The period surrounding and including the Second World War shaped the postindependence educational landscape in Cambodia. With the dawning of the belief that receiving a modern education would offer the prospect of upward social mobility, the queues at the enrollment desks of Cambodia’s public schools steadily lengthened. Increased demand resulted in unchecked expansion, constrained only by the financial ca-pacity of the administration; problems were augmented, and the first UNESCO education advisers arrived in Cambodia.16 The extent to which their recommendations were adopted, and often ignored, is a re-curring theme throughout this chapter.
In the years preceding the war, the prospect of upward social mobil-ity motivated many Cambodians to demand access to modern educa-tion. Unfortunately for these people, the French were unwilling to meet the demand. The 1936/1937 report of the head of the colonial Educa-tional Service noted that “schools have been attended . . . by a total of
17,725 pupils,” before concluding that “these figures are nothing com-pared to what they would be if we were in a position to satisfy all requests for admittance.”17
The threat to the French administration caused by the war saw them begrudgingly begin to address the increased popular desire for educa-tion. The impetus for demand for the expansion of educational facili-ties came not only from among the peasantry and those who believed they would personally benefit from such provision but also from selected members of the Cambodian elite who believed that modern education would enhance the development of the country. An example was Si-hanouk’s enduring ally, Nhiek Tioulong, who was the governor of Kom-pong Cham province between 1939 and 1945. During a period of tenure overshadowed by the Second World War, the number of primary educa-tion graduates in his province increased from nine annually to over ninety.18Figures such as these were reflected throughout the country.
The Japanese occupation of Indochina and the subsequent modus vivendi of 1946, which moved Cambodia further in the direction of in-dependence, saw control of the Ministry of Education transferred to Cambodians. Government expenditure on education provides clear ev-idence of the emphasis the new indigenous Cambodian educational ad-ministration placed on expansion, increasing from an outlay of only 984,900 piastres in 1938 to over 165 million by 1952.19
With expansion came problems and the first evidence of the possi-bility of an emerging educational crisis. Speaking in 1952 about expen-diture on public education, King Sihanouk stated:
For these socially and culturally useful projects, which are of such vital importance for the kingdom, I must admit that we are sadly lacking in funds. To be frank, I have no great hope of improving this lamentable situation to any appreciable extent.20
Yet it was not only financial constraints that troubled the administration.
There was a high number of adult illiterates; poor attendance by girls at school; widespread difficulties in communications; a scattered popula-tion distribupopula-tion; the problems of hygiene and water supply within edu-cational facilities; and of course, a severe shortage of adequately trained educational personnel.21
It was within this context that the first UNESCO experts were sent to Cambodia to study the problems in education and to make recom-mendations for the future. The UNESCO report, written during a pe-riod when there existed no significant body of literature on the negative
aspects of the colonial legacy in education, applauded the progress made in the development of education in Cambodia. It praised the foundation of the Cambodian system on the French model, “which is one of the best organized in the world,” stating that “Cambodia could indeed be regarded as an example [to other developing nations].”
Although critics could later argue that its faith in the French educa-tional model reeked of neocolonialism, the UNESCO report’s key rec-ommendations were insightful. In the first place, the report advised that educational expansion be tempered so as to be affordable and to pro-vide time for the development of necessary resources; and second, it ad-vised that the school curriculum be read-vised to adapt to the needs of Cambodia. The report concluded that the “final curriculum is thus bound to differ appreciably from that of Western countries.” UNESCO’s primary concern was with the attainment of compulsory education in Cambodia, a stated ambition of the Cambodian government. While agreeing that providing all children with a certain minimum of educa-tion was “a laudable ambieduca-tion,” the report sternly warned that “it would be Utopian to attempt enforcing such a system immediately . . . The ef-fort would be beyond the country’s power.”22
UNESCO’s proposals were embraced by the Cambodian Ministry of Education during a period of heightened political instability. Sihanouk went abroad attempting to gain support for his “Royal Crusade”; much of the countryside was in conflict as the Communist-backed Issarak (in-dependence) movement attempted their own campaign to dislodge the French; the Geneva conference of 1954 contributed to wider regional uncertainty; and the ensuing election campaign was among the most colorful, and violent, in Cambodian history.23 It was a climate hardly conducive to the implementation of educational policy reform, and the series of UNESCO-sponsored proposals, characteristic of the global ed-ucational imperatives of the period, were shelved until the domestic po-litical environment was more accommodating. The state of the Cambo-dian education system in the aftermath of the elections was succinctly summed up by one observer with the following remarks:
Cambodia found itself faced with too many pupils and students in crowded schools, taught by too few teachers who were inadequately prepared for their task. They used teaching approaches and methods which were copied from schools in France and which were intended to impart knowledge necessary for administrative assistants to French colonial civil servants.24
In other words, educational demand outweighed supply, curricula were irrelevant, the quality of instruction was inadequate, and there was in-creasing disparity between the education system and the national econ-omy. An educational crisis was already looming in Cambodia and, it should be noted, elsewhere in the states of the newly independent world.