globalisation and education essay

Global education: How to transform school systems?

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Emiliana vegas and emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development @emivegasv rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

November 17, 2020

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This essay is part of “ Reimagining the global economy: Building back better in a post-COVID-19 world ,” a collection of 12 essays presenting new ideas to guide policies and shape debates in a post-COVID-19 world.

Even before COVID-19 left as many as 1.5 billion students out of school in early 2020, there was a global consensus that education systems in too many countries were not delivering the quality education needed to ensure that all have the skills necessary to thrive. 1 It is the poorest children across the globe who carry the heaviest burden, with pre-pandemic analysis estimating that 90 percent of children in low-income countries, 50 percent of children in middle-income countries, and 30 percent of children in high-income countries fail to master the basic secondary-level skills needed to thrive in work and life. 2  

Analysis in mid-April 2020—in the early throes of the pandemic—found that less than 25 percent of low-income countries were providing any type of remote learning, while close to 90 percent of high-income countries were. 3 On top of cross-country differences in access to remote learning, within-country differences are also staggering. For example, during the COVID-19 school closures, 1 in 10 of the poorest children in the U.S. had little or no access to technology for learning. 4

Yet, for a few young people in wealthy communities around the globe, schooling has never been better than during the pandemic. They are taught in their homes with a handful of their favorite friends by a teacher hired by their parents. 5  Some parents have connected via social media platforms to form learning pods that instruct only a few students at a time with agreed-upon teaching schedules and activities.

While the learning experiences for these particular children may be good in and of themselves, they represent a worrisome trend for the world: the massive acceleration of education inequality. 6

Emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources.

The silver lining is that COVID-19 has resulted in public recognition of schools’ essential caretaking role in society and parents’ gratitude for teachers, their skills, and their invaluable role in student well-being.

It is hard to imagine there will be another moment in history when the central role of schooling in the economic, social, and political prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population. The very fact that schools enable parents to work outside the home is hitting home to millions of families amid global school closures. Now is the time to chart a vision for how education can emerge stronger from this global crisis and help reduce education inequality.

Indeed, we believe that strong and inclusive public education systems are essential to the short- and long-term recovery of society and that there is an opportunity to leapfrog toward powered-up schools.

A powered-up school, one that well serves the educational needs of children and youth, is one that puts a strong public school at the center of the community and leverages the most effective partnerships to help learners grow and develop a broad range of competencies and skills. It would recognize and adapt to the learning that takes place beyond its walls, regularly assessing students’ skills and tailoring learning opportunities to meet students at their skill level. New allies in children’s learning would complement and assist teachers, and could support children’s healthy mental and physical development. It quite literally would be the school at the center of the community that powers student learning and development using every path possible (Figure 12.1).

While this vision is aspirational, it is by no means impractical. Schools at the center of a community ecosystem of learning and support are an idea whose time has come, and some of the emerging practices amid COVID-19, such as empowering parents to support their children’s education, should be sustained after the pandemic subsides.

It is hard to imagine there will be another moment in history when the central role of schooling in the economic, social, and political prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population.

The way forward

To achieve this vision, we propose five actions to seize the moment and transform education systems (focusing on pre-primary through secondary school) to better serve all children and youth, especially the most disadvantaged.

1. Leverage public schools and put them at the center of education systems given their essential role in equalizing opportunity across society

By having the mandate to serve all children and youth regardless of background, public schools in many countries can bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and needs, providing the social benefit of allowing individuals to grow up with a set of common values and knowledge that can make communities more cohesive and unified. 7

Schools play a crucial role in fostering the skills individuals need to succeed in a rapidly changing labor market, 8 play a major role in equalizing opportunities for individuals of diverse backgrounds, and address a variety of social needs that serve communities, regions, and entire nations. While a few private schools can and do play these multiple roles, public education is the main conduit for doing so at scale and hence should be at the center of any effort to build back better.

2. Focus on the instructional core, the heart of the teaching and learning process

Using the instructional core—or focusing on the interactions among educators, learners, and educational materials to improve student learning 9 —can help identify what types of new strategies or innovations could become community-based supports in children’s learning journey. Indeed, even after only a few months of experimentation around the globe on keeping learning going amid a pandemic, some clear strategies have the potential, if continued, to contribute to a powered-up school, and many of them involve engaging learners, educators, and parents in new ways using some form of technology.

3. Deploy education technology to power up schools in a way that meets teaching and learning needs and prevent technology from becoming a costly distraction

After COVID-19, one thing is certain: School systems that are best prepared to use education technology effectively will be best positioned to continue offering quality education in the face of school closures.

Other recent research 10 by one of us finds that technology can help improve learning by supporting the crucial interactions in the instructional core through the following ways: (1) scaling up quality instruction (by, for example, prerecorded lessons of high-quality teaching); (2) facilitating differentiated instruction (through, for example, computer-adaptive learning or live one-on-one tutoring); (3) expanding opportunities for student practice; and (4) increasing student engagement (through, for example, videos and games).

4. Forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers

When a respectful relationship among parents, teachers, families, and schools happens, children learn and thrive. This occurs by inviting families to be allies in children’s learning by using easy-to-understand information communicated through mechanisms that adapt to parents’ schedules and that provide parents with an active but feasible role. The nature of the invitation and the relationship is what is so essential to bringing parents on board.

