The moral challenge of globalization demands a fundamental change in values, focusing on

human security, democracy, and economic justice. By thinking globally and acting collectively,
each of us must contribute to building a more compassionate, humane, and peaceful world. This
paper covers the development of the theories and concepts of globalization and debates about its
impact that are relevant to education. Also there is a light thrown on a relationship between
education and globalization. There are many ways to frame the relationship between
globalization and education. One way is that globalization can be seen to impact education, as
global processes and practices have been observed to influence many educational systems,
policies and structures; values and ideals; curriculum and assessment. However, there is also a
push in the other direction—through global citizenship education, education for sustainable
development, and related trends—to understand education and educators as shapers of
globalization.

The Emergence of Globalization(s)

At the broadest level, globalization can be defined as a process or condition of the cultural,
political, economic, and technological meeting and mixing of people, ideas, and resources,
across local, national, and regional borders, which has been largely perceived to have
increased in intensity and scale during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However,
there is no global consensus on the exact time period of its occurrence, or its most
significant shaping processes, from social and cultural framings to those that hold global
political-economic systems or transnational social actors as most influential. Intersecting
questions also arise regarding whether its influence on human communities and the world
should be conceived as mostly good or mostly bad, which have clear and significant
implications for understanding debates regarding the relationship between globalization and
education.

Conceptualizing Globalization
Globalization is a relatively recent concept in scholarly research, becoming popular in
public, academic, and educational discourse only in the 1980s. However, many leading
scholars of globalization have argued that the major causes or shapers of globalization,
particularly the movement and mixing of elements beyond a local or national level, is at
least many centuries old; others frame globalization as representing processes inherent to
the human experience, within a 5,000–10,000-year time frame.1 Conceptualizations of
globalization have typically highlighted cultural, political-economic, and/or technological
aspects of these processes, with different researchers emphasizing and framing the
relationships among these different aspects in diverse ways in their theories.

Cultural framings: Emphasizing the cultural rather than economic or political aspects of
globalization, Roland Robertson pinpointed the occurrence of globalization as part of the
process of modernity in Europe (though clearly similar processes were occurring in many
parts of the world), particularly a growing mutual recognition among nationality-based
communities.2 As people began identifying with larger groups, beyond their family, clan, or
tribe, “relativization” took place, as people saw others in respective outside communities
similarly developing national or national-like identities.3 Through identifying their own
societies as akin to those of outsiders, people began measuring their cultural and political
orders according to a broader, international schema, and opening their eyes to transnational
inspirations for internal social change.

Upon mutual recognition of nations, kingdoms, and the like as larger communities that do
not include all of humanity, “emulation” stemming from comparison of the local to the
external was often a next step.4 While most people and communities resisted, dismissed, or
denied the possibility of a global human collectivity, they nonetheless compared their own
cultures and lives with those beyond their borders. Many world leaders across Eurasia
looked at other “civilizations” with curiosity, and began increasing intercultural and
international interactions to benefit from cultural mixing, through trade, translation of
knowledge, and more. With emulation and relativization also came a sense of a global
standard of values, for goods and resources, and for the behavior and organization of
individuals and groups in societies, though ethnocentrism and xenophobia was also often a
part of such “global” comparison.5

Political-economic framings: In political theory and popular understanding, nationalism has

been a universalizing discourse in the modern era, wherein individuals around the world
have been understood to belong to and identify primarily with largely mutually exclusive
national or nation-state “imagined communities.”6 In this context, appreciation for and
extensive investigation of extranational and international politics and globalization were
precluded for a long time in part due to the power of nationalistic approaches. However,
along with the rise historically of nationalist and patriotic political discourse, theories of
cosmopolitanism also emerged. Modern cosmopolitanism as a concept unfolded particularly
in the liberalism of Immanuel Kant, who argued for a spirit of “world citizenship” toward
“perpetual peace,” wherein people recognize themselves as citizens of the world.7 Martha
Nussbaum locates cosmopolitanism’s roots in the more distant past, however, observing
Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 404–323 BCE) in Ancient Greece famously identifying as “a citizen
of the world.”8 This suggests that realization of commonality, common humanity, and the
risks of patriotism and nationalism as responses to relativization and emulation have
enabled at least a “thin” kind of global consciousness for a very long time, as a precursor to
today’s popular awareness of globalization, even if such a global consciousness was in
ancient history framed within regional rather than planetary discourse.

