of the different ethnic groups, within a largely Bamar-centric narrative,29 in a Grade 4 History textbook, under the Burma Socialist Program Party (1982).

36Schooling and the official curriculum were designed to foster patriotism and the building of a socialist society. The history textbooks of the national program, in comparison to those produced in the decade following independence, tend to go back to the Chronicles and history accounts taught in the National School for sources and inspiration. General Aung San, however, largely remained the central figure of the nation, with post-independence governments being portrayed as incapable of materializing his socialist aspirations. Kings, soldiers, and warriors were frequently invoked in schools: out of the 31 illustrations in the 1978 Grade 4 history textbook, for instance, 22 feature armed men or combat scenes, including characters associated with ethnic minorities, selected because of their alignment with a Burman-centered narrative (Fig. 8 and 9).30

37Meanwhile, beyond government-controlled territory, and before the signature of the late-1980s and early-1990s ceasefire agreements, several armed organizations, notably in Kachin, Shan, Karen, and Mon areas, managed to set up ‘jungle schools’ and start to structure or expand their basic education departments, with a strong emphasis on their respective languages and own ethno-nationalist perspectives on history. In the case of the Karen, for instance, while about 300 Karen schools were nationalized and aligned with the national program in the Irrawaddy Delta and Rangoon region after 1962, Karen education expanded in the highlands of Karen State and border areas with Thailand under the Karen National Union control (Thako and Waters, 2023). Other ethnic armed organizations, including the New Mon State Party, the Kachin Independence Organization, the Shan State Army, and the Communist Party of Burma (with its stronghold in what is today the Wa region) started to organize their health and education departments during this period, opening schools in the border areas under their control or influence.

5. 1988 uprising, the SLORC/SPDC, and the realm of education

38Against the backdrop of a major economic collapse and successive demonetizations, a new round of incidents between students from the Rangoon Institute of Technology and the authorities in March 1988 progressively escalated into huge demonstrations. Alongside the rise of (Oxford and SOAS-educated) Aung San Su Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, as the main political figure of opposition to the military, the tradition of student involvement in politics proved to be well alive. In line with the prominent role of the All Burma Student Union (ABSU), Rangoon University Student Union (RUSU), and other student movements in the 1920s, 1930s, 1960s and 1970s, the call by Min Ko Naing, chairman of the All Burma Federation of Student Union (ABFSU) for a general strike on the auspicious day of 8.8.88, greatly contributed to put hundreds of thousands of people from different walks of life in the streets across the country. Several thousand were killed by the armed forces in the following days and weeks. During the crackdown, many of the students involved in the demonstrations fled to the territories controlled by ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), founding the All Burma Student Democratic Front (ABSDF), the armed branch of the ABFSU. Others tried to operate underground, but several leaders of what would be later known as the “88 Generation,” including Min Ko Naing and Kyaw Min Yu (better known as Ko Jimmy) – who remained major figures in the 2007 and 2021 uprisings – were arrested in the following months.

39Following the seizure of power by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in September 1988, it was impossible for the military to ignore that the realm of education continued to represent the main political threat to the military regime within the territories under its control. New measures to bring this sector to heel and crush any form of contestation rapidly became a priority. Following the 1988 events, universities remained closed until May 1991, only after the regime organized a purge of all unsubmissive civil servants, notably through a questionnaire containing 33 questions such as “Is it right to have head-on confrontation with the military?” or “Do you prefer KIA, KNU, ABSDF, NMSP insurgent organizations to hold power?”31 Recalcitrant staff were replaced, with the help of various forms of lowering job requirements.

Figure 10: General Khin Nyunt and Lieutenant-General Soe Win, Chairing the Myanmar Education Committee, June 17, 2004.