COVID-19 is an opportunity for parents and families to gain insight into the skill that is involved in teaching and for teachers and schools to realize what powerful allies parents can be. Parents around the world are not interested in becoming their child’s teacher, but they are, based on several large-scale surveys, 11 asking to be engaged in a different, more active way in the future. One of the most important insights for supporting a powered-up school is challenging the mindset of those in the education sector who think that parents and families with the least opportunities are not capable or willing to help their children learn.

5. Embrace the principles of improvement science required to evaluate, course correct, document, and scale new approaches that can help power up schools over time

The speed and depth of change mean that it will be essential to take an iterative approach to learning what works, for whom, and under what enabling conditions. In other words, this is a moment to employ the principles of improvement science. 12 Traditional research methods will need to be complemented by real-time documentation, reflection, quick feedback loops, and course correction. Rapid sharing of early insights and testing of potential change ideas will need to come alongside the longer-term rigorous reviews.

Adapting the scaling strategy is especially challenging, requiring not only timely data, a thorough understanding of the context, and space for reflection, but also willingness and capacity to act on this learning and make changes accordingly.

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Emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources. But such a vision is essential, and that amid the myriad of decisions education leaders are making every day, it can guide the future. With the dire consequences of the pandemic hitting the most vulnerable young people the hardest, it is tempting to revert to a global education narrative that privileges access to school above all else. This, however, would be a mistake. A powered-up public school in every community is what the world’s children deserve, and indeed is possible if everyone can collectively work together to harness the opportunities presented by this crisis to truly leapfrog education forward.

• This essay is based on a longer paper titled “Beyond reopening schools: How education can emerge stronger than before COVID-19” by the same authors, which can be found here: https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-reopening-schools-how-education-can-emerge-stronger-than-before-covid-19/ .
• ”The Learning Generation: Investing in Education for a Changing World.” The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. https://report.educationcommission.org/report/ .
• Vegas, Emiliana. “School Closures, Government Responses, and Learning Inequality around the World during COVID-19.” Brookings Institution, April 14, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/research/school-closures-government-responses-and-learning-inequality-around-the-world-during-covid-19/.
• “U.S. Census Bureau Releases Household Pulse Survey Results.” United States Census Bureau, 2020, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/household-pulse-results.html .
• Moyer, Melinda Wenner. “Pods, Microschools and Tutors: Can Parents Solve the Education Crisis on Their Own?” The New York Times. January 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/parenting/school-pods-coronavirus.html.
• Samuels, Christina A., and Arianna Prothero. “Could the ‘Pandemic Pod’ Be a Lifeline for Parents or a Threat to Equity?” Education Week. August 18, 2020. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/07/29/could-the-pandemic-pod-be-a-lifeline.html.
• Christakis, Erika. “Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake.” The Atlantic. September 11, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-war-on-public-schools/537903/.
• Levin, Henry M. “Education as a Public and Private Good.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 6, no. 4 (1987): 628-41.
• David Cohen and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, who originated the idea of the instructional core, used the terms teachers, students, and content. The OECD’s initiative on “Innovative Learning Environments” later adapted the framework using the terms educators, learners, and resources to represent educational materials and added a new element of content to represent the choices around skills and competencies and how to assess them. Here we have pulled from elements that we like from both frameworks, using the term instructional core to describe the relationships between educators, learners, and content and added parents.
• Alejandro J. Ganimian, Emiliana Vegas, and Frederick M. Hess, “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?” Brookings Institution, September 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/essay/realizing-the-promise-how-can-education-technology-improve-learning-for-all/.
• “Parents 2020: COVID-19 Closures: A Redefining Moment for Students, Parents & Schools.” Heroes, Learning, 2020. https://r50gh2ss1ic2mww8s3uvjvq1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/LH_2020-Parent-Survey-Partner-1.pdf . 
• “The Six Core Principles of Improvement.” The Six Core Principles of Improvement. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. August 18, 2020. https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/our-ideas/six-core-principles-improvement/ . 

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Reimagining Globalisation and Education

Opinion: Fazal Rizvi, Professor of Global Studies in Education at the University of Melbourne

The past few years have witnessed the rise of a strident form of nationalism around the world. This has clearly been evident in the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote; but also in the nationalist political tides in countries as diverse as Philippines, Turkey and India.

To explain the global rise of this nationalism, many commentators have pointed to the idea of globalisation itself. They have argued that this historical shift represents a major backlash against the various forms and effects of globalisation, and that ordinary people no longer believe in what they now regard as its false promises.

What implications does this anti-globalisation sentiment have for the internationalisation agenda to which many systems of education are now committed? In what ways do they now need to re-imagine the relationship between globalisation and education? How might we now need to rethink the ideas of global learning and global citizenship education?

It is of course no longer possible to deny the contention that recent global transformations have resulted in much economic anxiety, social unrest and political angst. Recent economic shifts are at least in part responsible for unsustainable and unacceptable levels of inequality, both within and across national borders.

Politically, globalisation has spawned a new world order in which power is in the hands of a transnational elite. The rise of transnational corporations and the influence of intergovernmental organisations have squeezed out the democratic voices of citizens within their own communities. It has led to a democratic deficit.

