Teaching and Globalization
Teaching and Globalization
Pasi Sahlberg
Globalization is typically understood as an economic, political and cul-
tural process that is reshaping the role of many nation-states in rela-
tion to global markets, agreements, and traditions. Recently it has be-
come frequently analyzed in the context of education. However, there is
surprisingly little work done on the pedagogical implications of glob-
alization on teaching and learning other than shifting the emphasis
from traditional subjects to information and communication technol-
ogy and English as a foreign language. This article argues that globaliza-
tion is having an eect on teaching and learning in three ways: educa-
tional development is often based on a global unied agenda, standard-
ized teaching and learning are being used as vehicles to improvement of
quality, and emphasis on competition is increasingly evident among in-
dividuals and schools. The article concludes that recent development of
standardization and competition-based education will become increas-
ingly counter-productive to preparing students for meaningful lives for
and beyond knowledge economy. Furthermore, as a response to glob-
alization, educators need to rethink the ways teaching and learning are
organized in schools, promote appropriate exibility at school level,
creativity in classrooms and risk-taking among students and teachers
as part of their daily work in school.
Education Systems in the Global Context
Globalization has typically been interpreted using economic, political
and cultural terms. Depending on the perspective, it has been seen as
a transition from a Fordist workplace orientation to internationalized
trade and consumption. Globalization is also leading to a diminish-
ing role of nation-states, loss of their sovereignty, and the emergence
of global hegemony of transnational media and entertainment corpo-
rations. As a consequence, standardization in economies, policies and
culture has become a new norm for competitive corporations, ideas, and
media. As Burbules and Torres (:ooo) write, changes in global culture
Dr Pasi Sahlberg is Senior Education Specialist
in the World Bank, Washington, uc, us..
The views are those of the author alone and do not necessarily
represent those of the World Bank or any of its aliated institutions.
Managing Global Transitions : (I): o,8,
oo Pasi Sahlberg
deeply aect educational policies, practices, and institutions. From re-
cent attempts to analyze and understand the multiple and complex ef-
fects of globalization on education it is obvious that there is no single
straightforward view of the consequences of the globalization process
on teaching and learning in schools and other education institutions
(Carnoy I,,,; Burbules and Torres :ooo; ovcu :ooI; Stromquist :oo:;
Hargreaves :oo,; World Bank :oo,). Although globalization has also cre-
ated new opportunities to transform education, this article focuses on
some counterproductive implications that are becoming evident in re-
cent education reforms.
Globalization has two macro-level paradoxical eects on our daily
lives. First, it simultaneously both integrates and segregates. It integrates
world cultures through the global communication networks and less re-
stricted movement of individuals. At the same time it creates a tension
between those who are beneting more and those who may be marginal-
ized by the market values and consumer cultures that are typical to many
societies, especially in the areas that suer from poverty or slower de-
velopment. The challenge for future public education is to give prior-
ity to teaching ethics and a sense of global responsibility that go be-
yond the bounds of the knowledge economy. Second, globalization pro-
motes competition although strategic alliances between competing par-
ties are becoming a condition of success. Economic markets have become
more open and exible because of diminishing barriers of trade and low-
ering of labor and trade regulations. The mobility of goods, services,
money and intellectual capital has increased due to sub-regional and
global agreements. Competition to expand markets, promote innova-
tions, and develop highly skilled workforces is shifting the focus of work
from quantities to qualities and from mastery of facts to professional
exibility and continuous renewal of personal capacities. Globalization
increases competition because productivity and eciency have become
key descriptors of successful economies. Corporations and service or-
ganizations are regularly using quality assurance policies and commit-
ting themselves to management strategies that are based on assessment
of performance of both sta and managers.
As a consequence, similar doctrines have emerged in education. Stan-
dards, testing and alternative forms of nancing have come to challenge
conventional public education in many countries. In the name of ac-
countability and transparency, schools, teachers and students are more
often than before measured, tested and asked to perform under the ob-
Managing Global Transitions
Teaching and Globalization o,
serving eyes of external inspectors. Even ministers of education today
compete to determine whose students can perform the best in inter-
national student assessment programs. Indeed, introduction of interna-
tional test comparisons, such as vis. (Programfor International Student
Assessment) and 1ixss (Trends in International Mathematics and Sci-
ence Study), has been one of the strongest pretexts for school reforms
in many countries including many of the transition economies (Harg-
reaves :oo,). The emerging perception seems to be that making schools,
teachers and students compete will itself improve the quality of educa-
tion, as it has vitalized corporations in market economies. Various forms
of educational standards have been created to help these competitions to
become fairer and more comparable.
