Of Credits, Kontrakty and Critical Thinking:

encountering ‘market reforms’ in Kyrgyzstani

higher education

MADELEINE REEVES

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of market metaphors and mechanisms on higher

education in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon recent anthropological literature on the local meanings of

market reforms in post-socialist contexts, as well as work in the field of educational policy that has

focused attention on the ‘local spaces’ in which curricular and administrative reforms are encountered,

this study will explore the ways in which languages of market have been received and appropriated by

the students, teachers and administrators who have to negotiate what Kyrgyzstani higher education

reform means in practice. Specifically, the article examines how practices and valuations of higher

education have been affected by the opening of commercial (kontraktnyie) departments in nominally

state universities, by the transformation of curricular content and teaching practice in the social

sciences, and by the severing of the Soviet-era link between higher education and guaranteed

professional employment. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation, it will suggest that

we need to move beyond the overdrawn dichotomies in which contestations over the post-Soviet

educational space are generally cast (‘East’ vs. ‘West’; ‘Tradition’ vs. ‘Innovation’) to focus on the

complex ways in which educational ‘reform’ is practised and interpreted in specific institutional

settings.

Introduction

As summer nears and Kyrgyzstan’s university students prepare for their annual round of exams, a

new kind of poster begins to appear at bus-stops, on lamp-posts and near university buildings

alongside the usual handwritten announcements of cheap accommodation and lucrative work

abroad. The goods that these posters advertise: course papers and senior theses (diplomnaya rabota)

downloaded from dedicated Internet sites, which can be purchased from photocopy shops and

Internet cafés around town. ‘Don’t do your head in!’ a typical poster reads, ‘buy your papers from

us – quick, cheap and high quality!’ Noting the surprise that these posters had prompted from the

foreigner with whom she was walking, a student from a prestigious Bishkek university

commented, with more than a hint of exasperation, ‘but you see, in Kyrgyzstan now we have a

market economy. Everything can be bought [vsyo mozhno kupit’].’ Education, her remark conveyed,

is now a commodity – so it is only to be expected that course papers are to be bought and sold as

readily as bread and meat. What else is one to expect in the current, post-Soviet environment of

cut-throat capitalism?

This article seeks to explore the processes of transformation in Kyrgyzstani higher education

over the last decade, and specifically the impact of the sudden penetration of market concepts into

a domain that was previously outside their embrace. In so doing, it seeks to make sense of the

vignette above, arguing that the proliferation of incidents in which course papers – not to mention

exams, diplomas, PhDs (kandidatskaya stepen’) and university teaching positions – are bought and

sold, must be interpreted within the context of rapid and radical commodification of education that

Kyrgyzstan has undergone since the early euphoria of independence in 1991, and the new set of

Madeleine Reeves

ethical discriminations that such transformations entail. It does so drawing upon the critique of

teleological accounts of post-socialist ‘transition’ that has been developed in the ethnographic

literature on post-socialism, and on recent work within the sphere of comparative education which

has sought to draw attention to the ‘local spaces’ within which discourses of educational ‘reform’,

‘modernization’ and ‘global integration’ are locally encountered, interpreted and potentially

contested.

Encountering a Market in Education: an ethnographic approach

Ethnographers working in post-Soviet contexts have drawn attention to the fact that triumphalist

narratives of ‘transition’ from socialism to capitalism, which have tended to dominate the social

science literature on post-Communism, rarely look so tidy when one explores post-socialist change

‘from the ground up’, starting from the local worlds that people inhabit, and the everyday

mediations of ‘reform’ that are undertaken in homes and institutions throughout this vast and

diverse region (Burrawoy & Verdery, 1999; Berdahl et al, 2000; Hahn, 2002; Mandel & Humphrey,

2002). There could be few better places for puncturing complacent predictions about the ‘end of

history’ (Fukuyama, 1992) following the collapse of Communism than the Central Asian successor

states, where the political leadership is overwhelmingly drawn from the Soviet political class, and

where the economic reforms of ‘shock therapy’ for the majority of the population have failed to

bring promised benefits (Green & Bauer, 1998; Anderson & Pomfret, 2000; Namazie, 2002). In a

powerful recent restatement of this critique, anthropologist Morgan Liu (2003, p. 2) has drawn

attention to the ways in which empirically grounded studies sensitive to ‘the actual processes of

how new institutions or values like citizenship or entrepreneurship might take root (or fail to do

so) at the level of mundane life’ can help to challenge theoretical models concerning transition that

have tend to be inductive, linear and over-generalizing: exposing, in the Central Asian context, the

‘detours from utopia’ that are occurring along the Silk Road (p. 2).

Three insights from this ethnographic literature on post-socialism are particularly salient for

the discussion of education under question. Firstly, they remind us that the ‘market’ in post-Soviet

contexts constitutes much more than simply a specific, contemporary set of economic relations,

premised upon concepts of private property and free exchange of goods and services. In a context

of radically transformed social relations that have accompanied the introduction of market

relations, it is a term that is intensely morally loaded, a metonym for the much broader replacement

of one political and economic system with another, a constitutive part of a particular ‘moral

economy’ (Booth, 1994; Sayer, 2000; Sanghera & Satybaldieva, 2004). Many authors working in the

post-socialist context have pointed to the intense ambivalence that accompanies the ‘market’: a site

of often simultaneous ‘shame and pride’ (Kaneff, 2002), opening a world of new opportunities,

whilst simultaneously erasing former economic certainties, and introducing income gulfs that were

previously unknown. In other words, ethnographic detail reminds us that the ‘market’, as both

symbol and set of practices, is always encountered in particular ways that are culturally embedded,

and that the resonance of this term in states where market activity was formerly banned is likely to

be very different from the valence it carries in the West.[1]

Secondly, ethnographic attention to the ways in which the market is mediated ‘on the

ground’ reminds us that it is never encountered as a single whole, as a tidy economic abstraction or

set of coherent, interconnected principles. The shorthand signifier that we employ is always

encountered through particular social relations, institutions, images and practices. As Mandel &

Humphrey argue (2002, p. 1) in the post-Soviet context, ‘[t]he “market” confronts people in diverse

contexts and is not experienced as a purely economic phenomenon: it might appear as a rural

privatization programme, advertisements for Western cigarettes, daily observations of growing

inequalities in poverty and nouveau wealth, or the sudden visibility of prostitution’.

Although not touched upon by these authors, the sphere of education is precisely one of

those where, in post-Soviet contexts, ordinary families come most saliently to experience ‘market

relations’. From an ethnographic point of view, whether or not what in fact exists in Kyrgyzstan is

a genuine free market in education according to the economists’ definitions is less salient than the

fact that the particular changes that ordinary people encounter in the educational sphere are

perceived as having been produced by, and being inseparable from, ‘the market’. In terms of the

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

vignette presented at the outset, for instance, it is important to ask not simply whether the student

in question was ‘correct’ to characterize the buying and selling of course papers as an integral part

of the market economy, but also to reflect on why it is that she saw the market for education in this

particular way, why it was that for her payment for course papers was to be placed within the same

ethical category as payment for university tuition. The moral and emotional valence that attaches

to market concepts, this literature reminds us, will be of profound significance for the ways in

which various ‘rational and rationalizing’ initiatives are received, in the sphere of education as

much as any other.

Thirdly, this literature enables us to reflect upon the particular ways in which much broader

discourses of educational reform promoted by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the

International Monetary Fund, the US Agency for International Development and Tacis, as well as

by a number of private foundations (notably in Central Asia, the Higher Education Support

Program of the Open Society Institute, the Eurasia Foundation and the Aga Khan Foundation), are

liable to be locally encountered when introduced to the Central Asian context. In Kyrgyzstan, as

elsewhere in the former Soviet space and beyond, the emphasis of international financial

institutions and grant giving foundations within higher education has been upon fostering

efficiency, market responsiveness, demand-driven regulation of student intakes, target setting and

testing as mechanisms for quality control, ‘democratization’ of educational administration through

the establishment of boards of trustees, greater transparency of accounting procedures and a

lessening of ministerial control over curricular content.[2] In this sense, then, the discourse of

higher education ‘marketization’ being promoted in Kyrgyzstan differs little from that circulating

elsewhere: the ‘big policies’ of which Ball (1998) speaks are being seeded here, too, with their

central emphasis on ‘the commodification of knowledge’ (p. 128). The World Bank’s influential

Country Brief on Kyrgyzstan, for instance, states emphatically that ‘adjusting the skills of the Kyrgyz

people to a market economy remains one of the main challenges of successful economic

transformation’ (World Bank, 2002, p. 2): educational reform, marketization and global

competitiveness discursively constituted as essential and interdependent elements of a successful

post-Soviet ‘transition’.