And, culturally, a growing number of people believe that cross-border migration, encouraged by global economic processes, has unsettled the deeply held values and traditions that had given them and their communities a sense of meaning and purpose. Distrust of migrants and refugees has increased markedly.

These voices of discontent are clearly linked to the uneven distribution of opportunities resulting from globalisation. While in some countries, such as China and Korea, it has created new opportunities in others it has exasperated social inequalities. Even in those countries that have benefitted from it, gaps in people’s life chances have widened.

In Europe and the United States, both the industrial cities and rural areas have carried much of the burden of global economic transformations. Job security has vanished, forcing people to move to places where the new jobs might be, away from their communities. They have had to retrain for new jobs, but lifelong learning is often privatised and requires an investment that many are not able to afford.

There is a growing realisation that the issues of environmental sustainability and global peace cannot be adequately addressed without acknowledging the ontological realities of  ‘one world’

At the same time, welfare provisions have been cut. Governments have increasingly objected to them on ideological grounds. They have argued that state subsidies and programmes encourage inefficiencies, making people dependent on handouts. A relentless ideological campaign has celebrated the logic of the markets, suggesting that each individual should be, responsible for his or her own future.

It is these sentiments – some justified others exaggerated or false – that have arguably given rise to a class of people whom the sociologist Guy Standing aptly calls the ‘precariat’, an agglomerate of several different social groups that include young educated but underemployed people, those who fear losing their cultural privileges, and those who have fallen out of the old-style industrial working class.

This new class of people is not only worried about job insecurity but is also concerned about loss of cultural identity, and especially its long-established cultural privileges. Not surprisingly therefore it is susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism, including those enunciated by expedient politicians who are not reluctant to stoke the fear of immigrants, refugees, indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups.

In the context of these developments, ethno-nationalism’s appeal is perfectly understandable. But is it justified? To what extent is globalisation responsible for the economic, political and cultural conditions that have exasperated social inequalities? And is it possible to abandon globalisation in favour of a nationalism that can bring back prosperity and cultural certainties?

These are profound questions, of deep relevance to educational policy and practice. This is so because education is simultaneously about the present and the future: about how things are and should be. In a world characterised increasingly by cynicism, distrust and pessimism, educators face the challenging task of helping young people to understand the sources of their confusions and discontents, and imagine the possibilities of a better future.

This pedagogic task clearly demands an appreciation of how global interconnectivity may not in fact be the main source of the contemporary problems, but the ways in which it is interpreted and articulated; how a particular way of thinking about it has been grounded into our popular imaginary; and how many of our major institutions have been re-shaped in line with its ideological assumptions.

Collectively these assumptions are widely referred to as ‘neoliberalism’. Neoliberalism assumes that a society is best imagined as a sum of individuals, each pursuing their own self-interest. It rests on a belief that the public sector is necessarily inefficient and presents a barrier to individual freedom, economic productivity and national development. It suggests therefore transferring the control of public institutions to the private sector, opening them up to global competition.

Most communities have already been transformed by the global flows of people. Cultural diversity, exchange and hybridity have become a fact of life . . . and cannot simply be wished away.

In this way, the ideas of globalisation and neoliberalism are viewed as inextricably linked. However, recent nationalist movements do not view globalisation in economic terms only, but more seriously as a major source of cultural concerns. They thus present a most diffused and often contradictory account of globalisation. Perhaps their success lies in their ability to bring under one ideological umbrella a range of conflicting ideas, political interests and cultural prejudices.

What they fail to consider however is that it is the automation of work and the privatisation and corporatisation of institutions that might have arguably contributed more to the economic distress of the precariat than the facts of global mobility and exchange. If social inequalities are not inherently an outcome of the global flows of people then it is perfectly possible that their causes lie in the excesses of the global corporations and the transnational elite.

In recent decades, the neoliberal reading of globalisation has involved the contention that globalisation is a force to which there are no alternatives. Accepting the neoliberal logic, nations around the world have accordingly reconstituted their major institutions, including education. In the process however they have failed to manage the contradictions of the neoliberal logic of the markets, and also redistribute the benefits of global trade in a more inclusive manner.

Yet what is intriguing now is that while recent anti-globalisation rhetoric has been strong among the new nationalists around the world, they have not abandoned a commitment to neoliberalism. Indeed, under the Trump Presidency, neoliberal policies have been promoted with even greater vigour. In India, its neoliberal assumptions have driven the Modi Government to further open the Indian economy to global competition, even as its nationalist rhetoric has become stronger.

In the United States, private and charter schools have never been supported with greater conviction. The notion of public higher education has been undermined by the withdrawal of a great deal of state funding, especially for programmes that promote the equality of educational opportunity. The idea of individual self-reliance has become the key driver underpinning policy shifts.

These contradictions will of course play themselves out over the next decade or so. But it is hard to imagine national systems anywhere once again separating themselves totally from global forces and opportunities. There are some aspects of global interconnectivity that now appear ontologically fixed. Developments in information and communications technologies have, for example, rendered inevitable the global flows of ideas, images and ideologies. They have intensified transnational connectedness.

