Measures for the Appointment and Management of Foreign Teachers (Draft for Solicitation of Comments) [外籍教师聘任和管理办法（征求意见稿）]

Pix Credit: Precarious times for foreign teachers in China.

The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China has distributed for comment （征求意见稿）  Measures for the Appointment and Management of Foreign Teachers [外籍教师聘任和管理办法]. Much of the legislation covers the usual issues in the usual fashion. With respect to these there are issues of efficiency and the connection between objectives and the administrative methods chosen to meet these objectives.  But these issues are little different from those facing an administrative apparatus anywhere. And the legislation represents the end of a process already well underway in 2019 (e.g., Precarious times for foreign teachers in China ("Another reason that authorities are cracking down on foreign teachers is ideological. China has long been wary of foreign influences in education, and in December 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping reminded education leaders that, “Adherence to the Party’s leadership is essential to the development of higher education in the country”, emphasising the need to “build universities into strongholds that adhere to Party leadership”.")).

And indeed the two sets f provisions that are the most interesting for foreigners are those relating to the legalization of the policy of Part leadership over education. These merit sustained consideration.  The first is Article 5:

Article 5 (Specific Obligations) Foreign teachers shall abide by Chinese laws and regulations, abide by Chinese public order and good customs and professional ethics of teachers, and abide by the principle of separation of education from religion. The educational and teaching activities and contents implemented shall conform to China's educational policies and basic teaching principles. It is required that China’s national sovereignty, security, honor, and social public interests must not be harmed. [第五条 （特定义务）外籍教师应当遵守中国法律法规，遵守中国的公序良俗和教师职业道德，遵守教育与宗教相分离的原则，所实施的教育教学活动和内容应当符合中国的教育方针和教学基本要求，不得损害中国的国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益。]

The second are Articles 27-32 (Chapter 4 Supervision and Responsibility [第四章 监督与责任]).  Articles 27 and 28 establish an administrative structure for the supervision of the obligations imposed by law on relevant national and local governments. Article 27 requires the establishment of deep cooperation between the science and technology depart and the education departments of the State Council.  The Science and Technology Department is charged with sharing a list of foreign teachers, and the education department is required to deliver to the science and technology department lists of foreign teachers prohibited from employment "in real time." Article 28 charges the education administrative department of the local people’s government, the administrative department of science and technology, the entry-exit management agency of the public security organ, and other relevant departments shall strengthen the daily supervision of the employment of foreign teachers by educational institutions with the daily supervision (日常监管) of foreign teachers for violations of law relating to their hiring and work. 

Articles 29-32  then establish the parameters by which the Chinese Social Credit system is extended to foreign teachers in China. Article 29 requires that assessments relating to the foreign teacher's compliance with law, ethics, and quality of teaching be included in a national foreign teacher comprehensive information service platform.  Good social credit scores will ensure that regulatory hurdles relating to employment will be convenient. Article 30 then lists four key areas of activities that will reduce social credit scoring: (1) Serious academic misconduct; (2) Engaging in paid work in violation of regulations outside the appointed educational institution; (3) Dismissed in violation of the rules and regulations of the employment agency; and (4) Resigning without authorization after the appointment period has not expired [（一）有严重学术不端行为的；（二）在受聘任的教育机构以外违规从事有偿工作的；（三）违反聘任机构规章制度，被解聘的；（四）聘任期未满，擅自离职的。]. Lastly Article 31 lists those actions or activities that will result in dismissal of appointment. The resulting Social Credit score will require that such individuals be placed on a black list, which will make it impossible for educational institutions to hire them [教育机构不得聘任有前款情形的外籍人员担任外籍教师。]. The ten include:  

(1) Words and deeds that damage China's national sovereignty, security, honor, and public interests;
(2) Being held criminally responsible;
(3) Obstructing the implementation of the education policy;
(4) Violating public security management such as taking drugs;
(5) Sexual assault or abuse of minors;
(6) Engaging in religious education or preaching illegally;
(7) Engaging in cult activities;
(8) Sexual harassment of students or other serious violations of China's public order and good customs, teachers' professional ethics and codes of conduct;
(9) Providing false certification information in the process of applying to teach in China;
(10) The total number of untrustworthy records specified in Article 30 of these Measures exceeds 3. [（一）有损害中国国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益的言行的；（二）被追究刑事责任的；（三）妨碍教育方针贯彻落实的；（四）有吸食毒品等违反治安管理行为的；（五）有性侵害、虐待未成年人行为的；（六）非法从事宗教教育或者传教的；（七）从事邪教活动的；（八）有性骚扰学生或者其他严重违反中国的公序良俗和教师职业道德、行为准则的；（九）在申请来华任教过程中提供虚假证明信息的；（十）本办法第三十条规定的失信记录累计超过3条的。].

