The global push to expand formal education, particularly primary and secondary schooling, originated with human capital theory (Becker 1993; Schultz 1961). Human capital theory specifies several plausible outcomes as products of the expansion of formal education such as economic growth and poverty reduction. Furthermore, it hypothesizes that the expansion of formal education has a profound effect on economic and social inequalities. Woo (1991); Birdsall, Ross, and Sabot (1995); Lewin (1998); and Mingat (1998) indicated that the high-achieving East and Southeast Asian economies of Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand are examples of countries that experienced rapid economic growth and a dramatic decline in poverty because of the expansion of formal education, among other factors. Morris (1996) stated that the most significant feature of high-achieving East and Southeast Asian economies, with respect to formal education and its accrued benefits, was the near universalization of primary schooling and the timely expansion of secondary schooling.
Many developing countries viewed the model utilized by these East and Southeast Asian economies as a template for replication. Consequently, these countries allocated considerable financial resources to universalize primary schooling and expand secondary schooling in an attempt to duplicate the outcomes experienced by the high-achieving East and Southeast Asian economies. However, while many of these developing countries experienced similar outcomes, disparity intensified within each country due to an unequal distribution of the benefits of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction. In several cases, the divide between the elite and the masses grew considerably. Under such conditions, it may be easy to view formal education as culpable in some contexts where the elite designed formal education to maintain, replicate, and augment economic and social inequalities instead of eliminating them. While this may be accurate for some countries, for most developing countries the benefits of economic growth and reduced poverty did not reach the masses because of an unequal distribution of formal education.
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Rew, W.J. (2008). Provincial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Education: A Descriptive Study of Vietnam. In: Holsinger, D.B., Jacob, W.J. (eds) Inequality in Education. CERC Studies in Comparative Education, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2652-1_13
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