. . . the challenge facing education is not to reject the facts of global interconnectivity and exchange, but to redefine globalisation, beyond its neoliberal imaginary; to re-articulate the meaning of global interdependence

Most communities have already been transformed by the global flows of people. Cultural diversity, exchange and hybridity have become a fact of life in both America and Europe, and cannot simply be wished away. Economies have increasingly become service-oriented, with a growing recognition that such industries as tourism, education and retail rely invariably on global mobility and cultural exchange.

At the same time, there is now a deep awareness, especially among the young, that many of the most serious problems facing humanity are global, requiring collective action. Indeed there is a growing realisation that the issues of environmental sustainability and global peace cannot be adequately addressed without acknowledging the ontological realities of ‘one world’. In these and other ways, many aspects of globalisation are thus here to stay.

If this is so then the challenge facing education is not to reject the facts of global interconnectivity and exchange, but to redefine globalisation, beyond its neoliberal imaginary; to re-articulate the meaning of global interdependence. This meaning should not only refer to economic exchange but should also view interdependency as an opportunity to build a more just global community. This should be seen as a moral and political issue. It is also an educational issue, for it involves young people imagining their future, beyond the neoliberal terms in which economic, political and cultural exchange is currently defined.

Globalisation is not only about the material structures of power, but it also constitutes, and is constituted by, a particular way of interpreting and representing the world, a ‘common sense’. One of the unexpected benefits inherent in the rise of nationalism might yet be its unmasking of the ‘common sense’ generated by neoliberal social imaginary,  in which education clearly has a role to play.

This unmasking should show students how the benefits of neoliberal globalisation are unevenly distributed and how it has disempowered many communities. Students need to recognise that in order to empower themselves and their communities, they need to develop a new common sense of globalisation that does not ignore the ontological realities of globalisation but interrogates further the neoliberal assumptions upon which its hegemonic understanding has been framed, as a way of better understanding the effects and discontents it has produced.

They need to explore ways of rescuing globalisation from the clutches of neoliberalism, and imagining a conception that is not wedded to its deeply ideological structures. At the same time, they need to be alerted to the risks associated with nativism, the dangerous form of ethno-nationalism that has in recent years been promoted widely by the popular media and is often exploited by expedient politicians.

The task of education is to show students how economic and cultural nationalisms are unlikely to deliver the economic and social benefits they promise. Instead they will intensify a cultural politics based on a permanent state of fear, resentment and conflict. The future of young people cannot be well served by such a politics.

Fazal Rizvi  is a Professor of Global Studies in Education at the University of Melbourne, as well as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois  at Urbana-Champaign. Fazal has written extensively on issues of  identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalisation and education policy and Australia-Asia relations.  A collection of his essays is published in: Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi (Routledge 2014). Fazal is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, a past Editor of the journal, Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education, and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education. He is a co-author of Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (Palgrave 2017), and of a major report, Australia’s Asian Diaspora Advantage, produced for the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA 2016).

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Globalisation and schooling: equity and access issues

• Published: 01 February 2011
• Volume 6 , pages 143–152, ( 2011 )

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This review essay focuses on the prominence given to globalisation and discourses of globalisation in education reforms and pedagogy, as well as the way conceptual thinking in this area has changed and developed, due to competing ideologies, forces of globalisation and political, economic and cultural transformations. It analyses and evaluates the shifts in methodological approaches to globalisation and its effects on education policy and pedagogy. It focuses on forces of globalisation, ideology, social inequality and implications for equity and access to quality education.

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Zajda, J. Globalisation and schooling: equity and access issues. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 6 , 143–152 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-010-9309-z

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Education, Globalisation and the State. Essays in Honour of Roger Dale

This book pays tribute to an intellectual giant. The twenty-one succinct chapters comprising the volume, and the variety of scholars who have authored them, are indicative of his intellectual, geographical, and intergenerational reach. These chapters reflect the towering influence of Roger Dale’s work in fields such as the Sociology of Education, Globalization and Education Policy Studies, and Comparative and International Education. While engaging critically with Roger’s intellectual ideas—and without exception the authors demonstrate the significance of these to their own theoretical and research endeavors—they also include personal reflections on his role as mentor, role model, networker, and friend. Together the chapters are testimony to the richness, quality, and diversity of Roger Dale’s work and the extent to which it has inspired several generations of scholars from very different world locations. In a final chapter, Roger Dale himself responds from his usual humble position to all contributors and reviews the key aspects of an exceptional and ongoing intellectual journey.

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April Biccum

This paper is an interpretive study of a Global Educational Reform Movement marshalling Global Education, Global Citizenship Education, Global Competence and twenty-first Century Skills in response to the problems caused by capitalist globalisation and a technological society. What kind of knowledge is being endorsed by this educational reform movement? Using Critical Discourse Analysis this paper shows that Interpretivist methodological capability is part of what GERM actors think you need to know to live in the world. This raises a puzzle: why are technocratic organisations engaged in metrological politics endorsing interpretive methodological capability? GERM is content driven and despite many well founded critiques, needs to be theorised under the rubric of Global Knowledge Politics. I employ the concept 'knowledge monopolies' from Canadian Political Economist Harold Innis as a way of theorising the complexities of GERM. My study points to the necessity for a conversation about the democratisation of knowledge.