In the same way as culturally oriented globalization scholars, those theorizing from an
economic and/or political perspective conceive the processes of globalization emerging
most substantively in the 15th and 16th centuries, through the development of the capitalist
world economic system and the growth of British- and European-based empires holding
vast regions of land in Africa, Asia, and the Americas as colonies to enhance trade and
consumption within empire capitals. According to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system
theory, which emerged before globalization theory, in the 1970s, the capitalist world
economic system is one of the most essential framing elements of the human experience
around the world in the modern (or postmodern) era.9 Interaction across societies primarily
for economic purposes, “not bounded by a unitary political structure,” characterizes the
world economy, as well as a capitalist order, which conceives the main purpose of
international economic exchange as being the endless generation and accumulation of
capital.10 A kind of global logic was therein introduced, which has expanded around the
globe as we now see ourselves as located within an international financial system.
Though some identify world system theory as an alternative or precursor to globalization
theories (given Wallerstein’s own writing, which distinguished his view from globalization
views11), its focus on a kind of planetary global logic interrelates with globalization theories
emerging in the 1980s and 1990s.12 Additionally, its own force and popularity in public and
academic discussions enabled the kind of global consciousness and sense of global
interrelation of people which we can regard as major assumptions underpinning the major
political-economic theories of globalization and the social imaginary of globalization13 that
came after.

Globalization emerged within common discourse as the process of international economic

and political integration and interdependency was seen to deepen and intensify during and
after the Cold War era of international relations. At that time, global ideologies were
perceived which spanned diverse cultures and nation-states, while global economic and
military interdependency became undeniable facts of the human condition. Thus, taking
world systems theory as a starting point, global capitalism models have theorized the
contemporary economic system, recognizing aspects of world society not well suited to the
previously popular nationalistic ways of thinking about international affairs. Leslie
Sklair14 and William Robinson15 highlighted the transnational layer of capitalistic economic
activity, including practices, actors and social classes, and ideologies of international
production and trade, elaborated by Robinson as “an emergent transnational state
apparatus,” a postnational or extranational ideological, political, and practical system for
societies, individuals, and groups to interact in the global space beyond political
borders.16 Globalization is thus basically understood as a process or condition of
contemporary human life, at the broadest level, rather than a single event or activity.

Technological framings: In the 1980s and 1990s, the impact of technology on many
people’s lives, beliefs, and activities rose tremendously, altering the global political economy
by adding an intensity of transnational communication and (financial and information)
trading capabilities. Manuel Castells argued that technological advancements forever
altered the economy by creating networks of synchronous or near-synchronous
communication and trade of information.17 Anthony Giddens likewise observed
globalization’s essence as “time-space distanciation”: “the intensification of worldwide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by
events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”18 As information became present at
hand with the widespread use of the Internet, a postindustrial society has also been
recognized as a feature of globalization, wherein skills and knowledge to manipulate data
and networks become more valuable than producing goods or trading material resources.

Today, globalization is increasingly understood as having interrelating cultural, political-

economic, and technological dimensions, and theorists have thus developed
conceptualizations and articulations of globalization that work to emphasize the ways that
these aspects intersect in human experience. Arjun Appadurai’s conception of global flows
frames globalization as taking place as interactive movements or waves of interlinked
practices, people, resources, and ideologies: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes,
finanscapes, and ideoscapes.19 Ethnoscapes are waves of people moving across cultures
and borders, while mediascapes are moving local, national, and international constructions
of information and images. Technoscapes enable (and limit) interactions of peoples,
cultures, and resources through technology, while finanscapes reflect intersection values
and valuations; human, capital, and national resources; and more. Ideoscapes reflect
competing, interacting, reconstructing ideologies, cultures, belief systems, and
understandings of the world and humanity. Through these interactive processes, people,
things, and ideas move and move each other, around the world.20

Evaluating Globalization
While the explanatory function of Appadurai’s vision of globalization’s intersecting
dimensions is highlighted above, many theories of globalization emphasize normative
positions in relation to the perceived impact of global and transnational processes and
practices on humanity and the planet. Normative views of globalization may be framed
as skeptical, globalist, or transformationalist. As Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard note, these
are ideal types, rather than clearly demarcated practical parties or camps of theorists,
though they have become familiar and themselves a part of the social imaginary of
globalization (that is, the way globalization is perceived in normative and empirical ways by
ordinary people rather than researchers).21 The positions are also reflected in the many
educational discourses relating to globalization, despite their ideological rather than simply
empirical content.

Skeptical views: Approaches to globalization in research that are described as skeptical

may question or problematize globalization discourse in one of two different ways. The first
type of skepticism questions the significance of globalization. The second kind of skepticism
tends to embrace the idea of globalization, but regards its impact on people, communities,
and/or the planet as negative or risky, overall.