What an ethnographic literature reminds us, however, is that although the discourses may

themselves be at least aspirationally ‘global’, the contexts in which they are encountered and

adopted are profoundly varied. Of particular importance for reflecting on the Kyrgyzstani case is

the fact that marketization within education is being promoted at a time when the ‘market’ more

broadly, as a particular set of mechanisms for regulating the economy, is being worked out from

scratch, its merits in relation to the planned economy of the past subject to ongoing and sustained

critique. What one finds, then, is not simply the transfer of an existing set of mechanisms and

concepts that have previously regulated other domains relatively uncontested (business, the

financial industry, etc.) to a new sphere, but rather the introduction of these concepts into

education at a time when the much broader ‘market economy’ is only hesitantly and partially

beginning to take root. This means that educational reform is not, as in Western Europe, merely

experimenting with concepts already circulating (and often dominant) in society: in the post-Soviet

context, it is actively constituting what the market is and what it is understood to be for ordinary

citizens. Education has become one of the loci, par excellence, for trying to ‘create’ the market,

both through the commodification of educational provision, and, more didactically, through the

transformation of educational content. In contrast to the marketization of education in established

market economies, then, we encounter not merely the ‘seepage’ of concepts from one sphere to

another, and specifically from management and economics to education (Ball, 1998, pp. 122-123).

What one finds, more radically, is education becoming a central medium through which ordinary

citizens encounter a particular – and often profoundly contorted – articulation of what in practice

‘the market’ is, with declining educational standards a common popular index of the ways in which

the market has ‘failed us’.

Theorizing Education’s ‘Local Spaces’

Ethnography’s emphasis upon the local, and its attention to the ‘social lives’ (Appadurai, 1986) that

objects and concepts can acquire when transferred to new cultural settings, are paralleled by a new

Madeleine Reeves

current of theorizing within the sphere of comparative education. This has sought to engage with

broader theoretical questions about the impact of globalization upon higher education (see, for

example, Burbules & Torres, 2000; Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002, for recent overviews), and specifically

the introduction of new managerial styles and market concepts (Welch, 1998; Hatcher, 2001), by

paying attention to the ‘local spaces’ within which such concepts are implemented and negotiated,

as well as potentially challenged and subverted. What emerges from this literature, which has

sought to be grounded ‘within the co-ordinates of the living’ (Cheesman, 2003, p. 45, quoting

Stenhouse, 1979, p. 5), sensitive to actual educational practice rather than the abstractions of

‘global-speak’, is attention to the importance of context, diversity and ambivalence for

understanding the various local outcomes in which global educational discourses result. Thus, for

instance, Michael Welmond’s study of ‘globalization viewed from the periphery’ has focused on

teacher identity in Benin to explore how and when the particular conceptions of teacher role

inspired by the rationalizing edlib initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s contrast with indigenous

understandings of teaching, using this empirical study to draw far-reaching conclusions about the

way in which imported discourses of ‘efficiency’ can be locally contested (Welmond, 2002). Sally

Findlow (2001) has explored in the context of a survey of debates within Emirati higher education

the ways in which discourses and practices perceived to be ‘Western’ are respectively appropriated

and challenged by different bodies of teachers within a given institution. She thereby urges us to

refine accounts positing a clash between a dichotomized ‘local’ and ‘global’, ‘tradition’ and

‘reform’, suggesting that we recognize the ways in which multiple discourses of reform and

imported models (and not just from the West) circulate in the policy sphere, as they do in society

more generally. From a different perspective, Nick Cheesman (2003) has shown how the

contemporary Burmese state, whilst ostensibly distancing itself from previous, religious modes of

educational organization, actually appropriates much of that past, employing it for the sake of very

modern nation building goals. Locating ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in the Burmese educational

context are thus far from simple undertakings.

Such empirical investigations bring to the fore the fact that whilst globalizing forces are

profoundly affecting the style and management of education across the globe, through the

interventions of international donor organizations, major lending banks and regional blocs

(Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Arab League, etc.), the relationship is not a simple

unidirectional or uncontested one. As Sampson (1996) reminds us, not just economic objects but

concepts, projects and idioms take on social lives in new settings that may be very different from

those they had at their site of production. This raises, of course, an important question for the

comparative study of globalization and education: how, theoretically, do we attempt to grasp the

relationship between global discourse and local practice? As Carnoy & Rhoten ask (2002, p. 2), ‘if

knowledge and information, usually transmitted and shaped by national and local institutions, are

fundamental to the development of the global economy, and the global economy, in turn, shapes

the nature of educational opportunities and institutions, how should we draw the directional

arrows in our analysis?’

In a recent paper, Nafsika Alexiadou & Ken Jones (2001) have sought to address this paradox

by invoking the ideas of ‘travelling policy’ and ‘local spaces’ to account for the impacts that global

policies have when transferred to local contexts. They have sought to go beyond an account of

globalization as a set of unidirectional impacts upon passive and monolithic local spaces to suggest

how the global and the local interact in particular, and culturally embedded, ways. Specifically,

they have argued that in considerations of the impact of globalization upon educational policy, it is

not enough simply to invoke a neat dualism between the ‘national’ and the ‘global’. There may be

instances, for instance, when local actors invoke global discourses to challenge the agendas of

national governments (2001, p. 3), suggesting that we need to complicate models premised on neat

dichotomies between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ agendas, and homogenous interests across all regions

and institutions.

Perhaps more significantly, discourses that are generated in one particular historical or

cultural context can come to acquire very different ‘lives’ and be used to support very different

agendas when they are invoked elsewhere. Jones, for instance, has explored how a language of

‘creativity’, marginalized for decades in British educational policy, has been appropriated by the

New Labour Government to support a very specific neo-liberal agenda in which competitiveness is

central. What one witnesses since the late 1990s, according to Jones, ‘[is] the installation of a

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

“creativity” deemed central by sections of business to competitive success in a world construed as

fast-changing and unpredictable’. This rhetoric of fast capitalism ‘was adopted by organizations

seeking to modify what was seen as an inflexible, tradition-centred national curriculum’ (Jones,

2001, p. 9). There is, of course, a certain irony in this situation: in the act of appropriation,

‘creativity’ has been transformed from an element of progressive pedagogy, rooted in

understandings of rounded, humanistic development, into a thoroughly instrumental tool for

fostering a more competitive, flexible workforce: ‘[t]he rhetoric of fast capitalism and those of

educators combine to confirm each other: the business world, the learner, the teacher and the

school all need “creativity”’ (p. 9).

A sensitive analysis of globalization’s impact upon higher education, then, must remain

cognisant of irony, ambivalence, and the possibility of contradictory outcomes. It is in this spirit

that the following analysis of Kyrgyzstani higher education is presented. It focuses empirically upon

three particular processes that have been associated with the label of ‘reform’ in the Kyrgyzstani

context: the introduction of fee paying (kontrakt) places at university; the reconfiguring and

‘streamlining’ of curricula with the introduction of a credit hours system of assessment; and the

rigorous promotion by a variety of external grant giving agencies of ‘critical thinking’ as the means

of fostering what one Kyrgyzstani educator has proudly called ‘citizens of a new type’, capable of

thriving in a radically changed political and economic environment (Sharshekeeva, 2001). It draws

upon participant observation over two years in both private and state universities in Kyrgyzstan, as

an instructor in English and lecturer in sociology, as well as upon both structured and unstructured

interviews with a number of Kyrgyzstani teachers, students and administrators whose work, day to

day, involves negotiating the practical reality of ‘market reforms’ in higher education. Its aim is

thus less to provide a comprehensive overview of reform agendas and programmes in the Kyrgyz

Republic, which have been provided elsewhere [3], than to focus upon the ways in which particular

initiatives have been encountered and mediated in specific ‘local spaces’.