 Lastly, Article 32 provides that educational institutions that fail either to ensure the proper operation of the social credit system (by facilitating negative activity) or hire a blacklisted foreign teacher will "be handled by the public security organs of the local people’s government at or above the county level."
 

For foreign faculty from liberal democratic states, the changes require a conscious sensitivity both to supervision, and to the measurement of conduct by reference to values and markers that are not the same as in many of their home states.  This is particularly true with respect to "(1) Words and deeds that damage China's national sovereignty, security, honor, and public interests" [（一）有损害中国国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益的言行的] and "(3) Obstructing the implementation of the education policy" [（三）违反聘任机构规章制度，被解聘的] if only because they may no way of understanding where the conduct boundaries or expectations are.  In those cases, it will likely fall to educational institutions to closely supervise and guide foreigner teachers in the conduct of their classes. It is also likely that educational institutions that contribute foreign faculty to the black lists will likely find their own social credit scores dangerous lowered, and in the worst cases, may find themselves on a black list as well (likely, at a minimum, prohibited from hiring any foreigners).

None of this, of course, ought to surprise. And in many cases the net result of the provisions will hardly be felt--other than with respect for the need to cultivate a greater sensitivity of the context in which teachers operate.  Still, even when teaching very young children, it will be necessary to be conscious that an offhand remark, or a reference to baseline principles and concepts that are cherished in a home country (and not really thought about as problematic) may be sensitive in the context in which it is heard.  It is the inadvertent act that poses the greatest threat. 

Of course, much of this would be ameliorated if it is possible t understand the analytics that will go into the social credit scoring for foreign teachers, and more importantly, the way that black lists are constructed, and the rules for getting off a black list.  None of that seems to be available currently. In a sense, then, the value of social credit in this case is to provide guidance necessary to adjust conduct.  Thus rather than produce regulatory guidance, authorities might be able to produce a guide to how scoring will be measured (the value of data and its identification) for purposes of Articles 30 and 31.

Moreover, in certain circumstances, the rules may provide substantial challenges for educational institutions and their foreign faculty.  This may be particularly true at the university and graduate levels in those areas that touch on professional education, business and some of the disciplines in the social sciences, especially where the issues touch on necessary aspects of globalization or are connected to foreign and comparative study.  It is likely that substantial regulation and soime waivers  and a waiver system will have to be greater in those respects--but the price will likely also be substantially greater supervision of those activities. As a result, it is possible that except for elite institutions, and those otherwise designated for that purpose, the scope and conduct of teaching by foreigners will change. At a minimum, national and local authorities would do well to provide more specific guidance to avoid a situation where the law itsef serves as a series of traps for the unwary (and those otherwise not guided by savvy educational sponsors).  Otherwise the result will be to reduce the presence and impact of foreign educators in China. In that respect it may be necessary to carefully consider the Communist Party Basic Line respecting "Reform and Opening Up" in the New Era (e.g., "The Party shall implement the strategy for  invigorating China through science and education")

The entire provision in the original Chinese along with a crude English translation follows. Interested individuals and entities  are encouraged to send their comments to the Ministry.