As discussed here, global or international processes are hardly new, while globalization
became a buzzword only in the last decades of the 20th century. Thus a first type of skeptic
may charge that proponents of globalization or globalization theory are emphasizing the
newness of global processes for ulterior motives, as a manner of gaining attention for their
work, celebrating that which should instead be seen as problematic capitalist economic
relations, for example. Alternatively, some argue that the focus on globalization in research,
theorization, and popular discourse fails to recognize the agency of people and
communities as actors in the world today, and for this reason should be avoided and
replaced by a focus on the “transnational.” As Michael Peter Smith articulates, ordinary
individual people, nation-states, and their practices remain important within the so-called
global system; a theory of faceless, ahistorical globalization naturalizes global processes
and precludes substantive elaboration of how human (and national) actors have played and
continue to play primary roles in the world through processes of knowledge and value
construction, and through interpersonal and transnational activities. 22

The second strand of globalization skepticism might be referred to as antiglobalist or

antiglobalization positions. Thinkers in this vein regard globalization as a mark of our times,
but highlight the perceived negative impacts of globalization on people and communities.
Culturally, this can include homogenization and loss of indigenous knowledge, and ways of
life, or cultural clashes that are seen to arise out of the processes of relativization and
emulation in some cases. George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” to refer to the
problematic elements of the rise of a so-called global culture.23 More than simply the
proliferation of McDonalds fast-food restaurants around the world, McDonaldization,
according to Ritzer, includes a valuation of efficiency over humanity in production and
consumption practices, a focus on quantity over quality, and control and technology over
creativity and culture. Global culture is seen as a negative by others who conceive it as
mainly the product of a naïve cultural elite of international scholars and business people, in
contrast with “low-end globalization,” which is the harsher realities faced by the vast majority
of people not involved in international finance, diplomacy, or academic research. 24

Alternatively, Benjamin Barber25 and Samuel Huntington26 have focused on “Jihad versus
McWorld” and the “clash of civilizations,” respectively, as cultures can be seen to mix in
negative and unfriendly ways in the context of globalization. Although Francis Fukuyama
and other hopeful globalists perceived a globalization of Western liberal democracy at the
turn of the 21st century,27 unforeseen global challenges such as terrorism have fueled
popular claims by Barber and Huntington that cultural differences across major
“civilizations” (international ideological groupings), particularly of liberal Western civilization
and fundamentalist Islam, preclude their peaceful relativization, homogenization, and/or
hybridization, and instead function to increase violent interactions of terrorism and war.

Similarly, but moving away from cultural aspects of globalization, Ulrich Beck highlighted
risk as essential to understanding globalization, as societies face new problems that may be
related to economy or even public health, and as their interdependencies with others
deepen and increase.28 Beck gave the example of Mad Cow disease (bovine spongiform
encephalopathy) as one instance where much greater and more broadly distributed risks
have been created through global economic and political processes. Skeptical economic
theories of globalization likewise highlight how new forms of inequality emerge as global
classes and labor markets are created. For instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
argue that a faceless power impersonally oppresses grassroots people despite the so-
called productivity of globalization (that is, the growth of capital it enables) from a capitalist
economic orientation.29 It is this faceless but perceived inhumane power that has fueled
globalization protests, particularly of the meetings of the World Trade Organization in the
1990s and 2000s, in the United States and Europe.

In light of such concerns, Walden Bello argued for “deglobalization,” a reaction and
response by people that aims to fight against globalization and reorient communities to local
places and local lifestyles. Bello endorsed a radical shift to a decentralized, pluralistic
system of governance from a political-economic perspective.30Similarly, Colin Hines argues
for localization, reclaiming control over local economies that should become as diverse as
possible to rebuild stability within communities.31 Such ideas have found a broad audience,
as movements to “buy local” and “support local workers” have spread around the world
rapidly in the 2000s.

Globalist views: Globalists include researchers and advocates who highlight the benefits of
globalization to different communities and in various areas of life, often regarding it as
necessary or natural. Capitalist theories of globalization regard it as ideal for production and
consumption, as greater specialism around the world increases efficiency.32 The productive
power of globalization is also highlighted by Giddens, who sees the potential for global
inclusivity and enhanced creative dialogue arising (at least in part) from global
processes.33In contrast with neoliberal (pro-capitalism) policies, Giddens propagated the
mixture of the market and state interventions (socialism and Keynesian economy), and
believed that economic policies with socially inclusive ideas would influence social and
educational policies and thus promote enhanced social development.
The rise of global culture enhances the means for people to connect with one another to
improve life and give it greater meaning, and can increase mutual understanding. As
democracy becomes popular around the world as a result of global communication
processes, Scott Burchill has argued that universal human rights can be achieved to
enhance global freedom in the near future.34 Joseph Stiglitz likewise envisioned a
democratizing globalization that can include developing countries on an equal basis and
transform “economic beings” to “human beings” with values of community and social
justice.35 Relatedly, some globalists contend against skeptics that cultural and economic-
political or ideological hybridity and “glocalization,” as well as homogenization or cultural
clashes, often can and do take place. Under glocalization, understood as local-level
globalization processes (rather than top-down intervention), local actors interact dynamically
with, and are not merely oppressed by, ideas, products, things, and practices from outside
and beyond. Thus, while we can find instances of “Jihad” and “McWorld,” so too can we find
Muslims enjoying fast food, Westerners enjoying insights and activities from Muslim and
Eastern communities, and a variety of related intercultural dialogues and a dynamic
reorganization of cultural and social life harmoniously taking place.