40At any sign of nascent protest among students (such as in 1992 or 1996), the universities were shut down and effectively remained closed in Yangon for ten of the twelve years between 1988 and 2000 (Lall, 2008; Proserpio, 2022). All education administration was placed under tight control of the military regime through the creation in 1991 of a Myanmar Education Committee, which gathered all the ministers linked to educative activities (Education, but also Religious Affairs, Social Affairs, and Progress of Border Areas and National Races), directly chaired by the First Secretary of the SLORC (renamed the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC, in 1997, Fig. 10). Teachers had to follow training supervised by the military, with an emphasis on patriotism, “Union spirit,” and student control strategies (Fig. 11 and 12). They were also expected to know and propagate the official ideology, such as the 12 political, economic, and social objectives defined by the SLORC/SPDC.

Figures 11 and 12: Myanmar Education Committee Chairman, (future President) Lieutenant-General Thein Sein, addressing the opening ceremony of a Special Refresher course for Basic Education teachers in Phaunggyi, May 7, 2007.

41Another critical strategy to prevent protests coming from the education sector was to progressively fragment and disseminate, both administratively and geographically, the higher education institutions: from about 30 in the late 1980s, the number of institutions progressively increased to well over 150, each under various ministries. While this shift may have contributed to facilitating access to higher education for some populations, the main objectives seemed rather clear: communicate widely the new building openings so that official media can convey the idea of the ongoing development of the country (Fig. 13) while preventing students gathering by sending them to remote and diverse locations (often not equipped with dormitories; Seekins, 2011). While undergraduate courses and the teaching of subjects potentially related to politics were severely restricted, distance education (အဝေးသင်ပညာရေး) was encouraged, remaining available when campuses were closed and allowing students to obtain degrees while working to support themselves and their families.

42The SLORC/SPDC period is also characterized by a very high budget allocated to defense (typically above 40% of the total) and an extremely low budget for education (between 1 and 2% of the total budget and less than 1% of the GDP). Needless to say, this emphasis on education as a tool for political control, in a context of economic stagnation and lack of financial support to the sector, did not have a positive impact on the quality of education, by any standards, or the development of ‘critical thinking’: rote learning answers in the perspective of examination remained largely the norm and most university degrees were regarded as holding very little value on the job market. The legacy of the changes during this era has meant that any contemporary education reform has had to struggle against a classroom hegemony of rote and passive learning, hierarchical rather than democratic classrooms, under-resourced and underpaid teachers, and a transfer system that impedes teacher specialization as teachers are continuously re-deployed across the country.

Figure 13: Inauguration of Loikaw University, August 5, 2007, typical illustration relating the “progress of education” (ပညာရေး(ဖွံ့ဖြိုး)တိုးတက်မှု) in State media under the SLORC/SPDC.

43The transition to a post-socialist junta, beyond the classical and unavoidable ‘unity in diversity’ rhetoric, also prompted shifts in the national narrative towards a more Burman-centric conception of national identity (Houtman, 1999). Schooling remained a major vehicle to convey this narrative, and most notably, history textbooks shifted toward an ancient and glorious “Myanmar” collective past, replacing Aung San (whose own daughter had become a fierce political opponent) with great “unifier” warrior kings such as Anawrahta, Bayinnaung, and Alaungpaya – without a doubt a source of pride and inspiration for the military – as the main historical figures and inspiration for the Union. In the early 2000s, neighboring Thailand was also designated as a new national enemy alongside the British colonialists, through a dedicated set of textbooks for primary, middle, and high schools (Salem-Gervais and Metro, 2012).

44As far as government schools were concerned, ethnic minority languages were further sidelined too: in the early 1990s the official program from the Ministry of Education (MoE) indicated that schools could choose to allocate up to two sessions of 30 minutes per week to the teaching of ethnic languages, during the slot dedicated to physical education and school activities (Than Oo, 1999). This modest possibility seemingly disappeared altogether from the updates of the official program at some point during the mid-1990s (Than Oo, 1999; Thaung Htut, 2000).32