The Elite University Administrator-Priest and Orthodox American Civic Religion: David Westbrook, "The Church of Harvard A Reading of President Bacow’s “What I Believe”"

From the end of the 19th century the American political vanguard (civilized Americans at the top of whatever then passed for hierarchies of power), like their Marxist-Leninist analogues, have been driven toward civic values as a means of civilizing the masses of migrants now grown powerful through the discovery of the power of disciplined voting. This informal but well organized vanguard group, our American aristocracy, continues to work diligently to develop an orthodox civic religion through which they could oversee the transformation of the American masses into something like the ideal American (the way that Marxist Leninist vanguards seek to develop the ideal worker, or the ideal socialist citizen). It was to be grounded in the articulation of authoritative meaning in the form of the core principles of the American nation. The application of its principles were to be protected (and interpreted) by an alliance of industrialists, financiers, elite lawyers and judges, high government officials, and the leaders of the leading universities. 

That alliance produced a powerful engine for meaning making, and the making of the American sense of itself well solidified in something like its present form just in time for the global unrest unleashed by the first post World War 2 generation eager to translate the principles of the American Republic so carefully developed  by these elites in ways better suited to their own desires.  This collective meaning making was to be enveloped in the language of the core principles of the American political economic model--democracy, stake holding, participation, inclusion, elections, and the like.

But this movement  also produced a substantial divide, the ruptures of which manifesting first in more benign form from the rebellion of Barry Goldwater to the election of Ronald Reagan, and then in its fully mature form with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Still, the old aristocratic vanguard held together. Its priesthood remained deeply embedded within the societal institutions that drove and shaped cultural narrative. Now allied with sectors of the tech industry, the vanguard could more easily leverage its interventions, and use societal techniques to ensure the privileged position of the orthodoxy over the application of which they presided. To a large extent it is still true that failure to embrace the orthodox position can serve to effectively block any real chance for someone to rise with social, economic, religious and political hierarchies.But reactive forces ought not to be underestimated as rising cunter vanguards emerge.

Within the traditional vanguard united front, the university has always played a key role.  The university served, in substantial respect, as the magisterium of the American civic religion, and the professorate its priests.  That has changed since the 1960s.  The role of priest may still be undertaken by the professorate, but it is the high university official, the leading administrator, that has taken for herself the role of "higher" priest in the Church of Academic verities. And even as that has occurred, sites of resistance has also manifested, sites that seek to produce a counter narrative, one embraced  by a reforming faction, even within the university.

These are the themes that are superbly considered in David A. Westbrook marvelous essay.  Entitled "The Church of Harvard A Reading of President Bacow’s “What I Believe”" the essay first appeared in Medium on 31 May 2020.  The essay is very well worth reading for  its many insights into the complex interweaving of collective meaning making, the academy, its administrators, and the management of social narrative. 

Professor Westbrook has kindly permitted me to re-post his marvelous essay.  It follows below. The original may be accessed HERE.  His bio also follows.

What is the Fundamental Task of Education?: Xi Jinping's Concept of 立德树人 [Cultivating People of Moral Character] and its Implementation Through Undergraduate University Reform in 教育部关于一流本科课程建设的实施意见 [Implementation Opinions of the Ministry of Education on the Construction of First-class Undergraduate Courses]

(Pix Credit: 兰资环学院教育实践透视立德树人工程 凝心聚力锻造思想政治教育 )

Education reform has been a priority of the Xi Jinping leadership for some time.  It is a central element of "new era" theory, which links economic, political. cultural and social renovation in a tight web that each contributes to a comprehensive expression of the "new China"  under the leadership of the Communist Party.  That "new China" is a fundamentally moral project.  It elaborates a core premise that China's further economic potential can be developed only in tandem economically potent precisely because of its transposition of core socialist moral values to the constriction of society and culture as well.  That, at least, is the theory. 

But this theory requires a powerful implementation mechanism.  And that mechanism is education. Under the current leadership that sort of education reform as been high on the agenda for a number of years (e.g., Focusing on Civic Education in China--The CCP's Ideological Work Comes to the Universities: 关于进一步加强和改进新形势下高校宣传思想工作的意见). The drivers have not changed much, but the goals are far better coordinated with the comprehensive reshaping of the political-economic m0del and its cultural basis in outlook, custom and behavior. While it may be difficult to re-form the minds of current generations, a vanguard party looks to the formation of future generations for the long term transformation of the social and political order in ways that stick. To that end education acquires a more ancient form--one that starts with the moral formation of the student as the basis on which information can be both created and disseminated.  Xi Jinping theory, when turned toward education and the socialization of the young within a morally specific trajectory of socialist modernization (the morally informed development of productive forces), informs not just the way in which students are instructed, but also the context and form of that instruction as well. 