Transformationalist views: Globalization is increasingly seen by educators (among others)

around the globe to have both positive and negative impacts on communities and
individuals. Thus, most scholars today hold nuanced, middle positions between skepticism
and globalism, such as David Held and Anthony McGrew’s transformationalist stance.36 As
Rizvi and Lingard note, globalization processes have material consequences in the world
that few would flatly deny, while people increasingly do see themselves as interconnected
around the globe, by technology, trade, and more.37 On the other hand, glocalization is often
a mixed blessing, from a comparative standpoint. Global processes do not happen outside
of political and economic contexts, and while some people clearly benefit from them, others
may not appear to benefit from or desire processes and conditions related to globalization.

Thus, Rizvi and Lingard identify globalization “as an empirical fact that describes the
profound shifts that are taking place in the world; as an ideology that masks various
expression of power and a range of political interests; and as a social imaginary that
expresses the sense people have of their own identity and how it relates to the rest of the
world, and … their aspirations and expectations.”38 Such an understanding of globalization
enables its continuous evaluation in terms of dynamic interrelated practices, processes, and
ideas, as experienced and engaged with by people and groups within complex transnational
webs of organization. Understandings of globalization thus link to education in normative
and empirical ways within research. It is to the relationship of globalization to education that
we now turn.

Globalization and Education

Historical Background
Globalization and education are highly interrelated from a historical view. At the most basic
level, historical processes that many identify as essential precursors to political-economic
globalization during the late modern colonial and imperialist eras influenced the
development and rise of mass education. Thus, what we commonly see around the world
today as education, mass schooling of children, could be regarded as a first instance of
globalization’s impact on education, as in many non-Western contexts traditional education
had been conceived as small-scale, local community-based, and as vocational or
apprenticeship education, and/or religious training.39 In much of Africa, Asia, the Middle
East, and the indigenous Americas and Australasia, institutionalized formal schools
emerged for the first time within colonial or (often intersecting) missionary projects, for local
elite youth and children of expatriate officials.

The first educational scholarship with a global character from a historical point of view would
thus be research related to colonial educational projects, such as in India, Africa, and East
Asia, which served to create elite local communities to serve colonial officials, train local
people to work in economic industries benefiting the colony, and for preservation of the
status quo. Most today would describe this education as not part of an overall development
project belonging to local communities, but as a foreign intervention for global empire
maintenance or social control. As postcolonial educational theorists such as Paulo Freire
have seen it, this education sought to remove and dismiss local culture as inferior, and deny
local community needs for the sake of power consolidation of elites, and it ultimately served
as a system of oppression on psychological, cultural, and material levels.40 It has been
associated by diverse cultural theorists within and outside the educational field with the loss
of indigenous language and knowledge production, with moral and political inculcation, and
with the spread of English as an elite language of communication across the globe. 41

Massification of education in the service of local communities in most developing regions

roughly intersected with the period after the Second World War and in the context of
national independence movements, wherein nationally based communities reorganized as
politically autonomous nation-states (possibly in collaboration with former colonial parties).
In 1945, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
emerged, as the United Nations recognized education as critical for future global peace and
prosperity, preservation of cultural diversity, and global progress toward stability, economic
flourishing, and human rights. UNESCO has advocated for enhancement of quality and
access to education around the world through facilitating the transnational distribution of
educational resources, establishing (the discourse of) a global human right to education,
promoting international transferability of educational and teaching credentials, developing
mechanisms for measuring educational achievement across countries and regions, and
supporting national and regional scientific and cultural developments.42 The World Bank,
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have engaged in similar work.

Thus, the first modern global educational research was that conducted by bodies affiliated
with or housed under UNESCO, such as the International Bureau of Education, the
UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and the International Institute of Educational Planning,
which are regarded as foundational bodies sponsoring international and comparative
research. In research universities, educational borrowing across international borders
became one significant topic of research for an emerging field of scholars identified as
comparative educational researchers. Comparative education became a major field of
educational inquiry in the first half of the 20th century, and expanded in the 1950s and
1960s.43 Comparative educational research then focused on aiding developing countries’
education and improving domestic education through cross-national examinations of
educational models and achievement. Today, comparative education remains one major
field among others that focuses on globalization and education, including international
education and global studies in education.

Globalization as a contemporary condition or process clearly shapes education around the

globe, in terms of policies and values; curriculum and assessment; pedagogy; educational
organization and leadership; conceptions of the learner, the teacher, and the good life; and
more. Though, following the legacy of the primacy of a nation-state and systems-theory
levels of analysis, it is traditionally conceived that educational ideas and changes move
from the top, such as from UNESCO and related bodies and leading societies, to the
developing world, we find that often glocalization and hybridity, rather than simple
borrowing, are taking place. On the other hand, education is also held by scholars and
political leaders to be a key to enhancing the modern (or postmodern) human condition, as
a symbol of progress of the global human community, realized as global citizenship
education, education for sustainable development, and related initiatives. 44 The next
subsections consider how globalization processes have been explored in educational
research as shapers of education, and how education and educators can also be seen to
influence globalization.