In so doing, the article aims to present a different perspective from that typically encountered

in the policy literature on higher educational reform in Central Asia. Studies of post-Soviet

education have tended to focus less on how particular initiatives have been, or might be, locally

encountered and potentially challenged, than on providing prescriptions for reform, thereby

privileging the perspective of the state over that of the teachers, students and administrators who

have to negotiate what ‘reform’ means in practice. In the idiom of Alexiadou & Jones (2001), they

have tended to assume that ‘travelling policies’ encounter more or less homogenous and passive

‘local spaces’ in the post-Soviet region, such that reforms that have successfully been introduced in

one region (for instance, in the Baltic states) can be easily replicated elsewhere (say, in Central

Asia). What results from such accounts is an often overdrawn dichotomy between ‘authoritarian’

and ‘liberal’ models of education, or a questionable faith in the capacity of English-language

instruction, the charging of fees or the expansion of information technologies magically to

transform the kind of education that is received (Kitaev, 1994; Hare & Lugachev, 1999; El Nassar,

2002). This case study of Kyrgyzstan will argue that a great deal more sensitivity needs to be given

to the local meanings of the market if reforms that are conducted in its name are not to result in

failure.

The Perils of ‘Reform’: the Soviet transformation of education and its legacy

Kyrgyzstan is a post-Soviet, Central Asian state that in August 2001 celebrated a decade of

independence. As a small, mountainous country surrounded by much larger, resource-rich

neighbours, Kyrgyzstan’s immediate post-independence trajectory was one of rapid economic

liberalization and political democratization, through the introduction of competitive elections and

the toleration of political opposition. However, a decade into a ‘transition’ that appears, in popular

imagination, to have ‘transited’ only backwards to an age of poverty and arbitrary rule,

Kyrgyzstan’s initially rosy image in Western foreign policy circles has been severely tarnished, and

its record on human rights and rule of law have been subjected to increasingly trenchant critique

from foreign analysts and academics.[4]

Debates over higher education, and educational reform more generally, have tended to

mirror these broader political trends. Although it is difficult to identify a single, linear trajectory of

Madeleine Reeves

post-independence educational policy in Kyrgyzstan (the tenure of individual education ministers

has averaged little over a year since the country’s independence and they have espoused far from

unanimous conceptions of reform) [5], it is fair to say that initial expectations about the rapid

transformation of the educational sphere and the gradual displacement of older rectors with

younger, foreign-trained academics have largely failed to materialize. Indeed, there is frequent

reference to the educational ‘crisis’ in which Kyrgyzstan now finds itself, one that encompasses not

only the dramatic decline in funding for education that accompanied Soviet collapse, but a much

broader uncertainty about appropriate educational ‘values’ to be promoted in a state that is still in

the process of defining its relationship to the Soviet past.

To understand the present contestations over higher educational reform in Kyrgyzstan, it is

important to contextualize this within the Soviet legacy for education in Central Asia. Prior to the

1917 Revolution, education in Kyrgyzstan consisted of conservative religious schools, reformoriented

Jadid schools run by liberal Muslims who were calling for the appropriation of ‘new’,

European teaching methodologies, and a small number of Russian Imperial schools to teach the

children of the colonial administrators and their local aides in Russian. There were no institutions

of higher education, and overall literacy rates were in single figures. According to official statistics,

literacy rates in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic increased from 3.5% in 1924 to 57.1% in 1935,

and by the end of the 1980s, were close to 100% (Dzhumanaliev, 2002, p. 275). It is fair to say,

therefore, that higher education in Kyrgyzstan is a Soviet creation, as are the provision of universal

primary education and the virtual elimination of illiteracy by the post-war era.[6] In popular

discourse, although there is considerable post-perestroika recasting of the Soviet experience as a

period of colonial administration, there is almost universal consensus that one of the areas in which

incorporation into the Soviet Union undoubtedly contributed to the progressive transformation of

Kyrgyz society was that of education. The education system, together with the successful provision

of primary health care, is commonly identified in Kyrgyzstani political discourse as having been

critical in propelling Kyrgyzstan from a ‘backward’, nomadic country into a ‘civilized’, modern

Soviet republic (Akaev, 1995). As the introduction to a recent text on the history of Kyrgyz

statehood asserts:

it was with entry into the union of socialist republics that the Kyrgyz people began to occupy

their deserved place in the development of contemporary civilization ... The great events

achieved during the course of the cultural revolution brought about an increase in the level of

education of the population and the appearance of the first professional troops [otriady] of the

national intelligentsia. (Dzhumanaliev, 2003, p. 5)

Soviet education, in other words, is what brought us ‘civilization’. Dismantling that system,

therefore, is considerably more complex, and marked with considerably more ambivalence, than in

many other post-Soviet states, where a pre-Communist educational tradition can more easily be

located to legitimize contemporary educational experiments, and where initiatives to ‘democratize’

the educational system can be more easily articulated as the return to a pre-Soviet ‘state of

normalcy’, rather than the imposition of something radically new. In the context of uncertainty

over Kyrgyzstan’s future political identity, it is easy for fears to emerge that innovation will

necessarily represent the imposition of something inauthentic and alien. ‘Reform’ has often come

to be seen in this context as a popular shorthand for ‘destruction’. As one Kyrgyzstani journalist

commented after the introduction of university entrance tests loosely modelled on the American

SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in 2002:

Can’t you see what’s happening?! It’s the Americanization of our life ... And in order that the

process works successfully, what do you need to start with? Of course, with education, with

youth, into whose heads it is easier to force American or some other standards. But who said that

the American system of education is better than our tried and tested [ustoiavsheisiia i proverennoi

vremenem] Russian one? (Domagal’skaia, 2002b, p. 4)

Likewise, the Dean of Humanities at Bishkek’s prestigious Slavonic University, during discussion

concerning the same testing scheme, emphasized in interview his displeasure at the

‘Americanization’ of the education system, carried out under the guise of ‘integration’ and

‘internationalization’:

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

We’ve been borrowing [my vziali na prokat] American values. But different countries have

different values ... This is the kind of unattractive [neprigliadnyi] influence that we fall under

when we haven’t determined our own educational priorities. We are liable to abandon all that

we had accumulated that was good.[7]

Soviet-era higher education in Kyrgyzstan mirrored that of other Union republics in terms of

structure, content and educational philosophy. As elsewhere in the Soviet space, the tasks of

teaching and research were accorded to universities and academies of science respectively, such

that universities were primarily concerned with producing new cadres who had assimilated a

particular body of knowledge (their spetsial’nost’) and who were then qualified to work in

designated professional fields. Curricula were classroom heavy and prescriptive, with minimal

room for optional courses or independent research work (Merrill, 2000). It is still common on the

walls of Kyrgyzstani universities to have huge display panels detailing the precise number of hours

that students studying for a particular speciality will be exposed to different topics, from the first

year of university through to the last. Higher education, in this respect, was an integral part of the

Soviet planned economy, with quotas for intake and allocation of work upon graduation; an

emphasis on the acquisition of factual material (poluchit’ znanie) rather than its critical, analytical

assessment in the manner celebrated by Western theorists of liberal education (see, for example,

Nussbaum, 1997, for an elegant defence), and a rigid hierarchical distinction between the student

and teacher. As Chad Thompson has recently argued (Thompson, 2003), such institutional and

structural factors entail a totally different role for the student than that typically encountered in the

West: concepts such as ‘peer review’, ‘plagiarism’, and ‘critical thinking’, which draw upon a

particular philosophy of education and model of the student–teacher relationship, take on

profoundly different associative lives when they are transferred to a context in which students are

not presumed to possess the credentials independently to review, author, or criticize.