It was perhaps with that in mind that Xi Jinping set about to elaborate the fundamental task of education (习近平这样阐释教育的根本任务 ["Cultivating People of Moral Character," Xi Jinping explains the fundamental task of education] Xinhua News Agency [March 18 2019]). What is the fundamental task of education? The answer 立德树人 [Cultivating People of Moral Character] (with thanks to Flora Sapio for the translation of this quite complex and subtle term).

The concept was derived from a variety of Xi Jinping's statements put forward in a variety of context and then woven together by the Xinhua News Agency for wide distribution. Despite its subtleties, the term is both straightforward and at the same time intimately connected to the the larger projects of Chinese Social Credit (with its foundation in integrity; see "Blacklists and Social Credit Regimes in China"), and of building a rule-of-law Socialist society in the "New Era" (grounded in the 12 Core Socialist Values [社会主义核心价值观]). It was with that in mind that Xi Jinping noted an objective to "Integrate the cultivation of moral character into all aspects of ideological and moral education, cultural knowledge education, and social practice education, and run through basic education, vocational education, and higher education. The discipline system, teaching system, teaching material system, and management system should revolve around this goal.""

From that pronouncement consolidated in March 2019, only a short time passed before the publication by the Ministry of Education of implementation guidance first targeted to undergraduate education institutions and is reflected in the 教育部关于一流本科课程建设的实施意见 [Implementation Opinions of the Ministry of Education on the Construction of First-class Undergraduate Courses].  The idea is to reshape education to suit the "New Era." To that end, education is understood first as a moral project within which it is possible to infuse the most forward looking approaches to the instruction in particular fields, all understood, of course, within the moral framework that shapes the educational project in the first place.  The object is to give content to and provide a disciplined and measurable delivery system for moral character education as overseen by the vanguard as the guardians of morals, ethics, and integrity.

(用故事和事实告诉学生人生哲理，形象生动，文字配画面增强说服力，把“大德育”化身为“小水滴”，改“大水漫灌”为“精准滴灌”。涉及的内容十分丰富，包括科学知识、感恩教育、名人典故、我的中国梦、感动中国、讲评时事、国家法律法规、生活常识、教育改革与发展、传统文化、职业素养、工匠精神等，“个个都充满正能量”。"It tells students the philosophy of life with stories and facts. The image is vivid, the text is enhanced with persuasiveness, and the "great moral education" is transformed into "small water droplets". The flood irrigation is “precise drip irrigation”. The content involved is very rich, including scientific knowledge, grateful education, celebrity allusions, my Chinese dream, moving China, commenting on current affairs, national laws and regulations, common sense of life, education reform and development, traditional culture, professionalism, craftsmanship, etc., Everyone is full of positive energy."兰资环学院教育实践透视 supra.).

The idea is profound, but not unique to China (see, e.g.,Education to Meet the Labor Needs of Markets--Cuba Changes its Approach to University Education).  It reflects a certain all around approach to education that sees it intimately tied to both moral projects, and to the project of the perfectibility of humanity within the framework in which instruction acquires both meaning and direction--its rationality.  The connection between education, labor markets and political-societal socialization runs deep in the West as well. In this sense there is much that ties this approach to that of Pope John Paul II in the encyclical Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason (discussed in Fides et Ratio: Religion and Law in Legal Orders Suffused by Faith) ("This is to say that with the light of reason human beings can know which path to take, but they can follow that path to its end, quickly and unhindered, only if with a rightly tuned spirit they search for it within the horizon of faith. Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way." Fides et Ratio ¶ 16). 

The core pronouncements of Xi Jinping follow (in the original Chinese and with crude English translation. The important Implementation Opinions of the Ministry of Education on the Construction of First-class Undergraduate Courses (教育部关于一流本科课程建设的实施意见 ) also follow in English and Chinese., including the important annex on implementation (“双万计划”国家级一流本科课程 推荐认定办法).

New From Academe--The Magazione of the AAUP; Academic Freedom and Free Speech

I am happy to pass along the table of contents of the features in the latest issue of Academe--the Journal of the American Association of University Professors. 