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

The globalisation of education

three examples of the globalisation are: PISA tests and league tables, international companies providing education services in more than one country, private schools and universities expanding into more than one country.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on November 14, 2022 by Karl Thompson

The globalisation of education refers to how a ‘global system’ of education is emerging, beyond the level of individual countries. Three examples of this are:

• PISA league tables rank countries according to how well pupils’ score on English and maths tests.

International companies are increasingly providing educational services in Britain and abroad.

• Private schools and universities are expanding abroad and offering services to fee-paying parents/ students.
• The rise of online learning and digital education.

Below I will briefly consider each of these aspects of the globalisation of education in more depth, applying some sociological perspectives to provide some analytical depth.

PISA International Tests

PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment which conducts standardised tests in dozens of different countries every three years in reading and literacy, maths and sciences and produces league tables which rank countries based on the average student performance.

These tests are conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which is a global organisation aiming to promote peace, prosperity and equality of opportunity.

From a New Right/ neoliberal perspective the publication of league tables should encourage competition between countries as those countries nearer the bottom should not want to be down there and so adapt their education policies in order to improve their outcomes.

It should also promote comparative education research on the part of policy makers as they seek to investigate what it is about the education systems of high performing countries that makes them come at the top of the league tables.

The results of such cross national investigations could then be applied on a national basis, although to be successful policies may have to be adapted to fit local cultures.

International Companies and the Globalisation of Education

One example of this is where companies such as Apple and Microsoft provide educational software to schools all over the world.

A second example is International exam boards providing assessment services and text books to different countries.

From a neoliberal perspective, this makes sense as these companies are efficient and in a better position to provide such services than especially governments in poorer countries (who tend to lack money).

From a Marxist perspective, this is a process of mainly Western companies gaining power and control over the education systems of poorer countries.

Private Schools and Universities setting up abroad

Private schools and universities from the UK are increasingly moving towards attracting more students from abroad and also setting up outposts in foreign countries.

According to a recent article in the Economist Britains’ 136 universities now have 39 campuses abroad educating 26 000 students, so these are very much global institutions.

From a neoliberal perspective this is very good for the UK education sector, it increases profits and more money flows into the UK.

From a Marxist perspective, looked at globally, these institutions only really benefit the elite, they do nothing for the poor, so this will just perpetuate global inequality.

Digital Education and Globalisation

Digital education has seen phenomenal growth over the last two decades, not only that coming from formal educational establishments such as universities which have restricted access for fee paying students but also much cheaper offerings from organisations such as Udemy and free to view educational services such as TED talks.

These online learning platforms are inherently global rather than national or local in nature simply because they can be access from anyone anywhere in the world who has access to a smartphone, and enough money in the case of paid-for courses.

The globalisation of education: analysis

There are certainly some moves towards education becoming more global, but it is not clear what kind of globalisation this is.

The people and institutions pushing the globalisation of education – the OECD, global companies such as Apple and Google, Universities and online learning platforms – these would probably be global optimists seeing this process as benefitting everyone – for example people in developing countries can benefit from access to free educational resources via Udemy and TED talks.

Global pessimists however might be more sceptical seeing the globalisation of education as more about the spread of Western market ideologies into the developing world.

It’s also worth being critical about how genuinely global education is – it is still nation states who maintain education systems through taxes and shape the national curriculums, for example.

Signposting

The material above is relevant primarily to the education topic within A-level Sociology, the specification for which explicitly states students need to know about the relationship between globalisation and education.

You might also like to consider this post on how globalisation more generally has affected education in the UK , and how education policy has responded to this.

Sources / Find out More

You might like to explore the wonderful world of PISA in more depth!

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Essay on globalization and education.

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After reading this essay you will learn about Globalization and Education: 1. Meaning of Globalization 2. Re-Structuring of Our Education System vis-a-vis Globalization.

Essay on the Meaning of Globalization :

Globalization refers to the merger and integration of national economies with that of world economy.

It is characterized by reduction of trade barriers and tariff tree-flow of trade in goods service and ideas, free flow of capital, information and technology and free movement of labour and man-power.

Shrinking of national boundaries, geographical borders and time is the hall-mark of globalization process.

There emerges a single world market without any barriers. All the nations are the potential players in such a global economic market. All the economies are mutually intertwined in a completely free environment.

All the countries are bound to liberalize their economies to allow free flow of investment and trades in goods and services. In the process, no nation the winner or loser. In this “win-win” perspective in the context of globalization, there emerges the concept of “global village”.

Each and every nation acts and takes decisions considering the potential benefits of other countries. There is interdependence among nations which minimizes the differences.

Bretherton and Ponton (1996) see globalization which consists of four composite elements: technological change, the creation of a global economy, political globalization and a globalization of ideas. Today it is rapidly increasing bringing with it expanded personal mobility; access to knowledge across borders; increased demand for higher education especially in developing countries; growing world-wide investment; and increased needs for adult and continuing education. Ronald Robertson is said to be the father of globalization as he penned an article entitled “Mapping the Globe conditions-Globalization as the central concept of 1990’s.”

