Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy

Book excerpt: This book explores critical pedagogy and issues relating to entrepreneurialism, commodification, and marketization in education, and their deleterious effects on student agency and subjectivity. The central theme of the book is a cross-border critical ethnographic study of the shadow education practices of an overseas Japanese business community in Singapore which ​d​​ra​w​s attention to the elaborate extent to which families are engaged in shadow or cram tutoring practices as part of their children’s education, supported by the strong presence of overseas branches of well-established corporate tutoring businesses headquartered in Japan. The author ultimately critiques a banking approach to education, particularly in terms of its oppressive and dehumanizing outcomes, sustained by the inner workings of neoliberal forces and mercantilist ideologies.