Continuing from last week’s Cuts, we proceed with our on-going examination of education in Burma, with two more texts. Cheesman, better known for his work on law in Myanmar, also has a Master’s Thesis on Myanmar educational curricula, where he looks “into the texture of text: its style, form, organisation, history and context, and not merely its contents” (2002:112). Then we have Brooke Treadwell’s 2013 dissertation that attends to how such texts are actually transmitted (by teachers) and received (by students). Her ethnography reveals, perhaps not surprisingly, that the state’s ideology was not transmitted through pliant mediators to docile recipients (see ch 5 and end of ch 4).

As a special topical bonus, last week Chu May Paing penned an article about Myanmar’s “slave education” system (“Is Neocolonial Education a Solution to ‘Military Slave Education’?”), and whether external interventions are necessarily better.