Provision of GATS and Education Service :

General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) was made in 1948 in Geneva to pursue the objective of free trade to boost the growth and development of all member nations, Different rounds of talks have been moved among the member nations to sort out different pertinent issues relating to trade.

Trade in services was not covered under GATT unto the conclusion of Uruguay Round in 1994, but keeping in view the fast growth of trade in services during the pre-Uruguay Round period, shifting composition of GNP in favour of service sector in most of the countries and competitive advantage to developed countries in this sector, it was got annexed in the final act of Uruguay Round: the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) covered in WTO provides an international as well as a multilaterally accepted legal framework for the promotion of liberalization of trade in services as quickly as possible.

GATS is designed to increase trade liberalization internationally, and includes “education” as a service sector. Education accounts for $ 2 trillion of the world’s economy each year. The higher education services market was estimated in 2002 at approximately $ 30 billion, with the US holding the largest market share including recruitment of international students, establishment of university campuses abroad, franchised provision and online learning.

Barriers in the trade in education services ought to be perceived as visa restrictions, taxation that disadvantages foreign institutions and accreditation arrangements that privilege domestic institutions and qualifications. GATS cover the educational services of all countries whose educational systems are not exclusively provided by the public sector, or those educational systems that have commercial purposes.

GAT is a positive force that accelerates the influx of private and foreign providers of higher education into countries where domestic capacity is inadequate.

The GATS under WTO has two components, viz:

(a) The framework agreement containing 29 Articles; and

(b) A number of annexed, ministerial decisions, schedules of commitments etc.

This agreement obliges the country to remove restrictions to market access and entry of market forces in education service.

Education services have been categorized under the following:

(a) Primary education service including primary education and pre-school education but excluding child care and adult literacy programme.

(b) Secondary education service.

(c) Higher education service covers two elements:

(i) Teaching and training in post-secondary, sub-degree, technical and vocational training institution.

(ii) Relating to university level education, its affiliated colleges and specialized professional education recognized under university system.

(d) Adult and continuing service education.

(e) Other education services.

Essay # Re-Structuring of Our Education System vis-a-vis Globalization :

Globalization and advancement in information technology in one hand offers a good deal of opportunities to work and think globally at the same time throws formidable array of challenges to the domain of education. In future, market driven courses are likely to be the focal strategic points of the educational institutions.

Educational institutions of higher learning in particular have to conform to internationally acceptable standards of performance. Since quality education is a necessity in knowledge and technology driven society, our education seems to be degraded and aim-less. Quality of human resource is the key to all-round development of nation. Deterioration of quality poses a major challenge to our education system.

The products of higher education institutions are of low-quality and less-productive. In the global perspective, ours man-power is getting out-dated and rated third grade. This situation is so alarming that the entire system needs to be overhauled drastically and radically. The crux of the matter is increasing the quality and to maintain quality. Teacher or researcher is at the nerve-centre. There goes a saying, “As the teacher so is the pupil.”

Therefore, education of the teacher is the passport to ensure better quality-based education. In the emerging era of globalization, there is the dire need of preparing teachers to be committed and responsible to the pressing needs of the students.

Secondly, educational institutions need to keep on carefully assessing the major requirements of the stakeholders of higher education system to sense their changing needs, expectations and perceptions of higher education, and to decipher the various forces driving the change.

Customer-focused education is central to the thought of globalization. Only a win-win situation for all the stakeholders would help institutions growing up and sustain. In the current situation in India, it is a reality that our education system is less adaptive to the needs and aspirations of its stakeholders.

So, it is not a matter of choice to accept change but an irreversible compulsion to change in the sweeping wave of globalization. Educational institutions must be governed, led and managed to benefit the stakeholders.

Thirdly, when providers of education from abroad venture into our educational market, the government needs to be activated to guard its public interest. Since, the goal of education is to provide access to all without any differences; it is the Herculean task of government to see that the interest of the marginalized poor be protected.

Policies of education must be-framed to give wider access to the disadvantaged groups, who are mostly poor, ill-fed, and ill-clad, to the periphery of education.

Thus, our education system has to be restructured radically to increase and widen participation of all, especially under-represented groups in education. The system of education needs to exploit new technology to deliver a quality-based education to all effectively.

Fourthly, our educational system should respond to the needs of time and society. There is the emerging trend of information technology and communication engineering which conditions and shapes the life. This technology reduces differences in time and space which turns the entire world into a global village, where man thinks globally and acts locally.

Therefore the need of the hour is to restructure the entire gamut of education especially higher education to redesign its courses to accommodate the sweeping tide of information technology to cater to the real needs of our students.

Lastly, for the preparation of our youth, there is the urgent need of convergence of different disciplines by encouraging research on an interdisciplinary approach. There is the necessity of partnership among the educational institutions on an equal basis for the development of excellent quality education by undertaking different need based projects and research activities in the wake of the blowing of globalization wind.

So, Government must be sensitive to this approach by encouraging all the partners of education to come forward and work for the larger interests of our nation.

Conclusion :

From the foregoing discussion, it is crystal clear that no nation is typically independent of others in the current scenario of all-encompassing globalization. The unprecedented pace of change in the global scenario makes it imperative to initiate and speed up changes in the Indian higher education system as expediously as possible.