Equally importantly, of course, Soviet-era higher education was prestigious, free, and, for

students of remote Union republics such as Kyrgyzia, an important agent of incorporation and

equalization into the larger Soviet polity. Quotas according to region (and, earlier, class

background) meant that bright children from poorer backgrounds really did have the chance to

benefit from the rigorous, well-financed education of the so-called ‘Central Universities’

(tsentral’nye VUZy). Many of Kyrgyzstan’s current political and intellectual elite (including President

Akaev, a Leningrad-trained physicist) are united by having been educated in Moscow, Leningrad

and Novosibirsk, universities which are now de facto out of the financial reach of all but an

extremely select few. For those who benefited from this system, the contrast with current realities

is profound. Anara, a Bishkek sociologist who studied in Russia during the turbulent years of

perestroika, lamented the change in the following way:

if in Soviet times it was enough when you were toasting someone on their birthday to wish for

them that their children study well at school, because if that were the case then their future was

taken care of, now when you say a toast, you wish them first of all money – money to pay for the

school, to pay for the university, to pay so that they can get a nice job [literally, a ‘warm place,’

teploe mestechko]. It’s not education you need to get a job now; it’s money to get an education!

What Anara’s point reminds us is that for ordinary Kyrgyzstanis, the education system has become

one of the prime sites in which ‘the market’ is encountered, even in those villages constituting the

majority of Kyrgyzstan’s population, where market ideologies may appear at first glance to have

impacted relatively little. From obligatory ‘donations’ by parents to their children’s schools to

ensure heating in winter and roof repairs, to the de facto privatization of elite ‘state’ establishments

[8], to the bribes necessary to secure a nominally merit-based ‘budget’ (budzhetnoe) place at

university, to the dramatic proliferation of institutions offering (often dubious) qualifications in

‘prestigious’ subjects, the child’s progress through the education system is an area where families

are repeatedly and often painfully confronted with the penetration of market languages and

(il)logics in an area formerly under far greater state control. This is not to deny that money

previously entered the education system, or to imply that corruption was formerly unknown (see,

for example, Ledeneva, 1998, for a thorough analysis). It is rather to suggest that the manner in

which education was perceived has changed: from a service provided by the state, as encompassing

as the state itself, it has become a commodity, the cost of which is intimately known and for which

Madeleine Reeves

huge family sacrifices are often made. As Caroline Humphrey commented of Soviet consumption,

‘[t]he idea that housing, social services, transport, education and so forth might be paid for at the

cost of producing them never entered people’s heads, if only because there was no way to know

how much this cost was’ (Humphrey, 2002, p. 131). It is precisely this new cost-awareness that

changed circumstances have brought about. The education system, like so many domains of

former state provision, has entered a new regime of value. This necessitates new practices of

ethical discrimination – a radical reconfiguration of the boundaries between ‘legitimate’ and

‘illegitimate’ ways to obtain an education and the document trail through which progress is

proven, as well as a profound reconfiguration of what is to count as ‘relevant’ knowledge for

successful functioning in this system.

From Marx to the Market: redesigning curricula

Accordingly, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most significant sites of debate about the

place of the market in contemporary Kyrgyzstani higher education has been the attempt to

‘rationalize’ the content of curricula, by purging the social sciences of the Marxist-Leninist

framework that defined the content of what was taught, and developing instead programmes that

prepare students for the ‘market economy’. Although all disciplines have been affected by this

transformation to a greater or lesser extent, the case of the social sciences is particularly revealing.

To understand the significance of the changes that these disciplines have undergone, it is worth

reflecting on the context in which they were institutionalized in Kyrgyzstan. The social sciences,

perhaps more than any other field of knowledge, were constrained during the Soviet era by their

subordination to the particular interpretive lens of historical materialism, and specifically, its

Marxist-Leninist variant. Historical materialism, according to Soviet orthodoxy, was what made the

social sciences scientific – in their bourgeois incarnation, the social sciences remained speculative,

backward-looking and conservative because they had failed to identify the laws governing social

relations; it was the recognition of the irreversible logic of production relations that alone could

give them their predictive potential. Lenin’s observations on the contribution of historical

materialism to the still-young discipline of sociology in post-revolutionary Russia are revealing in

this regard:

The idea of materialism in sociology was a marvellous one ... This approach was the first to

transform sociology into a science. Until then, sociology had difficulty in distinguishing, within

the complex network of social phenomena, those phenomena which were significant, and those

which were insignificant (that is the root of subjectivism in sociology). It couldn’t find objective

criteria for such a distinction. Materialism gave completely objective criteria for this distinction

by identifying relations of production as the structure of society and by according these relations

the universal scientific principle of replicability. In so doing, it allowed sociology to abandon

subjectivism. Whilst [sociologists] were still limited by ideological social relationships, they could

not notice the replicability and law-boundedness of social phenomena in different countries, and

their science was at best a mere description of these phenomena, a collection of raw data. (Lenin,

1997, pp. 143-144, original emphasis)

This context has significant implications for the social sciences’ current self-(re)definition in relation

to the market, and not just those contemporary departments of politologiia and sotsiologiia that have

tended to be the inheritors of the human and material resources of former kafedra of historical

materialism within Kyrgyz universities. For it raises the question of which interpretive paradigm(s)

are to be sanctioned, which discourses legitimated in a context – that of ‘post-Communism’ – which

in the Marxist reading of reality is a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility (for what can

come after Communism)? Is Marx to be rejected from the social science canon taught by university

departments, as many Kyrgyzstani sociology students assumed he should, as having been delegitimized

and therefore no longer deserving of sustained analysis? And if so, is there a temptation

for another all-encompassing interpretive framework to rush into its place, one that risks being

equally totalizing, equally reductive if imposed with sufficient force (‘rational choice’ and the ‘clash

of civilizations’ [Huntington, 2002] being perhaps the prime contenders for such a role in

contemporary Kyrgyzstani social scientific discourse)? In a context where truth was deemed to be

unitary, absolute rather than relative, can ‘theory’ be articulated in a way that is not dogmatic,

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

recognizing the contingency and partiality of the social world that it is trying to explain? Or is any

theory, as one professor of sociology commented, tainted with ideology and now to be avoided in

favour of ‘method’ – our task as social scientists to follow Von Ranke’s dictum to historians to

‘simply’ ‘tell it as it really is’? Worse, is there a danger that in the current rush to ‘purge’ the social

sciences of ideology in the post-Soviet space (as one Moscow history professor put it to Catherine

Merridale in 2000, ‘what we need is a history like yours. A history that has no ideology’ [Merridale,

2003, p. 13]), other ideologies, with their own genealogies, will fail to be identified as such?

There is a second, related sense in which the content of Kyrgyz social science programmes

has been affected by the penetration of market languages and logics. In a context where parents,

teachers, administrators and students themselves are increasingly conscious that higher education

is a financial investment from which guaranteed returns are sought, there has been increasing

pressure on departments to provide courses that fit a particular conception of ‘educational

relevance’, one that is potentially in tension with previous orthodoxies about relevant ‘content’ or

appropriate pedagogy. Should the sociology department prioritize classes in measurement

techniques and marketing over classical social theory on the basis that many of their graduates are

likely to seek employment with one of the burgeoning market research firms that have sprung up

in Bishkek upon graduation, where familiarity with SPSS is often the decisive criteria in obtaining a

job? Should departments of international relations prioritize the teaching of diplomatic protocol

over the history of political thought in the expectation that the former will increase their graduates’

employability in the country’s foreign service? And what weight should institutions attach to the

fact that parents and students are (understandably) overwhelmingly more concerned to know their

job prospects upon graduation having obtained a given spetsial’nost’, than on whether they are

likely to find a subject intrinsically interesting or theoretically challenging?

