The “Kampuchean problem” continued to represent a most important foreign policy issue in Southeast Asia during the 1980s. The CGDK, led by Prince Sihanouk, dominated by the Khmer Rouge, and funded by the United States, ASEAN, and China, continued to represent Cambodia at the UN and continued its attempts to disrupt the Vietnamese-backed socialist government in Phnom Penh. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascen-dancy in the USSR throughout the 1980s, Soviet support for the Viet-namese regime, and therefore Cambodia, began to wane. As pressure
mounted for a reconciliation between Vietnam and ASEAN, the winds of regional change increasingly affected the Cambodian climate. Al-though still occasionally a theme in the rhetoric of the PRK regime, by 1989 socialism was all but a faded memory on the Cambodian political and economic landscape. The education system again became a victim of shifting state priorities and a renewed Cambodian state ideology.
The reorientation of the Cambodian state was evident as early as 1985. The first signs of the shift had come before the KPRP’s Fifth Party Congress. After the surprise death of Prime Minister Chan Si in Decem-ber 1984, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge officer and the foreign min-ister of the PRK, was elected as his replacement. The election was sig-nificant in that it reinforced a shift away from the party’s Hanoi veterans in favor of younger KPRP members, former DK officials, and those who were without revolutionary backgrounds. While the party’s allegiance to the Vietnamese had not and would not diminish, the shift signaled an increasing confidence by the Cambodian Communist movement in its capacity to independently govern Cambodia. It was a confidence em-bodied by the nonrevolutionary PRK Minister of Education Pen Navuth, who had told a French visitor to Cambodia in 1983 that “we can fend for ourselves.”63
The most significant shift in the orientation of the PRK came at the KPRP’s Fifth Party Congress in October 1985. The president of the party, Heng Samrin, announced in his political report that, for the first time since 1979, “in order to mitigate the weaknesses of the state sector,” the party would recognize private enterprise as a legitimate sector of the economy. In effect, the move merely legitimized what had been the sta-tus quo since 1979, with acute observers recognizing that a private sec-tor had been operating in Cambodia since the overthrow of the DK re-gime.64 The announcement represented the first official recognition that the task of building socialism in Cambodia was not achieving the success anticipated by the government or its Vietnamese patrons. It was a failure caused by a lack of competent cadres, a lack of cadres who be-lieved in the system, and a lack of cooperation from the Cambodian peasantry.65 In short, the goal of building socialism lacked legitimacy.
Despite what seemed a recognition that the building of a socialist state was failing, the PRK’s rhetoric, although cautious, was nonetheless de-fiant. Heng Samrin, in his speech at the Fifth Party Congress, called for
“making every effort to complete economic restoration, reorganize pro-duction, and build socialist education and culture.” He also emphasized that the state “must gradually build a national economy with socialist norms.” Samrin’s report conceded the existence of several problems in
building socialism, including a “thin and weak” organizational system that was “incomplete at district and especially at grass-roots level.”66A sympathetic observer of the PRK argued that the report indicated a
“clear implicit recognition” that the weaknesses of the party “derive from general apathy to socialist goals among the mass of the population.”67 Following the lead of Samrin, there was both defiance and caution in relation to education. In a report to a conference of Ministers of Edu-cation of Socialist Countries in November 1985, Pen Navuth declared that the essential objective of education was to “form new and good hard-working citizens with a baggage of culture, of technical awareness, of a capacity for work, of good health and of a revolutionary morality ready to serve the Kampuchean revolution.” This self-assurance was tempered, however, in noting that the apprehension of the population and distrust of Cambodia’s Vietnamese neighbors were both “problems our schools were compelled to face.”68
The education system, as it had through other periods of social tran-sition in Cambodia’s history, was left to struggle with the prospect of adjustment in a vacuum of irrelevance. While the state ideology of the PRK, both in economic and political terms, continued to promote Cam-bodia’s alignment with the Soviet-led socialist bloc and continued to reject capitalism, the movement toward a more capitalist economic ori-entation had gathered substantial momentum. The crisis in education crisis had taken another turn, again a product of the ruling regime’s ef-forts to build a Cambodian state.
The contradiction between explicit socialist rhetoric and an “unso-cialist” economic orientation saw the education system perceived as increasingly irrelevant by its users. Chea Saron, a former student of the Lycée Phnom Daun Penh, recalled learning about “socialist economic theory,” about “socialist solidarity,” and about “Marxism and Leninism”
during his senior high school years. Saron, who believed that “socialism could not work in Cambodia,” recalled his lack of interest, and that of his peers, in classes that examined or discussed the socialist cause. “We studied [these subjects] because we had no choice.” Nobody was inter-ested in socialism, Saron asserted, but it was a necessity for students who aspired to higher education. “I remember writing in my exam: ‘The Mekong river will dry up and the mountains will be crushed before sol-idarity between the Kampucheans and Vietnamese disappears.’ But I did not believe it.”69
The contradiction was also evident in relation to the study of foreign languages. Officially, the study of English and French was illegal in the PRK. Both were rejected by the regime as vestiges of imperialism.
Stu-dents were encouraged to study Vietnamese, Russian, German, and Spanish, while opportunities for higher education abroad were pro-vided in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, East Germany, and Cuba.70Despite the orientation toward these languages of the socialist world, students continued to prize a knowledge of both English and French, and a flour-ishing private industry emerged in Phnom Penh and other provincial centers catering to the increasing demand for languages the ruling re-gime was unwilling, and to be fair, unable to provide.71
The students’ perception of irrelevance was not the education sys-tem’s only problem. While the extraordinary school enrollment expan-sion of the first years of the decade had appeared to stabilize and marked improvements had been achieved, the crisis of quality contin-ued to concern education policy-makers. The supply of school text-books, supplies of basic stationery materials, and educational infra-structure all remained inadequate.72Contributing to the crisis of quality was Cambodia’s continued international isolation, with the government still denied sorely needed development assistance.
The major obstacle to improving educational quality in Cambodia re-mained the nation’s teaching corps, who were very poorly trained and poorly remunerated. Provincial teacher training facilities, where future primary school teachers were trained, were staffed by teachers whose credentials should have often failed to gain them employment as the teachers they were charged with training. Secondary teacher trainers were recycled teachers without the training, experience, or knowledge necessary to prepare future educators. In higher education, lecturers were generally either Vietnamese or Russian nationals who were poorly understood by their students, or were Cambodians who had been pro-moted from senior secondary school teaching, and who were without ei-ther a background in research or experience in the delivery of tertiary education. Lacking experience, poorly trained, and led by a ministry that was lacking the credentials to adequately administer the system, the national teaching corps was ill-prepared to cope with the clouds of change whose rains were about to flood the Cambodian countryside.