Currently, countries like the US, Australia, Singapore, ECM cluster have already radically readjusted their educational systems to grow and expand even beyond their national boundaries.

As our education system is considered to be highly credible especially among third world countries, this is the appropriate time to change and attract, at least third world countries, to which India could be projected to be offering world class education at an affordable cost.

Any loss of time by not giving a serious thought to readjust our largest system of education in the world would cause irreversible damage to meet the new challenges.

To integrate globally anticipating and facing competition in the higher education system in particular is the best bet. The need of the hour is to expedite the international competitiveness of the Indian system of education. The vitality and efficiency of ours system of education would be tested by the extent it acquires a worldwide star attraction. Thanks to the emerging trend of Globalization!

Related Articles:

• Globalization: Short paragraph on Globalization
• Globalization and Education in India

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This Is the Way the World Ends (According to Novelists)

A new kind of disaster fiction is serving as scenario planning for real global crises. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller.

Credit... Anuj Shrestha

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By Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru’s next novel, “Blue Ruin,” will be published in May.

• March 29, 2024

In the opening chapters of “2054,” a new thriller co-written by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis, the action shifts every page or two — from a private jet, to the White House, to a Ritz-Carlton hotel, to Capitol Hill and elsewhere. The short sections are titled with locations and time stamps (including time zones) to signify global scope and high stakes. We understand at once that this is a story too big to be told from one perspective.

It’s a familiar technique; in movies, such titles are often given extra technical sheen with a flashing cursor that prints them out across the screen, a skeuomorphic legacy of teletype and early command-line interfaces. The implication is that diverse situations are being monitored in some way, logged and recorded by a technically proficient authority that sees them as part of a coherent whole.

“2054” is a sequel to “2034,” “a novel of the next world war” that meticulously laid out a sequence of events starting with a naval confrontation in the South China Sea and ending in nuclear conflict. Twenty years afterward, Sandy Chowdhury, a character in the first novel, asks the pilot of his Gulfstream to divert so he can view the reconstruction of Galveston, Texas, which was leveled by a Chinese warhead. The physical consequences of the devastation are being repaired, but the social and political divisions remain.

The geopolitical epic is at least as old as “War and Peace,” but there’s a particular kind of novel that came into its own with globalization, taking on new life in recent years. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller, or, because abbreviations and acronyms are crucial to its aesthetic, the A.S.T.

Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.

The currency of the A.S.T. is plausibility. It can be counterfactual, but never fantastical. It differs from other kinds of thrillers in its willingness to indulge in essayistic digressions about technology or policy. In some cases, the story may even take second place to these ideas, a mere vehicle for the delivery of an info-payload. In this, the A.S.T. is essentially a subgenre of SF, or at least the kind of science fiction that prioritizes world-building over other kinds of narrative pleasure. Indeed, many A.S.T.s, like “2034” and “2054,” are near-future tales, extrapolating from the present to a carefully imagined next five minutes, designed to elicit a little spark of recognition, the feeling of being shown a possible path from “here” to a utopian or dystopian “there.”

“The End of October,” Lawrence Wright’s eerily prescient novel about a global influenza pandemic, was written before Covid and published in the early days of the 2020 lockdown. Like Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic drama, “Contagion,” which experienced a boom in streaming in early 2020, Wright’s book generated a lot of affect, at least in that moment, from its power of extrapolation. We were in the early days of something; we didn’t know what. Here were narratives that showed what we could be facing if the pandemic intensified to the point of mass death and social breakdown. Naturally, we could not look away.

To succeed, this kind of story has to feel true. Even as the A.S.T. indulges in thriller tropes, the chases and explosions must be anchored by a kind of epistemological authority. We must believe that what we’re reading is something more than a product of the writer’s fevered imagination. Wright, who won a Pulitzer for “The Looming Tower,” his account of 9/11, derives his authority from extensive and rigorous research. In the acknowledgments (always an important part of an A.S.T.) he credits virologists and public health officials, as well as a number of submariners, who helped with an extended sequence that takes place aboard one of the U.S. Navy’s long-range underwater vessels.

Ackerman and Stavridis derive their authority from their military experience. Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine. Stavridis retired as a four-star admiral and served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe. When they’re describing the buildup to war in “2034,” their procedural knowledge gives their story a verisimilitude that elevates its workmanlike telling. As Navy men, they are not above a little light trolling of the other branches of the armed forces: How else are we to understand a novel about World War III without a single mention (as far as I’m able to tell) of the Army?

The interwoven character arcs of “2034” convey what really seems to interest the authors — a set of warnings and predictions aimed at their peers in what used to be called the military-industrial complex. The ladder of escalation begins with a Chinese demonstration of decisive cyberwar superiority, a capability gap that leads to disaster. The vulnerability of global communications systems is a preoccupation, as is the rise of India as a military power. The important theaters of war are naval ones — the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. So maybe that’s where military spending ought to be directed? Just a thought from the admiral.