Critical Thinking as the ‘Education of the Future’

Accompanying attempts to change curricular content have been numerous initiatives to change the

whole style of teaching and learning as it is conducted in universities to place greater emphasis

upon ‘critical thinking’. The Soros Foundation in Kyrgyzstan sponsors a ‘critical thinking

laboratory’, offering classes to students and training in critical thinking for school and university

teachers; teachers from village schools are invited to seminars to ‘introduce critical thinking into

rural schools’, and many of the international organizations active in the region (notably the Aga

Khan Humanities Program, the Civic Education Project and the International Foundation for

Electoral Systems) articulate a policy that is explicitly ‘centered on the belief that democracy

requires critically minded and informed individuals’ in the words of one organization’s publicity

material, thereby placing critical thinking at the core of their work.[9] The discourse of critical skills

has also been appropriated, albeit somewhat ambivalently, into state policy. The republic-wide,

SAT-modelled test of school leavers initiated in 2002 contained sections intended specifically to test

students’ ‘critical skills’ according to the official line promoted by the Ministry of Education and

Culture at the time of their introduction.[10] The Candidate of Science dissertation of Kamila

Sharshekeeva, the Americophile, reform-oriented former minister of education who had initiated

these tests, can be described as an extended exploration of the role of a critical thinking citizenry in

fostering a vibrant civil society. As Sharshekeeva argues in the introduction to that work:

[t]he principle task of any educational institution (whether that be a pre-school, primary,

secondary or university institution) is not so much instruction [obuchenie], the presentation and

transmission of reproductive knowledge [reproduktivne znanie], but rather the acquiring of the

skills of independent, critical analytical and creative thinking, and also, no less importantly, the

creation of the conditions necessary for the receipt of such knowledge and skills. It is precisely in

this way that the whole range of atraditional, alternative and truly future-oriented educational

systems differ from the traditional ones. (Sharshekeeva, 2001, pp. 24-25)

Whilst official discourse has embraced the concept of ‘critical thinking’, aligning it, as

Sharshekeeva’s dissertation suggests, with the country’s ‘future’, what is more revealing is the

social life that this concept has acquired in the Kyrgyzstani context at the level of ordinary

university practice. For many educators, ambivalent about the dismantling of a system based on

the rigorous transmission of knowledge from educator to student, ‘critical thinking’ has become a

Madeleine Reeves

metonym for an approach that is seen to have much more to do with polemical criticism than with

informed critique. The response of a Bishkek linguistics lecturer, asked to comment on this muchvaunted

concept, is revealing in this regard:

Critical thinking? [laughs]. You know what that means? It’s when they [students] say, ‘well, I

don’t like that classification of vowels and consonants!’ ‘I don’t like Gleason’s classification!’ OK,

then give us your own system! It just won’t do if you always let people try to figure it out for

themselves. It is not in vain that we have to study these phenomena together with great minds

who have written about them. To start with, we must understand them, and then, having

listened, ask ourselves, ‘do you really have some arguments against?’ If so then please, go ahead.

Prove it. But don’t be pleased simply by the fact that he spurted out something against the

author, and showed his ‘critical orientation’.[11]

For the lecturer in question, ‘critical thinking’ was understood to be profoundly different from the

sustained, informed analysis of which he approved (in which the student first listens and reads and

then asks questions). It was a system for saying, ‘I don’t like such-and-such’, for ‘spurting out’

against all scholarly authority: an excuse for rant rather than reflection. The indignation from

Bishkek students when polemical or unjustified comments are met with question marks on essays

and comments in the margin suggest that such a perception of ‘critical thinking’ is widely shared:

‘but I thought you wanted to hear my opinion. I thought you wanted us to criticize?!’

To understand why ‘kriticheskoe myshlenie’ aroused ambivalence and occasional open hostility,

especially amongst an older cohort of teachers, it is important to pay attention to the term’s

associative lives in a previous political context. This term, like the English expression for which it is

a direct translation, draws upon a root, kritika (critique/criticism), which carries a somewhat

different associative baggage from its English equivalent. Specifically, the appropriation of this term

by a Soviet regime committed to exposing the ‘true’ laws of historical motion by fostering practices

of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ (kritika i samokritika) amongst its population, means that in the

recent Kyrgyz past kritika often had less to do with exploring disagreement on the basis of a

plurality of opinion, than on exposing positions that were officially (and hence ‘objectively’)

‘incorrect’.[12] In a context in which social science training is about the gradual exposure to the

‘true’ laws of historical motion, it follows that critique is about identifying those positions that are

objectively untrue. The kritika that you give is not expected to be perspectival – i.e. taken to be

wrong, inconsistent, logically flawed or problematic ‘from my point of view’ – but rather wrong ‘in

and of itself’. Certain positions are to be subjected to critique; others emphatically are not. The

relevant entries in the Comprehensive Soviet Encyclopaedia capture vividly this political appropriation

of the term: kritika is to be regarded ‘as an element of the class (i.e. ideological and political)

struggle’, it is ‘one of the most important means of assessing social action and of eliminating

outdated ideas and conceptions’, with the criteria for determining the concepts which should be so

exposed lying in ‘the principles of Marxist-Leninist ideology and politics, the Soviet Constitution

and socialist legality [sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’]’ (Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1950-1958,

pp. 451, 452). Critique, in this conception, is firmly subordinate to politics, rather than politics

subject to critique. It thus proves, ironically, to be as much a conservative as a radical force – aimed

at defending truths that ‘should’ be dominant within society from attack by the subversive and

flawed claims of bourgeois ideology.

This is, of course, a rather stylized sketch of one particular incarnation of kritika during the

Soviet experience. It is relevant, however, for thinking about the ambivalence of many educators

towards the vigorous promotion of ‘critical thinking’ in the current political climate of Kyrgyzstan;

the tendency to view it, as one elderly Kyrgyz historian put it in interview, as ‘just another passing

fad’, and a potentially damaging one at that. For the legacy of such a conception is that criticism is

seen as having only a tenuous relationship to the pursuit of truth, having much more to do with

attacking views that are ‘politically incorrect’ according to the priorities of the day, celebrating

‘opinion for opinion’s sake’, and riding roughshod over previous scholarly findings, than with

informed, engaged and scholarly analysis.

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

Contracts and Credits: market metaphors and their appropriation

Alongside innovations in curricular content and pedagogical approach to ‘internationalize’ the

education system and foster graduates better able to deal with post-Soviet realities, there has been a

very radical transformation of the whole market for higher education with the introduction of socalled

kontraktnyie, or fee paying places. As any glance at debates within educational policy in the

West over the last few years reminds us, the dilemma of how to finance higher education is

certainly by no means unique to the post-Soviet context. What is unique in post-Soviet societies,

however, is the speed and scale of the rupture of the previously existing nexus linking student,

university, state and future employer: the problem of financing higher education in a context such

as that of Kyrgyzstan is less one of ‘topping up’ government contributions, than of having to

replace comprehensive government funding almost entirely with student fees. Even nominally

‘state’ universities today meet only 10-15% of their budget requirements from state transfers

(Osorov, 2002), and when one takes into consideration the amount of ‘informal’ contributions that

enter the university in the form of unpaid student and teacher labour (e.g. on building projects,

gardening or building repairs) or obligatory ‘contributions’ (especially at exam time), the true

proportion of state funds as a proportion of university totals is probably even lower.

The dependence of state universities upon fee paying students means that the kontrakt

departments are under great pressure to keep enrolments up, just as the extremely competitive job

market means that students are under great pressure to stay enrolled and finish university somehow

or other (Rysalieva & Ibraeva, 1999, p. 19). Such pressures are particularly high in the commercial

departments (kontraktnoe otdelenie, literally ‘contract department’). As one Bishkek lecturer

characterized the situation in interview:

what is the usual pattern for Kyrgyzstan? A commercial university is practically always unable to

maintain academic standards in reality. The university ultimately needs to buy paper, pay

teachers, this and that, and at the end of the day they will teach anyone who can pay money to

attend. They take them all in, and they all graduate. The fact that they bring in money is

essentially a guarantee [zalog] of the fact that they will graduate ... I was once at a gathering

where I remember I was sitting next to a lady from the registry of [name of university]. She

showed me a whole pile of documents in which students had 3 or 4 fails [dvoiki] and she had to

find a way to keep them at the University. So that they remained students. Why are you doing

that? Well, she said, it’s the commercial department. There in the commercial department you

can’t even talk about excluding a student.[13]

What is significant here is that whatever the truth of the charge (and anecdotal evidence suggests

that it is a fair charge for many contemporary Kyrgyz universities), the widely shared perception, as

this interviewee articulated it, is that commercial departments are able only with great difficulty to

maintain serious academic standards because of the pressure on all sides to keep students enrolled

at all cost. Another lecturer put the problem in a slightly different way, critiquing the language in

which such departments define their activities:

the problem with students who study na kontrakt is that the ‘contract’ in question is ambiguous;

they think it is a contract to receive a diploma – I’ve paid my money, therefore I should get the

‘product’ I want – the diploma, when in reality, the contract ought to be for the provision of a

service [dlia ukazania uzlug]. You get it all the time. Students say, look, I’m a kontrakt student,

you can’t give me a bad mark. They’ve got it all wrong.[14]

In this reading, the dependence of universities upon their fee paying students represents a complete

rupture of the logic of student-as-apprentice and turns him/her into student-as-consumer. The

student expects to receive good grades and a diploma at the end of his/her studies for no other

reason than simply having paid his/her dues – a situation which represents a dramatic threat to the

integrity of the educational process.