45However, while reaffirming and tightening its grip on State education, the post-socialist junta also progressively renounced direct control of all the educational activities of the country. This shift, along with the signature of ceasefire agreements with several of the main armed groups, opened new possibilities, and a number of complements and alternatives to government schooling progressively gained ground throughout the 1990s and 2000s (Lorch, 2008; Lall, 2008). These forms of education can be seen as answers from different segments of a reemerging civil society and private sector to perceived shortcomings of public education in the three dimensions of our lens: quantity, quality, and identity. In government-controlled areas, despite facing regular difficulties and punctual setbacks, various forms of private education, monastic schools, Chinese schools, and other community schools reappeared or extended their reach during the 1990s and 2000s. Different regions may have seen extremely different dynamics in this regard, ceasefires often contributing, for instance, to more leeway in the teaching of ethnic languages and cultures by faith-based networks and literature and culture committees (LCCs) during summer, weekend, and evening classes.

46Beyond government-controlled areas, the ceasefire agreements signed during the 1990s allowed several armed groups to significantly consolidate their own education systems. Among them, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and the New Mon State Party (NMSP) managed to set up and run over 200 schools each by the end of the 2000s. These two education systems, each organized in its own way and with different approaches in terms of curriculum, were emphasizing their respective ethnic identities, culture, and language (Jinghpaw and Mon respectively), while also using the national Burmese language curriculum and maintaining bridges toward the government education system for their students. Meanwhile, armed groups which did not sign agreements, such as the Karen National Union (KNU), Mong Tai Army (MTA, until 1996), and Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), were often losing ground to the Tatmadaw on the battlefield and strived to develop their educational activities, primarily along their respective border regions, and taught little Burmese to their students (Lall and South, 2012; Salem-Gervais, 2013; Jolliffe and Speers Mears, 2016).

6. Towards democratization, decentralization, and educational progress? (2011-2020)

47After the crackdown on the protest led by monks and students during the “Saffron Revolution” in 2007 (which saw the re-arrest of most of the 88 Generation leaders), the drafting of a 2008 Constitution granting considerable power to the military, and the unconvincing 2010 elections largely won by the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the pace of political reforms under the Thein Sein government, resulting from the combination of multiple forces (Mullen, 2016), took most observers off-guard. In this context of transition from direct military rule to a quasi-civilian “hybrid” regime (Egreteau, 2016), the necessity of reforming the education system, which had long been described as both a political tool to protect the military’s power and a major hindrance to the economic and social development of the country, became impossible to ignore. Once elected, Thein Sein immediately stated that human resources were key to success, and that education was among his top priorities (Lall, 2016; Ye Htut, 2019). After the release of Aung San Su Kyi from house arrest in 2010 and the loosening of media censorship, the following years witnessed significant, although at times frustrating, reforms regarding education, in the context of other major (but ultimately short-lived) economic and social developments, including in terms of freedom of speech, democratization, and decentralization.

48Education reforms are slow processes, and the Myanmar education system certainly did not settle overnight the many pressing issues it had faced for decades (including in terms of access and inclusiveness, pedagogy, or corruption… Raynaud, 2016). Nevertheless, and while gathering accurate and comparable figures has always been challenging, the notoriously low support of the State to education under the SLORC/SPDC years gradually increased over the 2011-2020 decade. Estimated to be around 1.3% of the total government expenses during the late years of the SPDC, the education budget accounted for about 5% in 2015-2016 and reached 8.41% (2.685 billion kyats) for 2019-2020. The nominal value of the budget increase between the 2011-2012 and 2019-2020 fiscal years was almost nine-fold. Despite this dramatic increase the education budget was still comparing unfavorably to those of most Southeast Asian countries, priorities being many and the gaps to cover being so important in such a post-dictatorship context.33 Nonetheless, this increasing education budget in the context of a process of political and social reforms contributed to many positive developments including in schooling enrollments, teachers’ salaries, student-teacher ratio, and pedagogy. Available figures relate a massive increase in the number of government schools within the national territory (47,005 in 2019 against 39,676 in 2011), as well as school teachers (404,444 in 2019 against 277,645 in 2011) and primary net enrollments (from 87.6% in 2009-2010 to an estimated 97% in 2017-2018, Table 1).34

49Prior to these developments under successive USDP (2011-2015) and NLD (2015-2021) governments, the Thein Sein administration launched in 2012 the Comprehensive Education Sector Review (CESR), which involved the Ministry of Education, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank, and donors such as AusAID and Department for International Development (DFID), and which aimed at producing a comprehensive education plan. Later in October 2013, a parallel committee coined the Education Promotion Implementation Committee (EPIC), and with much less foreign influence, was constituted in Yangon by the President’s Office (South and Lall, 2016, Ye Htut, 2019).