Research on Globalization’s Impact on Education

Global and transnational processes and practices have been observed to influence and
impact various aspects of contemporary education within many geographical contexts, and
thus the fields of research related to education and globalization are vast: they are not
contained simply within one field or subfield, but can be seen to cross subdisciplinary
borders, in policy studies, curriculum, pedagogy, higher education studies, assessment, and
more. As mentioned previously, modern education can itself be seen as one most basic
instance of globalization, connected to increased interdependency of communities around
the world in economic and political affairs first associated with imperialism and colonialism,
and more recently with the capitalist world economy. And as the modern educational
system cannot be seen as removed or sealed off from cultural and political-economic
processes involved in most conceptualizations of globalization, the impacts of globalization
processes upon education are often considered wide-ranging, though many are also
controversial.

Major trends: From a functionalist perspective, the globalization of educational systems has
been influenced by new demands and desires for educational transferability, of students
and educators. In place of dichotomous systems in terms of academic levels and
credentialing, curriculum, and assessment, increasing convergence can be observed today,
as it is recognized that standardization makes movement of people in education across
societies more readily feasible, and that such movement of people can enhance education
in a number of ways (to achieve diversity, to increase specialization and the promotion of
dedicated research centers, to enhance global employability, and so on).45 Thus, the
mobility and paths of movement of students and academics, for education and better life
opportunities, have been a rapidly expanding area of research. A related phenomenon is
that of offshore university and school campuses—the mobility of educational institutions to
attract and recruit new students (and collect fees), such as New York University in Abu
Dhabi and Shanghai. By implication, education is often perceived as becoming more
standardized around the globe, though hybridity can also be observed at the micro level.
How economic integration under globalization impacts local educational systems has been
traced by Rizvi and Lingard.46 As they note, from a broad view, the promotion of neoliberal
values in the context of financial adjustment and restructuring of poorer countries under
trade and debt agreements led by intergovernmental organizations, most notably the
OECD, encouraged, first, fiscal discipline in educational funding (particularly impacting the
payment of educators in many regions) and, second, the redistribution of funds to areas of
education seen as more economically productive, namely primary education, and to efforts
at privatization and deregulation of education. While the educational values of countries can
and do vary, from democracy and peace, to social justice and equity, and so on, Rizvi and
Lingard also observed that social and economic efficiency views have become dominant
within governments and their educational policy units.47 Though human capital theory has
always supported the view that individuals gain proportionately according to the investment
in their education and training, this view has become globalized in recent decades to
emphasize how whole societies can flourish under economic interdependency via enhanced
education.

These policy-level perspectives have had serious implications for how knowledge and thus
curriculum are increasingly perceived. As mentioned previously, skills for gaining knowledge
have taken precedent over knowledge accumulation, with the rise of technology and
postindustrial economies. In relation, “lifelong learning,” learning to be adaptive to
challenges outside the classroom and not merely to gain academic disciplinary knowledge,
has become a focal point for education systems around the globe in the era of
globalization.48 Along with privatization of education, as markets are seen as more efficient
than government systems of provision, models of educational choice and educational
consumption have become normalized as alternatives to the historical status quo of
traditional academic or intellectual, teacher-centered models. Meanwhile, the globalization
of educational testing—that is, the use of the same tests across societies around the
world—has had a tremendous impact on local pedagogies, assessment, and curricula the
world over. Though in each country decision-making structures are not exactly the same,
many societies face pressure to focus on math, science, and languages over other subjects,
as a result of the primacy of standardized testing to measure and evaluate educational
achievement and the effectiveness of educational systems.49

However, there remains controversy over what education is the best in the context of
relativization and emulation of educational practices and students, and therefore the 2010s
have seen extraordinary transfers of educational approaches, not just from core societies to
peripheral or developing areas, but significant horizontal movements of educational
philosophies and practices from West to East and East to West. With the rise of global
standardized tests such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA), educational discourse in Western societies has increasingly emphasized the need
to reorient education to East Asian models (such as Singapore or Shanghai), seen as
victors of the tests.50 On the other hand, many see Finland’s educational system as ideal in
relation to its economic integration in society and focus on equity in structure and
orientation, and thus educators in the Middle East, East Asia, and the United States have
also been seen to consider emulating Finnish education in the 2010s.51