Similar fears have been articulated, albeit at a much more localized level, over the attempts to

introduce a credit hours system of assessment at certain private Kyrgyzstani universities.[15]

Kyrgyzstani universities typically have very classroom-heavy curricula, with students being

expected to spend over 40 academic hours per week in lectures and seminars and the majority of

courses determined not within the university but in the Ministry of Education, often with very little

Madeleine Reeves

attention to local context.[16] Those universities which have accreditation from more than one

national system can face even greater loads: it is not unusual for students at the Kyrgyz-Russian

Slavonic University in Bishkek, for instance, to have course loads of 48 hours per week.[17] Such a

situation naturally de-emphasizes individual research work in favour of a more passive and

prescriptive approach to learning: there simply isn’t the time in the student’s week actively to

assimilate, assess and critically reflect upon the material presented in the classroom, let alone to

develop new ideas and positions in the form of individual research papers.

It might be anticipated, therefore, that in the given context a credit hours system explicitly

emphasizing greater independent study and student choice would be welcomed by teachers and

administrators as well as students, as providing more opportunity to mature intellectually and

develop one’s own ideas. This, certainly, was the hope of the administration at the American

University in Kyrgyzstan, when it sought to introduce such a system in 2000. In a conference paper

at the University outlining the practical and philosophical implications of the change, for instance,

the institution’s then vice-president explicitly stressed the link between greater academic choice,

more independent study, and a more mature citizenry: the shift to a credit hours system, the vicepresident

asserted, represented ‘a philosophical choice on the part of the University ... Kyrgyzstan,

as a nation, has chosen independence. Adopting a system that emphasizes independent learning by

students follows in the same path. This is the way of the future’ (Merrill, 2000, p. 39).

What is striking, however, is that far from such a system being publicly embraced by other

institutions as a model to follow, it was frequently identified in academic discourse as being a threat

to established academic standards. If students are not spending so much time in the classroom, the

question went, how do we know that they are going to be using the time productively? And if we

give them the opportunity to choose which subjects they take within a given major, how do we

avoid them simply going for the ‘easy options’? The comment of one Kyrgyzstani lecturer, asked in

interview to comment on his perception of a credit hours system, captures a widely articulated fear

about the risks of too much educational choice that such a system was seen to introduce:

Under the language of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘free development of the personality’ [svobodnoe

razvitie lichnosti], ‘independent study’ to say ‘let him take whatever courses he wants’ – literature

or whatever – well, that is rubbish [chush’], absolutely not allowed. Many teachers perhaps do

that seriously in the west. But I certainly haven’t seen that done in a serious way here yet![18]

Alongside this concern over the threat to curricular coherence, two other fears came to be voiced

in response to the proposed scaling-down of the curriculum that a credit hours system would

entail. If we remove the broad range of subjects that any Kyrgyzstani student acquiring a higher

education is expected to attain, irrespective of his or her speciality, how do we avoid creating

narrow specialists with only a flimsy grasp of subjects in which they were formerly ‘certified’ as

knowledgeable? Perhaps most perilously of all, if we take away the classroom hours whilst still

charging fees, how do we avoid reducing education into mere ‘correspondence courses’ (zaochnoe

obuchenie) – a term that has become synonymous with poor quality and lack of educational

integrity, which, as one former student put it, ‘allows universities to get money, and the student to

get a diploma, without any teaching going on’.[19]

To understand the strength and tenor of this opposition to the introduction of a credit hours

system, it is crucial to recognize the context in which such innovations were being attempted. In a

situation of proliferating higher education institutions (Kyrgyzstan now has over 40 for a

population of five million), where crooks offering dubious qualifications are presumed to be

everywhere, and correspondence (zaochnye) courses are popularly seen be the equivalent of a

‘quick-fix’ degree, any attempt to reduce the number of contact hours, whatever the intended

pedagogical aim, is likely to be perceived as a threat to the institution’s educational integrity.

Resistance to the introduction of a credit hours system at the American University in Kyrgyzstan,

for instance, had less to do with an innate resistance to change on the part of local faculty, than to

fears that if the extent of classroom contact were lost, there would be nothing to distinguish the

University from other less rigorous higher education institutions charging significantly lower fees

(Reeves, 2003). Quantity of classroom contact, in a context of educational uncertainty, becomes the

measure of quality. Indeed, it is not uncommon when lecturers from different universities discuss

the respective merits of their institutions, for the number of students’ classroom hours to be cited

with pride as a demonstration of their institution’s academic rigour. In such a setting, the

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

introduction of a new educational metaphor – that of ‘course as credit’ premised upon the idea of

independent work as the root of real intellectual growth – represents much more than a minor

administrative adjustment. It comes to be perceived instead as a challenge to one of the few

remaining constants – the uchebnyi plan, the detailed, prescriptive list of courses that each student is

to take – through which, in a context of often debilitating educational ‘reform’, some legacy of past

academic rigour could be maintained. It represents, in other words, a challenge to the whole

educational order of things.

Conclusion

This article has sought to explore several of the sites in which ‘market reforms’, in various guises,

have been encountered in Kyrgyzstani higher education. By focusing on the micro-level at which

particular ‘travelling policies’ are locally encountered and negotiated, it has sought to show that the

ambivalence that is often voiced by teachers, students and administrators at Kyrgyzstani

institutions about ‘imported’ concepts such as critical thinking has less to do with some mythic

holdover of ‘Soviet mentality’, cultural conservatism or an innate hostility to reform, than it does

with the moral assessments that such terms invite in different institutional and cultural settings.

In so doing, it endorses the call of several ethnographers of Central Asia to pay attention to

what Kandiyoti (2002, p. 254) describes as the ‘volatile interactions between macro-level

institutions and policies and their reception at the micro-level, where families, workplaces and

communities often respond in unintended ways that have a decisive impact upon further

developments’. The literature on educational reform in the former Soviet Union has tended to

invoke ‘culture’, if at all, as a ‘black box’ variable: an obstacle to reform that is implicitly

‘hardwired’ into the nation, something that is to be ‘overcome’ if transition to anything other than

authoritarianism is to be overcome. As a Fulbright scholar in Uzbekistan commented at a

conference on higher education in Central Asia, for instance:

Unfortunately, the culture of authoritarian control of what is being taught in classrooms and

how professors administer their classes and courses still thrives today in many universities in

Central Asian countries in transition. Though it is not the intentions or the deliberate policy of

the institutions the current system has a built-in hostility to new ideas. (El Nasser, 2002, p. 6)

In contrast to such a position, which resorts to a ‘culture of authoritarian control’ and ‘in-built

hostility’ to explain the frustrations that were encountered in initiating educational reforms in an

Uzbekistani institution, this article has sought to ask why it is that particular ‘rational’ and

rationalizing reforms have failed to take effect in the Kyrgyzstani educational space in the way that

foreign policy makers anticipated. It has suggested that by focusing on the local meanings that

travelling policies acquire, the associative lives that particular reformist discourses assume in

different national contexts, we can come to a more subtle understanding of educational reform and

its challenges in the post-Soviet space. In the case of Kyrgyzstan, the context in which ‘reforms’ are

being initiated is one in which education has become dramatically and thoroughly commoditized –

to the extent that Bishkek students express surprise that there may be market economies in which

term papers, grades and diplomas are not openly bought and sold for cash. It is in this context that

reforms which are perceived as further dismantling the ‘tried and tested’ Soviet educational system

are being encountered and resisted, and that Western-sponsored reform initiatives are taking on

new social lives.