50In September 2014, a National Education Law (NEL) was enacted, shaped by the CESR and EPIC and largely amended by the parliament. This enactment reawakened the tradition of civic engagement within the realm of education, sparking an episode of student protest all over the country in the following months until a police crackdown in March 2015 (Ye Htut, 2019). The main grievances of the protesters were: insufficient inclusiveness of the stakeholders in the drafting process, insufficient expenditures on the education sector, not enough decentralization of the education system, not enough autonomy for higher education institutions,35 and not enough inclusion of ethnic minority languages in formal education.36 These demands led to a few compromises, including a (rather vague) aim at ultimately allocating 20% of State total expenditure to education (article 31a), in a June 2015 amended version of the law.

51A National Education Strategic Plan (NESP) for the time period of 2016-2021 was also launched following the CESR, with much of its development having occurred under the previous USDP administration. Organized around nine transformational shifts, the NESP put forward an ambitious roadmap for sector-wide reforms toward improving quantity (i.e. access) and quality at all levels of the national education system. In practice, improvements to basic education were prioritized above other levels and subsectors of education, which is perhaps justifiable given the scale and compulsory nature of basic education and the fact that the MoE oversees basic education alone whereas other sub-sectors have other ministries playing key roles, including the Ministries of Labour, Immigration, and Population, of Border Affairs, of Social Welfare, and of Religious Affairs and Culture.

52In 2017, a new national curriculum covering 12 years of primary and secondary education and produced with the support of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Asia Development Bank (ADB) started being released year by year (a process that concluded only in 2023, with the introduction of the Grade 12 curriculum). While making very significant steps in terms of fostering shifts away from rote learning pedagogy, this curriculum has been described as still largely “Bamar-centric” (Metro, 2019). This is particularly noticeable when it comes to history, with an enduring emphasis on the great warrior kings, which does not constitute a major departure from the previous curricula, apart from the addition of more colorful illustrations (Fig. 14).37 Other noteworthy role models included Queen Shinsawpu, Aung San, and U Thant, the first for being both female and Mon, and the two others for having their symbolic heritage at least partly associated with direct contestation of military rule.

Identity and language-in-education policy

57Parallel to negotiations that rapidly stalled for the 2015 National Ceasefire Agreement, as well as rather clumsy and counterproductive moves from the NLD in terms of national identity symbols,45 issues surrounding recognition, support, and bridging between Ethnic Basic Education Providers (EBEPs, including the education departments of some EAOs) and the State education system continued to generate deep frustrations. The relationships between these EBEPs (which catered to an estimated 300,000 in the late 2010s) and the MoE were contingent upon many factors, including the shifting relations of the various EAOs with the army and the State. Unlike with the New Mon State Party (NMSP) education system, for instance, the resurgence of conflict between the army and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) greatly compromised educational bridging, after the ceasefire signed in 1994 broke in 2011. Each group situation was specific, and potentially shifting: following a ceasefire agreement in 2012, the Karen National Union (KNU), historically among the earliest and staunchest opponents to the Myanmar army (a role that it recovered after the 2021 coup, Chapters 2 and 3), had established “joint administration” with the Myanmar Ministry of Education in up to around 50% of its 1,500 schools during the 2012-2021 period, teaching different combinations of its Karen Education and Culture Department (KECD) and Myanmar MoE curricula (Jolliffe and Speers Mears, 2016; Thako and Waters, 2023).