Evaluations: From a normative point of view, some regard changes to local education in
many contexts brought about by globalization as harmful and risky. Freire’s postcolonial
view remains salient to those who remain concerned that local languages and indigenous
cultural preservation are being sacrificed for elite national and international
interests.52 There can be no doubt that language diversity has been decreasing over time,
while indigenous knowledge is being reframed within globalist culture as irrelevant to
individual youths’ material needs.53 Many are additionally skeptical of the sometimes
uncritical adoption of educational practices, policies, and discourse from one region of the
globe to another. In many countries in Africa and the Middle East, ideas and curricula are
borrowed from the United Kingdom, the United States, or Finland in an apparently hasty
manner, only to be discarded for the next reform, when it is not found to fit neatly and
efficiently within the local educational context (for instance, given local educational values,
structures and organizations, and educator and student views). 54 Others argue, in parallel to
globalization skeptics, that globalization’s major impact on education has actually been the
promotion of a thin layer of aspirational, cosmopolitan values among global cultural elites,
who largely overlook the realities, problems, and challenges many face.55

On the other hand, the case for globalization as a general enhancer of education worldwide
has compelling evidence as well. Due to the work of UNESCO, the OECD, and related
organizations, educational attainment has become more equitable globally, by nation, race,
gender, class, and other markers of social inequality; and educational access has been
recognized as positively aligned with personal and national economic improvement,
according to quantitative educational researchers.56 (David Hill, Nigel Greaves, and Alpesh
Maisuria argue from a Marxist viewpoint that education in conjunction with global
capitalism reinforces rather than decreases inequality and inequity; yet they also note that
capitalism can be and often has been successfully regulated to diminish rather than
increase inequality generally across countries.57) As education has been effectively
conceived as a human right in the era of globalization, societies with historically uneven
access to education are on track to systematically enhance educational quality and access.

Changes to the way knowledge and the learner have been conceived, particularly with the
rise of ubiquitous technology, are also often regarded as positive overall. People around the
world have more access to information than ever before with the mass use of the Internet,
and students of all ages can access massive open online courses (MOOCs); dynamic, data-
rich online encyclopedias; and communities of like-minded scholars through social networks
and forums.58 In brick-and-mortar classrooms, educators and students are more diverse
than ever due to enhanced educational mobility, and both are exposed to a greater variety
of ideas and perspectives that can enhance learning for all participants. Credentials can be
earned from reputable universities online, with supervision systems organized by leading
scholars in global studies in education in many cases. Students have more choices when it
comes to learning independently or alongside peers, mentors, or experts, in a range of
disciplines, vocations, and fields.

The truth regarding how globalization processes and practices are impacting contemporary
education no doubt lies in focusing somewhere in between the promises and the risks,
depending on the context in question: the society, the educational level, the particular
community, and so on. Particularly with regard to the proposed benefits of interconnectivity
and networked ubiquitous knowledge spurred by technology, critics contend that the
promise of globalization for enhancing education has been severely overrated. Elites remain
most able to utilize online courses and use technologies due to remaining inequalities in
material and human resources.59 At local levels, globalization in education (more typically
discussed as internationalization) remains contentious in many societies, as local values,
local students and educators, and local educational trends can at times be positioned as at
odds with the priorities of globalization, of internationalizing curricula, faculty, and student
bodies. As part of the social imaginary of globalization, international diversity can become a
buzzword, while cultural differences across communities can result in international students
and faculty members becoming ghettoized on campus.60 International exchanges of youth
and educators for global citizenship education can reflect political and economic differences
between communities, not merely harmonious interconnection and mutual appreciation. 61 In
this context of growing ambivalence, education and educators are seen increasingly as part
of the solution to the problems and challenges of the contemporary world that are
associated with globalization, as educators can respond to such issues in a proactive rather
than a passive way, to ensure globalization’s challenges do not exceed its benefits to
individuals and communities.

Education’s Potential Impact on Globalization

As globalization is increasingly regarded with ambivalence in relation to the perceived
impact of global and transnational actors and processes on local educational systems,
educators are increasingly asked not to respond passively to globalization, through enacting
internationalization and global economic agendas or echoing simplistic conceptualizations
or evaluations of globalization via their curriculum. Instead, education has been reframed in
the global era as something youth needs, not just to accept globalization but to interact with
it in a critical and autonomous fashion. Two major trends have occurred in curriculum and
pedagogy research, wherein education is identified as an important potential shaper of
globalization. These are global citizenship education (also intersecting with what are called
21st-century learning and competencies) and education for sustainable development.