FEATURES

Knowledge for the Common Good
A plenary presentation from the AAUP’s 2019 annual conference.
By Joan W. Scott

Political Interference with Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Public Universities
The threat of governmental suppression of academic inquiry.By Gene Nichol

Rebuilding "Iowa Nice" in Shared Governance: From Sanction to Collaboration
A faculty senate committee works to address governance concerns.
By Sandra Daack-Hirsch, Frank Durham, Russell Ganim, Edward Gillan, and Justine Kolker

Of particular interestare the remarks of Jopan Scott, which are reproduced below.  Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is a long-standing member and former chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

New Issue of Journal of Legal Education: On the Relationship Between American Legal Education, Globalization, and Internationalism

The American Legal academy continues to consider its relationship to the rest of the world. That consideration takes two quite distinct forms. The first involves the reception of the "foreign" within the United States--and that requires combating a parochialism and legal-centrism long embedded in American legal education. The second involves the projection of Americanism in law and legal education outward. This is something that the American academy has been quite eager to participate in, especially after 1989. It reflects the notions of the central role of American sensibilities in the technical assistance required for other states to "catch up" under the guidance of a more mature system with good (and perhaps universal) principles. 

I have considered these issues from time to time. See e.g., 'Internationalizing the American Law School Curriculum (in Light of the Carnegie Foundation’s Report),' in The Internationalization of Law and Legal Education 49-112 (Jan Klabbers and Mortimer Sellers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2008); 'Global Law Schools on U.S. Models: Emerging Models of Consensus-Based Internationalization or Markets-Based Americanization Models of Global Legal Education,' 2 Revista de Educación y Derecho/Education and Law Review (España) 4:1-53 (April-Sept. 2011) (with Bret Stancil); 'Human Rights and Legal Education in the Western Hemisphere: Legal Parochialism and Hollow Universalism,' 21(1) Penn State International Law Review 115-155 (2002); and 'General Principles of Academic Specialization By Means of Certificate or Concentration Programs: Creating a Certificate Program in International, Comparative and Foreign Law at Penn State,' 20 Penn. State International Law Review 67 (2001).

This month the flagship journal of the Association of American Law Schools, the Journal of Legal Education, has devoted a substantial amount its Issue 67-4 to the relationship between American legal education and globalization and internationalism, through an examination of international and comparative law. Special thanks to the editors of this issue, American University's Camille A. Nelson and Anthony E. Varona for putting together a group of quite thought provoking articles.

Links to the articles follow.

Writing to the Standard/El suicidio programado del gran ensayo--Accountability and the Management of Knowledge Production

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2017)

Academics worldwide remain vigilant against the erosion of academic freedom by administrators or the state.  This erosion threat has worldwide dimensions. Yet academics have been all too willing to sell their academic freedom for financial support.  And all to often, that quid pro quo--grants for the production of work that satisfies the needs or desires of grantors--is institutionalized in universities that then make the acquisition of grants a significant element in professional assessment. 

Academics, for the most part are reconciled to this relationship between money and the control of the direction of academic production.  That reconciliation is due in part from need, but also because academics are critically embedded in the institutions that finance the production of knowledge.  They serve as the peer reviewers or relate positions of many of these; and the university itself rewards academics who are deeply embedded within the knowledge-finance complex. Academics (and their institutional masters) appear to have qualms only when there appear to be "conflicts of interest"--the definitions of which tend to reflect ongoing battles for ownership of knowledge or when outsiders question the legitimacy of such production for hire.   

It is too late in the day to worry overmuch abut the existence of the knowledge production-finance complex. The process tends to be transparent enough, and the oversight tends to be interested enough, that one can be assured that though financiers may substantial influence the sorts of knowledge that is produced (they tend to choose what is studied and what is ignored), the quality of the knowledge produced is not generally any more or less legitimate (in the sense of being disinterested) than knowledge produced by other means.    