58Slow but significant developments were also progressively unfolding in government schools (which provided education to a total of about nine million students including 5 million primary school children in the late 2010s) in terms of language-in-education policy, in the context of a slow but tangible decentralization process, and the emergence of State/Region Governments and Parliaments as important local political actors. In 2012, the first announcement of the reintroduction of ethnic minority languages in government schools was not followed by any spectacular shifts, by any standards. However, the 2014-2015 National Education Law, which provided for the teaching of ethnic minority languages as subjects, as well as their use as “classroom language” (i.e. oral media of instruction) and for making States and Regions in charge of implementing these teachings (in collaboration with State/Region level MoE offices and local Literature and Culture committees), paved the way for more noteworthy developments in the second half of the 2010s.

59In 2019-2020, according to the MoE and Regional administration figures, over 750,000 children nationwide were being taught 64 languages and counting by nearly 25,000 instructors (Table 2 and Fig. 16). These languages were taught as subjects for three periods per week within school hours in most cases (unlike what was happening earlier in the 2010s). Teaching Assistant (TA) positions were created for the ethnic minority language teachers, among other measures, to encourage the nurturing of teachers from the more remote geographic areas, in order to contribute to tackling the language barrier issue. Within the framework of the State/Region Local curricula development (aiming at 15% of the overall curriculum), “Local Knowledge” curricula were drafted in 2019-2020 for five pilot States (Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah and Mon), with the purpose of teaching these textbooks two periods per week in primary schools, in addition to the three periods dedicated to ethnic minority languages. Their content, drafted by the local Literature and Culture Committees in collaboration with the MoE and with the support of UNICEF, was mainly about local groups’ histories and cultures.46

Figure 14: Illustration of a lesson on King Bayinnaung, “unifying the national races,” in the Grade 2 textbook of the new Social Studies curriculum.

Figure 15: Pau Kam Hau, one of the Chin historical leaders featured in the (draft) Chin State “Local Knowledge” textbooks, produced in 2019–2020.

60The unfolding of this policy certainly faced several challenges and limitations. Language inclusion in the schools was limited to “national races/ethnic nationalities” (တိုင်းရင်းသား) and thus excluded Chinese, Indian, and Rohingya languages. Many actors in the realm of education had been asking for more ambitious language-in-education developments, such as Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). In many cases, and particularly in the most linguistically heterogeneous geographies of the country, the process of deciding which varieties are ‘languages’ and thereby worthy of being introduced in schooling, or mere ‘dialects’ and so with a less formal status, was more or less contentious. Projects to standardize language and promote ‘common’ languages or scripts were numerous and rarely devoid of opponents with different perspectives on identity and linguistic priorities. Schools in urban settings, often gathering students with more diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, often constituted challenges in terms of which languages should be prioritized.47 Finally, when it comes to the teaching of ethnic histories and cultures, the inclusion of local role models (စံပြပုဂ္ဂိုလ်, Fig. 15) – an approach echoing the education of colonial days, as well as the national history curriculum and its emphasis on the great Burman warrior kings – sometimes sparked controversies among local groups, with one’s group hero being at times, precisely, the neighboring group’s villain.48

Figure 16: Teaching of Rawang language in a government school, Myitkyina, 2019.49

Table 2: Languages officially taught – as subjects – in government schools of the different States/Regions, in 2019-2020.50

