I teach in a secondary school in Melbourne and our students do have little understanding about ASEAN and what is actually happening in South East Asia. No need to mention culture and history of South East Asia because even our teachers are incompetent about this particular issue.

Australian schools need to work on the new curriculum that include more regional studies. When AEC becomes a realitry, we need to fully engage with them.

The trajectory of ASEAN and Australia is really interesting from the political perspective. We in Australia know Indonesian politics well-enough but perhaps not a lot of us understand what is happening in Brunei, Burma or Cambodia.

I agree that our schools need to increase more of the ASEAN stories in the curriculum. Let alone the language, Australian students need to know more about this upcoming AEC.

.#...Contributions in the form of education, training or human resource development will strengthen our bonds with ASEAN members and will subsequently benefit the region...#.

...Yes, and if anybody fancies educating the "yellow hordes to the north", write your own personal cheques for the purpose; let not the Australian tax payer contribute one red cent; when almost half the population of Australia is incapable of reading and writing by the time they leave high school, it is definitely a case of "charity begins at home" as a priority.

...Skilling our own population to compete with cheap Asian labour, would prevent the present-day absurdity and need to import skills into Australia, masking the abysmal educational outcomes and standards of our underfunded and miss-directed Australia educational failure.

I think I detect the idea here, that I have seen elsewhere, that
Australia is either in Asia or right up against it.
This I think is because all schools have Mercator's projection of the
world on their walls.
In fact we are on the other side of the world from Asia. The mind set
of most is that Australia is closer to Asia than Europe.
This is not so, Paris is closer to Asia than Australia.
When you realise that neither Indonesia or the Philippines are in Asia
but are like us and New Zealand are in Oceana you will get the idea.

Beijing is closer to Paris than Sydney.
Seoul is closer to Stockholm that Darwin.

It does require a mind reset to grasp these things.

Not interested in geographical distant. We are talking about economic bond and cultural links. We now have more Asian migrants than those from Europe so we need to shift the mindset of the next generation.