1 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Educational Philosophy and Theory on April 9, 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2014.901161 Challenges to the Concept of Student-Centered Learning with Special Reference to the United Arab Emirates: ‘Never fail a Nahayan’ Liz Jackson, University of Hong Kong Student-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. However, perspectives vary widely on what student-centered learning entails. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks for engaging and empowering pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (Freire, 1972), Lorenzo Milani’s School of Barbiana (Italy), and other social justice orientations. Yet student- centered learning has also become, in the era of neoliberal education, a jingoistic advertisement for practices and ideologies which can be seen to lead to a global devaluation of the educational profession, and the bolstering of the view of the student as a customer. As this latter orientation becomes more influential around the globe, in many contexts what emerges as student-centered learning vividly contrasts with philosophical ideals related to engaging and empowering local students. On the other hand, the kind of ‘traditional’ education thinkers like John Dewey and Paulo Freire responded to in their work is not a universal phenomenon, and thus ‘exportation’ of any kind of student-centered learning in diverse societies and regions is likely to yield unexpected results. In this essay, I want to disentangle these varying views of student-centered learning and question the notion that student-centered learning has been or can be effectively exported from the West to the East and South today. First, I examine some key educational philosophies related to student-centered learning, and contrast their orientations with a neoliberal model of student-centered learning. In the course, I explore some of the limitations of the neoliberal view, and consider how it paradoxically entails a variant of teacher-centered education in contexts where it is imported together with outcomes-based education that holds instructors accountable for providing education to students as customers. To add context, I consider education in the United Arab Emirates today, which provides an extreme example of the risks involved with prioritizing student’s self-identified needs and interests above all else, in an idealized or exaggerated neoliberal conception of student-centered learning. I conclude with brief comments on rethinking student-centered learning to be more useful in diverse contexts today.