Notes

[1] For comparative ethnographic studies of local responses to market processes, see the essays in the

edited volume by Dilley (1992). For a critical introduction that seeks to ‘make [the market] seem

somewhat less self-evident’ to Western readers than it is typically taken to be, see Carrier (1997).

[2] See, for instance, the Eurasia Foundation-sponsored report to the Ministry of Education and Culture

of the Kyrgyz Republic on Higher Education Reform Initiatives in Kyrgyzstan, conducted by

associates of the Institute for Higher Education Policy (Phipps & Wolanin, 2001).

Madeleine Reeves

[3] See DeYoung (2003) and Mikosz (2003) for overviews relating to bank-sponsored initiatives and

international exchange programmes, Raiymbekova (1999) for an account of the promotion of

international linkages in Kyrgyzstani higher education, Rysalieva & Ibraeva (1999) for a detailed

account of the budgetary constraints faced by the Ministry of Education and Culture in its first years

of independence, and Phipps & Wolanin (2001) for a summary of policy recommendations presented

to the Ministry of Education and Culture in 2001 by consultants from the Institute for Higher

Education Policy.

[4] For general political overviews on Kyrgyzstan and the Central Asian context see Anderson (1999),

Gleason (1997), Glenn (1999) and Roy (1997).

[5] As witnessed, for instance, by the very cool response given on national television to the major reform

initiatives of her reformist predecessor in the post of Minister when Ishengul Boljurova became

Minister of Education in May 2002.

[6] On the Jadid school system in Central Asia, see the excellent monograph by Khalid (1998). On the

transformation of education in Central Asia under Soviet rule, see Medlin et al (1971) and Pavlov

(1957). On the implications of the Soviet legacy for reform of the high school system, see DeYoung

(2003).

[7] Author’s interview with Abdykadyr Orozbaev, Dean of the Humanities Faculty of the Kyrgyz-

Russian Slavonic University, Bishkek, August 2002.

[8] Prestigious urban ‘state’ schools, particularly those with an emphasis upon foreign languages or

computer science, can charge up to $200 per month, and a similar amount to have one’s child placed

on the waiting list for a place at the school. This figure represents over 5 times the current average

monthly salary. In remote rural regions, new kinds of tariff also emerge. The decreasing number of

classes taught in Russian in rural areas and teachers qualified to teach in that language mean that the

unofficial ‘entrance fees’ levied for children to attend Russian-medium classes (orus klass), typically

perceived to be better in quality and a better guarantee of higher education, significantly outweigh

those for Kyrgyz-medium groups (interviews in Batken, April 2004).

[9] See the official description of the organization posted on the Civic Education Project website,

www.cep.org.hu/aboutus/index.html

[10] See, for instance, the official ministerial line about the testing in Domagal’skaia, (2002a, p. 10):

students will be tested ‘not so much on their knowledge of five-dimensional formulae and “essential”

citations, as on the logic of their thought processes, sharpness of mind and level of intellect’.

[11] Author’s interview with linguistics lecturer, Bishkek, August 2002.

[12] See, for instance, the role of kritika i samokritika in the ‘games of Stalinist democracy’ described by

Kojevnikov (2000, pp. 147-158). What was crucial in these ‘games’ or ‘rituals of scientific life’ is that

one side were shown to be ‘objectively’ wrong, and the other correct. It was precisely a pluralism of

opinion which this process was intended to eliminate.

[13] Author’s interview with university lecturer, Bishkek, August 2002. Several Bishkek lecturers

commented in interview that their respective deans of faculty had told them that they should

‘consider themselves fired’ if they should ever give a failing grade (dvoika) to a contract student.

[14] Author’s interview with university ethnology lecturer, Bishkek, August 2002.

[15] A credit hours system is currently limited to a small number of Kyrgyzstani universities, particularly

those that have received a considerable degree of funding from Turkish or American foundations.

However, President Akaev’s express commitment that Kyrgyzstan align itself with the

recommendations of the Bologna Process with a view to eventually joining it means that a number

of state universities are actively reconfiguring curricula with a view to converting to a credit hours

system.

[16] For instance, English-language students in rural universities are expected to follow an identical

curriculum to those studying in urban institutions, premised upon a solid linguistic foundation, even

though de facto the majority of students from village schools now enter university with little or no

exposure to the language, such that they are obliged in reality to start studying the subject from

scratch (Reeves, 2004).

[17] Author’s interview with Dean of the Humanities Faculty, Kyrgyz-Russian Slavonic University, August

2002.

[18] Lecturer, Kyrgyz-Russian Slavonic University, Bishkek, 2002.

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

[19] Interview with former student of music, Bishkek, 2001.

References

Akaev, A. (1995) Voskreshenie istoricheskoi pamiati – velenie zhizni, zov ne tol’ko proshlogo, no i

budushchego [The revival of historical memory – a dictate of life, demanded both by the past and the

present], in A. Dzhumanaliev (Ed.) Kyrgyzskaia gosudarstvennost’ v XX veke [Kyrgyz statehood in the

twentieth century]. Bishkek: National Academy of Science.

Alexiadou, N. & Jones, K. (2001) Travelling Policy/Local Spaces, paper presented at the Congrès Marx

International III: Le capital et l’humanité, Université de Paris-X Nanterre-Sorbonne, 26-29 September.

Anderson, J. (1999) Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s island of democracy? London: Routledge.

Anderson, K. & Pomfret, R. (2000) Living Standards during Transition to a Market Economy: the Kyrgyz

Republic in 1993 and 1996, Journal of Comparative Economics, 28, pp. 502-523.

Appadurai, A. (1986) Introduction: commodities and the politics of value, in A. Appadurai (Ed.) The Social Life

of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ball, S. (1998) Big Policies/Small World: an introduction to international perspectives in education policy,

Comparative Education, 34, pp. 119-130.

Berdahl, D., Bunzl, M. & Lampland, M. (Eds) (2000) Altering States: ethnographies of transition in Eastern Europe

and the former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [The comprehensive Soviet encyclopedia] (1950-1958) Kritika, Kritika i

samokritika [Criticism, criticism and self-criticism], pp. 451, 452. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo BSE.

Booth, W. (1994) On the Idea of the Moral Economy, American Political Science Review, 88(3), pp. 653-667.

Burbules, N. & Torres, C. (Eds) (2000) Globalization and Education: critical perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Burrawoy, M. & Verdery, K. (Eds) (1999) Uncertain Transition: ethnographies of change in the postsocialist world.

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Carnoy, N. & Rhoten, D. (2002) What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative

Approach, Comparative Education Review, 46, pp. 1-9.

Carrier, J. (1997) Introduction, in J. Carrier (Ed.) Meanings of the Market: the free market in Western culture.

Oxford: Berg.

Cheesman, N. (2003) School, State and Sangha in Burma, Comparative Education, 39, pp. 45-63.

DeYoung, A. (2003) On the Demise of the ‘Action Plan’ for Kyrgyz Education Reform: a case study, in

S. Heyneman & A. DeYoung (Eds) The Challenges of Education in Central Asia. Greenwich: Information

Age Publishing.

Dilley, R. (Ed.) (1992) Contesting Markets: analyses of ideology, discourse and practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.

Domagal’skaia, N. (2002a) Interview with Sheishen Duzhenbaev, Abiturient 2002 [School leaver 2002], Delo

No., 1 May, p. 10.

Domagal’skaia, N. (2002b) Testirovat’ nashykh vypusknykov budet... po-amerikanskii [Testing of our school

leavers will be ... American-style], Delo No., 8 May, p. 11.