Global citizenship education: Global citizenship education has been conceived by political
theorists and educational philosophers as a way to speak back to globalization processes
seen as harmful to individuals and communities. As Martha Nussbaum has argued,
educators should work to develop in students feelings of compassion, altruism, and
empathy that extend beyond national borders.62 Kathy Hytten has likewise written that
students need to learn today as part of global citizenship education not just feelings of
sympathy for people around the world, but critical skills to identify root causes of problems
that intersect the distinction of local and global, as local problems can be recognized as
interconnected with globalization processes.63 In relation to this, UNESCO and
nongovernmental organizations and foundations such as Oxfam and the Asia Society have
focused on exploring current practices and elaborating best practices from a global
comparative standpoint for the dissemination of noncognitive, affective, “transversal” 21st-
century competencies, to extend civic education in the future in the service of social justice
and peace, locally and globally.64

Questions remain in this area in connection with implementation within curriculum and
pedagogy. A first question is whether concepts of altruism, empathy, and even harmony,
peace, and justice, are translatable, with equivalent meanings across cultural contexts.
There is evidence that global citizenship education aimed at educating for values to face the
potential harms of globalization is converging around the world on such aims as instilling
empathy and compassion, respect and appreciation of diversity, and personal habits or
virtues of open-mindedness, curiosity, and creativity. However, what these values, virtues,
and dispositions look like, how they are demonstrated, and their appropriate expressions
remain divergent as regards Western versus Eastern and African societies (for
example).65 By implication, pedagogical or curriculum borrowing or transferral in this area
may be problematic, even if some basic concepts are shared and even when best practices
can be established within a cultural context.

Additionally, how these skills, competencies, and dispositions intersect with the cognitive
skills and political views of education across societies with different cultures of teaching and
learning also remains contentious. In line with the controversies over normative views of
globalization, whether the curriculum should echo globalist or skeptical positions remains
contested by educators and researchers in the field. Some argue that a focus on feelings
can be overrated or even harmful in such education, given the immediacy and evidence of
global social justice issues that can be approached rationally and constructively.66 Thus,
token expressions of cultural appreciation can be seen to preclude a deeper engagement
with social justice issues if the former becomes a goal in itself. On the other hand, the
appropriate focus on the local versus the global, and on the goods versus the harms of
globalization, weighs differently across and within societies, from one individual educator to
the next. Thus, a lack of evidence of best practices in relation to the contestation over
ultimate goals creates ambivalence at the local level among many educators about what
and how to teach global citizenship or 21st-century skills, apart from standardized
knowledge in math, science, and language.

Education for sustainable development: Education for sustainable development is a second

strand of curriculum and pedagogy that speaks back to globalization and that is broadly
promoted by UNESCO and related intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Education for sustainable development is, like global citizenship education, rooted in
globalization’s impact upon individuals in terms of global consciousness. Like global
citizenship, education for sustainable development also emphasizes global interconnection
in relation to development and sustainability challenges. It is also a broad umbrella term that
reflects an increasingly wide array of practices, policies, and programs, formal and informal,
for instilling virtues and knowledge and skills seen to enable effective responses to
challenges brought about by globalization.67 In particular, education for sustainable
development has seen global progress, like globalization, as enmeshed in intersecting
cultural, social, and economic and political values and priorities. Education for All is an
interrelated complementary thread of UNESCO work, which sees access to education as a
key to social justice and development, and the improvement of human quality of life broadly.
In developed societies, environmental sustainability has come to be seen as a pressing
global issue worth curricular focus, as behaviors with regard to consumption of natural
resources impact others around the world, as well as future generations. 68

A diversity of practices and views also marks this area of education, resulting in general
ambiguity about overall aims and best means. Controversies over which attitudes of
sustainability are most important to inculcate, and whether it is important to inculcate them,
intertwine with debates over what crises are most pertinent and what skills and
competencies students should develop. Measures are in place for standardizing
sustainability knowledge in higher education worldwide, as well as for comparing the
development of prosustainability attitudes.69 However, some scholars argue that both
emphases miss the point, and that education for sustainable development should first be
about changing cultures to become more democratic, creative, and critical, developing
interpersonal and prosocial capabilities first, as the challenges of environmental
sustainability and global development are highly complex and dynamic.70 Thus, as
globalization remains contested in its impacts, challenges, and promise at local levels, so
too does the best education that connects positively with globalization to enhance local and
global life. In this rich and diverse field, as processes of convergence and hybridity of
glocalization continue to occur, the promise of globalization and the significance of
education in relation to it will no doubt remain lively areas of debate in the future, as
globalization continues to impact communities in diverse ways.