But while academics remain focused on formal or rule based threats, and remain vigilant about quality issues in the financing of knowledge production, the growing mania for productivity measures now may well pose a greater threat.  That threat is not just to academic freedom, but also to the quality generally of the production especially of basic knowledge (rather than boutique purchased knowledge for specific consumers). Quantitative measures increasingly provide a means for controlling the form and context of knowledge production, as well as the formats through which it is produced.  Here one sees the rise not just of assembly line factory ideologies transformed for the academic factory, but more importantly, of a production-publisher complex that not only shapes knowledge but which tends to transfer the rights to that knowledge from producers to "distributors." Academics, then, move closer to the bottom--lowest value added, part of knowledge production chains. 

Accountability has given rise to a mania for the production of proxy measures through which the administrative structures of a faculty department might judge quality and quantity of academic production.  There is nothing inherently odd either about the focus on accountability, or on the use of proxy measures per se. However, in the form in which they have been developing over the last several decades, the result is to produce an assessment structure that effectively manages, if not controls, both the form and content of academic production to satisfy the measures of assessment.  In effect, the measures of quality have themselves now become the object of quality. One does not produce knowledge to advance learning  but to meet the criteria for assessment.  In the process, assessment measures can be used to substantially shape and manage the cultures of academic production in ways that may ultimately harm the production of knowledge. 

This is not merely the whining of the American professorate. Academics elsewhere have begun to understand that data analytics, when these drive assessment without appropriate qualitative constraints beyond the measures, can be used to shape, in sometimes dramatic ways, the relationship between academics and knowledge production. Recent interest among Spanish academics suggest the nature of the problem. A article published in El País, El suicidio programado del gran ensayo, makes the point for the Spanish and Italian academy, portions of which follows below (Spanish only).

Flora Sapio: "Thoughts on the Globalized University and the Logic of the Nation-State as an Ideal Form"

(By Laurentius de Voltolina - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160060)

In The Globalization of University Education and Interference in the Domestic Social and Political Orders of States: Considering Chinese and Australian Approaches, I explored some of the political ramifications  in China and Australia relating in large measure to the management and use of higher education and the projection of ideologies of knowledge and to control of interpretation abroad. Some reference was made to Chinese efforts and to Australia's National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference (Bill 2017). I suggested the way that these sorts of engagements "move quickly, then, from a "thing" (knowledge and learning) to values, interpretation, management and ideology.  We move from the collection and deployment of data bits to (1) power (who determines what may be learned; and what is taboo),  and (2) form (what may be learned; the form does this knowledge take)."

Flora Sapio has been kind enough to offer further reflections on the themes raised.  Her essay, Scattered Thoughts on the Globalized University and the Logic of the Nation-State as an Ideal Form, follows below.

The Globalization of University Education and Interference in the Domestic Social and Political Orders of States: Considering Chinese and Australian Approaches

(By Laurentius de Voltolina - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160060)

Globalization happily came to the university with the establishment of strong globalist principles at the end of the 20th Century. But the "Globalization Revolution" (like the Marxist Revolution that preceded it by a century) did not immediately result in the withering away of the state. That has produced a contradiction and a controversy, generally for the advancement of a coherent global system of norms and more specifically for the evolution of education. The contradiction arises because global values might at times conflict with traditional and national customs, norms and ways of seeing (explaining) the world in a context in which the state must effectively contradict itself in the training of its youth. The controversy arises from the use of the avenues of globalized education as an avenue for the extraterritorial projection of the education vision/mission of a state outbound into other states. Thus education globalization can serve to develop its own values consonant with the developing of norms, mores and outlooks at the international public and private spheres, it can be used to displace, challenge or develop national and traditional ways of understanding and explaining the world on which national societies are ordered, and it serves as a means to project national values outward.  Each has manifested itself simultaneously in the operation of university education systems globally. 

But now these three trends are beginning to have political effects.  This post briefly considers the glimmerings of those effects in China, and then considers the way that Australia is now contemplating regulation grounded in the protection of its sovereignty against foreign manipulation. These suggest the contradictions between a growing sentiment at international levels that education is an essential tool for managing the substantial interplay between the construction of law-based legitimacy and the control and management of the substance, and mechanisms for the development, of social and cultural norms (2017 Report of the Special Rapporteur (A/72/523), ¶ 92), the use by states of education to perpetuate their own customs, traditions and values, and the use of globalization by states to project their national values abroad through education projects.