Ownership of Education Reforms in the Kyrgyz Republic: Kto V Dome Hozyain?

Abstract

An important subset of issues involved in describing the process of educational globalization emerges when considering the reception, response and/or rejection of international proposals, ideologies and agents by indigenous national and regional educators. This case study describes and discusses how foreign/Western education proposals and policies were solicited and then responded to by educators in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, now an independent country, between 2001 and 2004. It also discusses the pivotal role of one key figure in the process, the former minister of education in Kyrgyzstan, now responsible for a large World Bank project to improve rural education in that country. A powerful figure both in her own nation and in the eyes of foreign sponsors, both American and European, her biography continues to illustrate both possibilities and tensions between the former education system and international hopes and designs for school reform in the Kyrgyz Republic.