Research Considerations
There is no shortage of normative and explanatory theories about globalization, each of
which points to particular instances and evidence about domains and contexts of
globalization. However, when it comes to understanding the interconnections of
globalization and education, some consensus regarding best practices for research has
emerged. In fields of comparative and international education and global studies in
education, scholars are increasingly calling today for theories and empirical investigations
that are oriented toward specificity, particularity, and locality, in contrast with the grand
theories of globalization elaborated by political scholars. However, a challenge is that such
scholarship should not be reduced artificially to one local level in such a way as to exclude
understanding of international interactions, in what has been called in the research
community “methodological nationalism.”71 Such reductive localism or nationalism can arise
particularly in comparative education research, as nation-states have been traditional units
for comparative analysis, but are today recognized as being too diverse from one to the
next to be presumed similar (while global processes impact them in disparate ways). 72 Thus,
Rizvi has articulated global ethnography as a focused approach to the analysis of
international educational projects that traces interconnections and interactions of local and
global actors.73 In comparative educational research, units of analysis must be critically
pondered and selected, and it is also possible to make comparisons across levels within
one context (for instance, from local educational interactions to higher-level policy-making
processes in one society).74

Qualitative and quantitative analyses can be undertaken to measure global educational

achievements, values, policy statements, and more; yet researcher reflexivity and
positionality, what is traditionally conceived of as research ethics, is increasingly seen as
vital for researchers in this politically and ethically contentious field. Although quantitative
research remains important for highlighting convergences in data in global educational
studies, such research cannot tell us what we should do, as it does not systematically
express peoples’ values and beliefs about the aims of education, or their experiences of
globalization, and so on, particularly effectively. On the other hand, normative questions
about how people’s values intersect with globalization and related educational processes
can give an in-depth view of one location or case, but should be complemented by
consideration of generalizable trends.75

In either case, cultural assumptions can interfere or interact in problematic or unintentional

ways with methodologies of data gathering and analysis, for instance, when questions or
codes (related to race, ethnicity, or class, for example) are applied across diverse sites by
researchers, who may not be very familiar and experienced across divergent cultural
contexts.76 Thus, beyond positionality, the use of collaborative research teams has become
popular in global and comparative educational research, to ensure inevitable cultural and
related differences across research domains are sufficiently addressed in the research
process.77In this context, researchers must also contend with the challenges of collaborating
across educational settings, as new methods of engaging, saving, and sharing data at
distance through technology continue to unfold in response to ongoing challenges with data
storage, data security, and privacy.

Among recent strands of educational research fueled by appreciation for globalization is the
exploration of the global economy of knowledge. Such research may consider the practices
and patterns of movement, collaboration, research production and publication, and
authorship of researchers, and examine data from cultural, political, and economic
perspectives, asking whose knowledge is regarded as valid and most prized, and what
voices dominate in conversations and discourse around globalization and education, such
as in classrooms studying global studies in education, or in leading research
journals.78 Related research emerging includes questions such as who produces
knowledge, who is the subject of knowledge, and where are data gathered, as recurring
historical patterns may appear to be reproduced in contemporary scholarship, wherein
those from the global North are more active in investigating and elaborating knowledge in
the field, while those from the global South appear most often as subjects of research. As
globalization of education entails the globalization of knowledge itself, such inquiries can be
directed to various sites and disciplines outside of education, in considering how
communication, values, and knowledge are being dynamically revised today on a global
scale through processes of globalization.

Conclusion
Research that focuses on globalization and education uses a wide array of approaches and
methods, topics, and orientations, as well as diverse theoretical perspectives and normative
assumptions. The foregoing sections have explored this general field, major debates, and
topics; the relationships have been traced between globalization and education; and there
have been brief comments on considerations for research. One key point of the analysis
has been that the way globalization is conceived has implications for how its relationship
with education is understood. This is important, for as is illustrated here, the ways of
conceptualizing globalization are diverse, in terms of how the era of globalization is framed
chronologically (as essential to the human condition, to modernity, or as a late 20th-century
phenomena), what its chief characteristics are from cultural, political-economic, and
technological views, and whether its impact on human life and history is seen as good or
bad. A broad consideration of viewpoints has highlighted the emergence of a middle
position within research literature: there is most certainly an intertwined meeting and
movement of peoples, things, and ideas around the globe; and clearly, processes
associated with globalization have good and bad aspects. However, these processes are
uneven, and they can be seen to impact different communities in various ways, which are
clearly not, on the whole, simply all good or all bad.

That the processes associated with globalization are interrelated with the history and future
of education is undeniable. In many ways global convergence around educational policies,
practices, and values can be observed in the early 21st century. Yet educational borrowing
and transferral remain unstraightforward in practice, as educational and cultural differences
across social contexts remain, while the ultimate ends of education (such as math
competencies versus moral cultivation) are essentially contested. Thus, specificity is
important to understand globalization in relation to education. As with globalization
generally, globalization in education cannot be merely described as harmful or beneficial,
but depends on one’s position in power relations, and on one’s values and priorities for local
and global well-being.

Education and educators’ impact on globalization also remains an important area of

research and theorization. Educators are no longer expected merely to react to
globalization, they must purposefully interact with it, preparing students around the world to
respond to globalization’s challenges. As cultural and political-economic considerations
remain crucial in understanding major aspects of both globalization and education,
positionality and research ethics and reflexivity remain important research concerns, to
understand globalization not just as homogeneity or oppressive top-down features, but as
complex and dynamic local, global, and transnational intersections of people, ideas, and
goods, with unclear impacts in the future.