Concerning the education of children in contemporary rural Cambodia Filial debt, deference and “vagabondage” for boys and girls - Prigent, Steven (Cahiers d'Outre-Mer, 2017)
This article gives an account of the “moral economy” shared by Cambodian farmers regarding the subject of education, by highlighting on one hand the importance that the parents place on filial debt and on respect for the hierarchy of the ages, and on the other hand the educational prudence which they show with regard to children’s sociability. Secondly, the article historicises this moral economy by studying the institutional and the informal forms of education of the village children during the 20‪ ‪th‪ ‪ century, with particular attention paid at gender differences. As a third point, the text deals more particularly with the issue of state schooling, which is being imposed with more and more application in the educational lives of the children in rural Cambodia. Finally, this study bears witness to a contemporary weakening of the relation of deference between the generations where the context is one of the international promotion of the consumer society, of a salaried working class of young single people, of democratic educational and children’s empowerment global values. This article aims firstly at giving a “general view” of the Khmer peasant educational system, but it also examines the meaning which the notion of filial debt is acquiring in a differentiated manner according to gender in contemporary, rural Cambodia.‪
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