Dzhumanaliev, A. (2002) Politicheskaia istoriia Kyrgyzstana [The political history of Kyrgyzstan]. Bishkek:

National Academy of Science.

Dzhumanaliev, A. (2003) Predislovie [Forward], in A. Dzhumanaliev (Ed.) Kyrgyzskaia gosudarstvennost’ v XX

veke [Kyrgyz statehood in the twentieth century]. Bishkek: National Academy of Science.

El Nasser, M. (2002) The Importance of Democratization of Higher Education Institutions in the

Improvement of the Quality of Education in Central Asian Countries in Transition, paper presented at

the conference ‘Ten Years of Reform in Higher Education in Central Asian Countries in Transition’,

Almaty, 5-7 April.

Findlow, S. (2001) Global and Local Tensions in an Arab Gulf State: conflicting values in UAE higher

education, paper presented to the conference ‘Travelling Policy/Local Spaces: globalisation, identities

and education policy in Europe’, Keele University, 27-29 June.

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Gleason, G. (1997) The Central Asian States: discovering independence. Oxford: Westview Press.

Glenn, J. (1999) The Soviet Legacy in Central Asia. Houndmills: Macmillan.

Madeleine Reeves

Green, D. & Bauer, A. (1998) The Costs of Transition in Central Asia, Journal of Asian Economics, 9(2),

pp. 345-364.

Hahn, C. (Ed.) (2002) Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices. London: Routledge.

Hare, P. & Lugachev, M. (1999) Higher Education in Transition to a Market Economy: two case studies,

Europe–Asia Studies, 50, pp. 101-122.

Hatcher, R. (2001) Getting down to Business: schooling in the globalised economy, Education and Social

Justice, 3(2), pp. 45-59.

Humphrey, C. (2002) Rethinking Bribery in Contemporary Russia, in The Unmaking of Soviet Life: everyday

economies after socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Huntington, S. (2002) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Free Press.

Jones, K. (2001) Travelling Policy/Local Spaces: culture, creativity and interference, paper presented to the

conference ‘Travelling Policy/Local Spaces: globalisation, identities and education policy in Europe’,

Keele University, 27-29 June .

Kandiyoti, D. (2002) How Far Do Analyses of Postsocialism Travel? The Case of Central Asia, in C. Hahn

(Ed.) Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge.

Kaneff, D. (2002) The Shame and Pride of Market Activity: morality, identity and trading in postsocialist rural

Bulgaria, in R. Mandel & C. Humphrey (Eds) Markets and Moralities: ethnographies of postsocialism.

Oxford: Berg.

Khalid, A. (1998) The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Kitaev, I. (1994) Russian Education in Transition: transformation of labour market, attitudes of youth and

changes in management of higher and lifelong education, Oxford Review of Education, 20, pp. 111-130.

Kojevnikov, A. (2000) Games of Stalinist Democracy: ideological discussions in Soviet sciences, 1947-1952, in

S. Fitzpatrick (Ed.) Stalinism: new directions. London: Routledge.

Ledeneva, A. (1998) Russia’s Economy of Favours: blat, networking and informal exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Lenin, V.I. (1997) Chto takie ‘druz’ia naroda’ i kak oni voiuiut protiv sotsial-demokratov [What is a ‘friend of

the people’ and how they fight against the social democrats]. Reproduced as O predmete marksistkoi

sotsiologii [on the subject of Marxist sociology] in V.I. Dobrenikov (Ed.) Sotsiologiia v Rossii XIX – nachala

XX vekov [Sociology in Russia from the 19th to the start of the 20th centuries]. Moscow: International

University of Business and Management.

Liu, M. (2003) Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: ethical dilemmas of neoliberal triumphalism, Central

Eurasian Studies Review, 2(2), pp. 2-10.

Mandel, R. & Humphrey, C. (Eds) (2002) Markets and Moralities: ethnographies of postsocialism. Oxford: Berg.

Medlin, W.K., Cave, W.M. & Carpenter, F. (1971) Education and Development in Central Asia. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Merridale, C. (2003) Redesigning History in Contemporary Russia, Journal of Contemporary History, 38,

pp. 13-28.

Merrill, M. (2000) The Credit-hour System: a change with broad implications, in The Nature of University

Education. Intellectual Development of Students and Formation of Creative Personality: conference proceedings.

Bishkek: American University in Kyrgyzstan.

Mikosz, D. (2003) Academic Exchange Programs in Central Asia: the first eight years, in S. Heyneman &

A. DeYoung (Eds) The Challenges of Education in Central Asia. Greenwich: Information Age Publishing.

Namazie, C. (2002) Early Evidence of Welfare Changes in the Kyrgyz Republic: have things got worse with reforms?

DARP Discussion Paper 63. London: London School of Economics.

Nussbaum, M. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: a classical defence of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Osorov, Z. (2002) Higher Education in Kyrgyzstan is Big Business, Times of Central Asia, 8 October.

Pavlov, M. (1957) Teachers’ Training Schools in Kirgizia, in G. Kline (Ed.) Soviet Education. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Phipps, R. & Wolanin, T. (2001) Higher Education Reform Initiatives in Kyrgyzstan: an overview.

Unpublished manuscript.

Raiymbekova, K. (1999) Vysshee obrazovanie suverennogo Kyrgyzstana: na materialakh mezhdunarodnogo

sotrudnichestva [Higher education in sovereign Kyrgyzstan: based on materials of international

cooperation]. Candidate of Science Dissertation, Kyrgyz State National University.

Market Reforms in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education

Reeves, M. (2003) Cultivating ‘Citizens of a New Type’: the politics and practice of higher education reform

at the American University in Kyrgyzstan, in S. Heyneman & A. DeYoung (Eds) The Challenges of

Education in Central Asia. Greenwich: Information Age Publishing.

Reeves, M. (2004) Academic Integrity and Its Limits in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education: a view from the

margins, International Higher Education, 37, pp. 22-24.

Roy, O. (1997) La nouvelle Asie centrale ou la fabrication des nations. Paris: Seuil.

Rysalieva, S. & Ibraeva G. (1999) Educational Financing and Budgeting in Kyrgyzstan. Paris: International

Institute for Educational Planning/UNESCO.

Sampson, S. (1996) The Social Life of Projects: importing civil society to Albania, in C. Hahn & E. Dunn (Eds)

Civil Society: challenging Western models. London: Routledge.

Sanghera, B. & Satybaldieva, E. (2004) Roll Back the Market: moral judgments and market limits in a post-

Soviet society – a case study of Kyrgyzstan. Unpublished manuscript.

Sayer, A. (2000) Moral Economy and Political Economy, Studies in Political Economy, 61, pp. 79-104.

Sharshekeeva, K. (2001) Amerikanskii universitet v Kyrgyzstane kak odna iz sovremennykh modelei razvitiia

vysshei shkoly [The American University in Kyrgyzstan as a contemporary model for the development

of higher education institutions]. Candidate of Science Dissertation, American University in Kyrgyzstan.

Stenhouse, L. (1979) Case Study in Comparative Education: particularity and generalisation, Comparative

Education, 15, pp. 5-10.

Thompson, C. (2003) Academic Peerage: student writing and the politics of knowledge in Central Asia, paper

presented at the Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing, Central

European University, Budapest, June.

Welch, A. (1998) The Cult of Efficiency in Education: comparative reflections on the reality and the rhetoric,

Comparative Education, 34, pp. 157-175.

Welmond, M. (2002) Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: the dynamics of teacher identity in the

Republic of Benin, Comparative Education Review, 46, pp. 37-65.

World Bank (2002) Country Brief: Kyrgyz Republic. Bishkek: World Bank.

MADELEINE REEVES is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, University

of Cambridge. Between 2000 and 2002 she lectured in sociology at the American University in

Kyrgyzstan, and since 2003 has been Research Associate at the Center for East–West Research and

Intercultural Dialogue. Her research interests include educational reform in post-Soviet Central

Asia and ideas of citizenship and political authority in Kyrgyzstan. Correspondence: Madeleine

Reeves, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Trinity College, Trinity

Street, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, United Kingdom (mfr21@cam.ac.uk).