The sequel, however, turns its attention to biotechnology and American domestic partisanship. The president dies suddenly from a mysterious growth on his heart, raising fears of a new kind of bioweapon based on “remote gene editing” technology. His death leads to civil unrest, and takes a motley crew of characters, including Chowdhury, a genetics researcher and a seductive diving instructor, through an eccentric riff on “Heart of Darkness.” They head upriver to find a reclusive figure — not Kurtz, but a centenarian Ray Kurzweil, the ebullient (and real) Silicon Valley futurist and promoter of transhumanism. The future of humanity will be decided in the lab, the authors caution, and we are sorely unprepared.

Experts on military matters, Ackerman and Stavridis are much less secure on scientific terrain. Their notion of the world-changing “singularity,” drawn from Kurzweil, is little more than metaphysical hand-waving, and their descriptions of biotechnology lack substance, which drains their tale of the most important quality of any A.S.T.: procedural plausibility.

The most celebrated example of the A.S.T. in recent years — and the book that, in its breadth of speculation, sets the standard for the genre — is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” which attempts the enormous task of imagining a coordinated global response to another grave threat to humanity, climate change. From its terrifying opening set piece, which portrays a lethal heat event in north India, it expands across the globe and through decades, laying out strategies for alleviating the crisis. Along the way, the story is studded by capsule essays on a range of technical topics, from the Gini Coefficient and tax policy to carbon sequestration and the Jevons Paradox .

This is fiction as simulation, running versions of events, trying to imagine how things might be if the pieces on the board were arranged in a certain way, rather than playing the other games novelists play, imagining what could never be or simply never was. One ancestor of this kind of work is the 19th-century social novel: Think of Zola’s meticulously researched Rougon-Macquart sequence, a 20-book panorama of life under the French Second Empire. A more recent predecessor is the near-future cyberpunk narrative exemplified by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Still another would be the kind of techno-thriller pioneered by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, particularly the spate of novels published late in the Cold War, including Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” and Gen. Sir John Hackett’s “The Third World War,” which imagined hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But there’s a different tradition behind the A.S.T., one outside conventional literary history — corporate scenario planning.

During the Cold War, one think tank was central to the business of imagining the American future. The RAND Corporation had been spun out of the Department of War to produce policy proposals for the U.S. government. It used game theory to model nuclear escalation and collected what would now be called “big data” (in retrospect, woefully small) to guide the conduct of the Vietnam War. A RAND futurist called Herman Kahn began to supplement mathematical models with what he termed “scenarios,” war-game narratives illustrating “rungs of the escalation ladder” of nuclear conflict, from “ostensible crisis” through “justifiable counterforce attack” to “spasm or insensate war.” The storytelling element was a daring innovation in an organizational culture that valued quantitative analysis.

In the early 1970s, the oil company Royal Dutch Shell hired the Frenchman Pierre Wack to run its strategic planning department. A disciple of Kahn, Wack was also an early corporate adopter of “mindfulness” and a student of the Caucasian mystic George Gurdjieff. Wack made scenario planning a kind of structured science fiction, producing not a single forecast but several competing images of the future. Participants were encouraged to step away from the “official future” — whatever the orthodoxy might be in their organization.

Wack’s scenario planning was credited with helping Shell weather the oil shocks of the ’70s, and this style of “possible future” storytelling gradually spread beyond the company, finding fertile ground in the emerging Bay Area tech scene. By the 1990s, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, was a partner in a scenario planning consultancy. Wired magazine ran a “scenarios” issue in 1995, detailing possible futures imagined by writers of speculative fiction like Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and Douglas Coupland, completing the fusion of scenario planning with more traditional literary pursuits.

So, while the A.S.T. is a form of entertainment, it’s also meant to enlighten the planners and decision makers who might grab a hardcover off the shelf at an airport bookstore. Bill Gates and Barack Obama have recommended “The Ministry for the Future.” Robinson spoke at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos. Stavridis and Ackerman have spoken at think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. As fiction for the Davos set, the A.S.T. is a tool for both forecasting and navigating the troubles to come.

This dual purpose is made particularly clear in “AI 2041,” a recent book by Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, and Chen Qiufan, one of China’s most celebrated SF writers. In it, Chen writes 10 short stories, each illustrating a scenario that Lee wants to discuss. Lee introduces the stories and writes an extensive commentary after each one, detailing the technological possibilities and social issues that it raises. Chen’s fictions are rather swamped by Lee’s context, which makes them into something like moral fables, mere illustrations of his points.

Why is the A.S.T. so salient right now? What itch is it scratching? One of the most astute thinkers about the emergent networked future is the design theorist Benjamin Bratton. In “The Revenge of the Real,” a work of nonfiction published in 2021, he proposes a “politics for a post-pandemic world,” suggesting that Covid has trained us to see ourselves in an “epidemiological” way: Like it or not, we are, inescapably, a population as well as individuals. We have undergone a kind of crash course in systems thinking that will, Bratton hopes, force us to approach our problems at global scale. “It is necessary,” he writes, “for a society to be able to sense, model and act back upon itself, and it is necessary for it to plan and provide for the care of its people.”

The aesthetic of the A.S.T., with its flaunting of globalization, its pleasure in technical advances and its refusal of the “single window” into its stories, does have a utopian dimension — the imagination of what Bratton calls “planetary competency.” The message is one of resilience, of human beings acting in concert, muddling through problems in the hope of navigating what Pierre Wack called “the rapids” of the near future, into calmer waters beyond.

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