Paradoxical moments in children’s contemporary lives: Childhoods in East Asia

Abstract

What is childhood in an East Asian context? How have conditions of living and learning come to constitute children’s lifeworlds to elucidate social, cultural, economic, political, and education realities concerning ways of being in childhood? Seeking to understand the complexity of children’s lifeworlds as well as to unpack the hopes and fears for children’s being and becoming at the present and in the future, paying critical attention to the multiple definitions of the child and childhood across different spaces and places (i.e., home, school, community/society), this chapter offers an alternative reconceptualization of the dangers and limits of the global romanization of East Asian children’s academic performance and achievement