Education systems are reacting dierently to the changes in the worlds
new economic, political and cultural orders. Globalization has become
an inuence in nation-states social reforms as education sectors adjust
to the new global environments that are characterized by exibility, di-
versity, increased competition and unpredictable change. Understand-
ing the eects of globalization on teaching and learning is essential for
any policy maker, reform designer and educational leader. According to
Carnoy (I,,,), the approach which governments take in reforming their
education sector and its responses to globalization depends on three key
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Managing Global Transitions
Teaching and Globalization ,I
I,,,). Equity-oriented reforms often emphasize strengthening the po-
litical role of education in building democratic justice, social mobility
and equal opportunities for all citizens. These reforms typically focus
on shifting public spending from higher to lower levels of education,
rural/urban balance, gender issues, broadening the conception of edu-
cational quality beyond knowledge and skills in core subjects and mov-
ing towards a more integrated curriculum and inclusive organization
of teaching. Consequently, the popularity of equity-oriented education
reforms has decreased recently because of the perceptions that invest-
ing in equity may not show an increase in test scores and, hence, may
not give sucient attention to economic growth. Instead, market-based
solutions have often been seen as potential alternatives to conventional
public education in improving the quality and cost-eectiveness of ed-
ucational provision. Some fear, among them many teachers, that in this
race for higher standards only the fastest and strongest will succeed while
the weak either fail or lose their hope when being left behind.
Restructuring-oriented education reforms that emerged in I,8os are
based on structural alignments that aim to normalize the current sys-
tem with international practice. The basic assumption of such reforms
is that all education systems that function eectively and produce high
quality learning should share the same core values, assumptions and op-
erational principles. The most typical indicators of economically and ad-
ministratively adjusted education systems are pupil-teacher ratio, class-
size, school-size, time allocation per subject, education expenditure per
capita and length of compulsory education. Recently, as a consequence of
restructuring reforms especially in transition economies, several institu-
tional rearrangements have occurred, such as the emergence of indepen-
dent assessment and examination centers, privately managed education
institutions and accreditation agencies.
Financing-oriented education reforms typically aim at reducing the
share of public nancing of education by looking for ways of users to
pay for their education. As globalization increases competition among
nations, national economies have to adjust themselves to the new global
economic structural reality. In practice, since education is a signi-
cant proportion of public sector spending, reducing public spending
inevitably means also shrinking education budgets nanced from pub-
lic funding. This, in turn, leads governments to seek nancing outside
public budgets or to reduce the unit costs within the education sector, or
both of these. Financing-oriented reforms have had three direct implica-
Volume Number Spring
,: Pasi Sahlberg
tions for education. First, shifting public funding from higher to lower
levels of education. Higher education is typically high-cost, and basic ed-
ucation is relatively low cost in terms of student expenditures. The shift
of spending from higher to basic education would therefore enhance
opportunities for large numbers of primary students at the expense of
subsidizing a relatively elite group of families who could bear the costs of
university education privately anyway (Carnoy I,,,). Second, this leads
to privatization of secondary and higher education. Many governments
in the Central and Eastern European regions increase privately nanced
education in order to overcome the problems of low education nancing
portfolios in the State budgets. Third, reduction of the cost per student
is most often done by increases in class-sizes at all levels of education.
According to the economists estimates, countries that have fewer than
, students in a class could save signicant public resources by increasing
class sizes over time (World Bank I,,,). In the New Independent States,
for example, the pupil-teacher ratio is typically around Io : I, whereas the
ovcu average is I, : I.
Standardization-oriented reforms that have appeared since the I,,os
are based on the assumption that in the competitive economic and so-
cial contexts the quality of education and productivity of labor can best
be improved by setting high performance standards for teaching and
learning and then measuring whether these standards have been met.
Standardization-driven reforms were a catalyst for the introduction of
international test comparisons. Students test scores in 1ixss and vis.
have raised public interest in the performance of education systems
globally. A consequence is that the complex interconnections between
educational achievement and economic success are oversimplied. In
competition-intensive global markets, schools have been urged to reach
higher standards. This has led to focusing on education reforms that
are based on greater standardization and related micro-management of
teaching and learning. As Hargreaves (:oo,) has argued, the most com-
monly used reform strategy is:
Higher standards of learning for all students, except for those who
have the most severe mental or physical dysfunctions.