State/Region	Languages taught
Kachin State (11)	Jinghpaw, Lachit, Lisu, Tai Leng, Tai Leu, Rawang, Lohwo, Zaiwa, Tai Sar, Shan (Tai Long), Tai Khamti
Kayah State (6+)	Kayah, Kayaw, Gaybar, Tai Long, Kayan, Sgaw (+ Pa-o, Yintelay and Manumanaw)
Kayin State (12)	Sgaw, Western Pwo, Eastern Pwo, Pakanyaw, Mon, Pa-O, Kayan, Kayaw, Gaybar, Bwe, Shan, Lekwekaw
Chin State (20+)	Hakha, Mara, Falam, Hualngo, Tedim, Zo, Thado, Cho, Matupi, Zotung, Upu, Daai, Yindu, Ya, Khumi, Lautu, Lemi, Hkongso, Mro…
Sagaing (17)	Shan Ni, Tai long, Kayanyuyan naga, Thado, Falam, Hakha, Tedim, Rushaing, Zo, Hualngo, Makuri Naga, Kyakya, Tankon, Pannyon, Lainyaung, Kognet, Gonwanponyo
Tanintharyi (3)	Swaw, Mon, Pwo
Bago (East) (7)	Sgaw, Mon, Pa-O, Asho Chin, Shan, Kayah, Kayin
Bago (West) (3)	Sgaw, Asho, Shan
Magway (6)	Asho, Upu, Hakha, Cho, Daai, Zotung
Mandalay (2)	Shan, Lisu
Mon State (4)	Sgaw, Eastern Pwo, Mon, Pa-O
Rakhine State (6)	Rakhine, Chin, Upu, Sontu Chin, Asho Chin, Thet
Yangon (4)	Sgaw, Shan, Asho Chin, Westen Pwo
Shan State (South) (8)	Shan, Pa-O, Palaung, Lisu, Kayan, Kayah, Kayaw, Lahu
Shan State (East) (5)	Shan, Lahu, Akha, Wa, Kachin
Shan State (North) (6)	Shan, Wa, Lahu, Palaung, Kachin, Lisu
Ayeyarwady (5)	Sgaw, Pwo Kayin, Rakhaing, Asho Chin
Naypyidaw (3)	Kayan (Gekho), Asho Chin, Sgaw

Main takeaways of Chapter 1

• Throughout Myanmar’s successive historical eras, the realm of education has continuously played multiple and critical roles in terms of reinforcing or challenging political legitimacies, as well as in defining and inculcating multiple senses of belonging.
• The colonial era has been particularly defining in that regard, through (1) the importation of the idea of a nation-state delimited by linear borders; (2) a divide-and-rule strategy laying the foundations of conflicts that remain unresolved to this day; (3) a decisive contribution to the emergence of radical Burman nationalist movements; and (4) the entrenchment of conceptions of belonging according to essentialized racial (and later ‘ethnic’) categories in the realm of politics, which is in contrast to the ‘mutli-layeredness’ and relative fluidity of these senses of belongings as experienced by individuals throughout space and time.
• While quantitative access to education has undeniably progressed since the country’s independence, the military regimes that ruled between 1962 and 2011 have largely used the education sector as a political tool, both to defuse perceived threats and to consolidate their power. These priorities have had consequences in terms of quality (i.e. the prioritization of rote-learning over any kind of ‘critical thinking’) and in terms of identity (i.e. the inculcation of a Burman-centered monolithic national narrative and the sidelining of ethnic identities and languages).
• The 1988 uprising, while not successful in terms of ending military dictatorship, constitutes a defining episode of the country’s history, including in terms of the power struggle between the military and the rebellious education sector. This episode has largely influenced the 2021 protests (Chapter 2), and similar patterns are striking, such as the junta’s playbook to bring the education sector to heel or protestors fleeing to EAO territories and borderlands to be involved in the armed struggle as well as education initiatives.
• With the end of the socialist era, the education sector noticeably evolved under the SLORC/SPDC (1988-2011), with the gradual reappearance or expansion of a number of complements or alternatives to government schools – which will be of critical importance in the post-2021 context – such as monastic education, private education, Chinese education, as well as the progression of ‘ethnic’ education systems, typically more or less directly connected to an EAO, following the rounds of ceasefires of the 1990s.
• Before being abruptly ended by the coup, the 2011-2020 decade witnessed important reforms taking place at uneven paces. As far as education is concerned, while numerous frustrations remained, significant developments regarding quantitative access were undeniable, and the inclusion of ethnic cultures and languages in public education was making slow but noticeable progress, in the context of the development of local curricula under each State and Region, and parallel to increasing contact between ethnic education providers and the MoE.
• The Covid-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on Myanmar society in general and its education sector in particular, but it also decisively contributed to the mastery of online platforms and digital tools that would prove to be of critical importance following the coup of February 2021, in the realm of education and far beyond.