Globalization and Education

Globalization and Education

Liz Jackson, University of Hong Kong

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.52
Published online: 26 October 2016

Summary
Few would deny that processes of globalization have impacted education around the world in
many important ways. Yet the term “globalization” is relatively new, and its meaning or
nature, conceptualization, and impact remain essentially contested within the educational
research community. There is no global consensus on the exact time period of its occurrence
or its most significant shaping processes, from those who focus on its 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 of as mostly good or mostly bad, which have
significant implications for debates regarding the relationship between globalization and
education. Competing understandings of globalization also undergird diverse methodologies
and perspectives in expanding fields of research into the relationship between education and
globalization.

There are many ways to frame the relationship of globalization and education. Scholars often
pursue the topic by examining globalization’s perceived impact on education, as in many
cases global convergence around educational policies, practices, and values has been
observed in the early 21st century. Yet educational borrowing and transferal remains
unstraightforward in practice, as educational and cultural differences across social contexts
remain, while ultimate ends of education (such as math competencies versus moral
cultivation) are essentially contested. Clearly, 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,
perspective, values, and priorities.

Education and educators’ impacts on globalization also remain a worthwhile focus of

exploration in research and theorization. Educators do not merely react to globalization and
related processes, but purposefully interact with them, as they prepare their students to
respond to challenges and opportunities posed by processes associated with globalization. As
cultural and political-economic considerations remain crucial in understanding 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 and global intersections of people, ideas, and
goods, with unclear impacts in the future.

Keywords: globalization, economic integration, education borrowing, mobility, curriculum, global

studies in education, comparative education, education development

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Globalization and Education

Subjects: Globalization, Economics, and Education

Few would deny that processes of globalization have impacted education around the world in
many important ways. Yet the term “globalization” is relatively new, and its meaning or
nature, conceptualization, and impact remain essentially contested within the educational
research community. Competing understandings of globalization undergird diverse
methodologies and perspectives in the expanding web of fields researching the relationship
between education and globalization examined below. The area of educational research which
exploded at the turn of the 21st century requires a holistic view. Rather than take sides within
this contentious field, it is useful to examine major debates and trends, and indicate where
readers can learn more about particular specialist areas within the field and other relevant
strands of research.

The first part below considers the development of the theorization and conceptualization of
globalization and debates about its impact that are relevant to education. The next section
examines the relationship between education and globalization as explored by the educational
research community. There are many ways to frame the relationship between globalization
and education. First explored here is the way 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; pedagogy; curriculum and
assessment; as well as broader conceptualizations of teacher and learner, and the good life.
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, so these views are also explored here. The last section
highlights relevant research directions.

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.

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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,
1
within a 5,000–10,000-year time frame. 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
2
communities. As people began identifying with larger groups, beyond their family, clan, or
tribe, “relativization” took place, as people saw others in respective outside communities
3
similarly developing national or national-like identities. 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
4
was often a next step. 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,
5
though ethnocentrism and xenophobia was also often a part of such “global” comparison.

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
6
or nation-state “imagined communities.” 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,”
7
wherein people recognize themselves as citizens of the world. Martha Nussbaum locates
cosmopolitanism’s roots in the more distant past, however, observing Diogenes the Cynic (ca.

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Globalization and Education

8
404–323 BCE) in Ancient Greece famously identifying as “a citizen of the world.” 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
9
postmodern) era. 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
10
generation and accumulation of capital. 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
11
views ), its focus on a kind of planetary global logic interrelates with globalization theories
12
emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. 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
13
political-economic theories of globalization and the social imaginary of globalization 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
14
popular nationalistic ways of thinking about international affairs. Leslie Sklair and William
15
Robinson 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

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16
to interact in the global space beyond political borders. 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
17
of information. 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
18
versa.” 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,
19
finanscapes, and ideoscapes. 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
20
move each other, around the world.

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
21
perceived in normative and empirical ways by ordinary people rather than researchers). The
positions are also reflected in the many educational discourses relating to globalization,
despite their ideological rather than simply empirical content.

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Globalization and Education

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
22
interpersonal and transnational activities.

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
23
problematic elements of the rise of a so-called global culture. 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
24
people not involved in international finance, diplomacy, or academic research.
25 26
Alternatively, Benjamin Barber and Samuel Huntington 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
27
the 21st century, 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.

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Globalization and Education

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
28
and increase. 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
29
orientation. 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
30
governance from a political-economic perspective. Similarly, Colin Hines argues for
localization, reclaiming control over local economies that should become as diverse as
31
possible to rebuild stability within communities. 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
32
consumption, as greater specialism around the world increases efficiency. The productive
power of globalization is also highlighted by Giddens, who sees the potential for global
33
inclusivity and enhanced creative dialogue arising (at least in part) from global processes. In
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
34
freedom in the near future. Joseph Stiglitz likewise envisioned a democratizing globalization
that can include developing countries on an equal basis and transform “economic beings” to
35
“human beings” with values of community and social justice. 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,

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Globalization and Education

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,
36
such as David Held and Anthony McGrew’s transformationalist stance. 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
37
technology, trade, and more. 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
38
world, and … their aspirations and expectations.” 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
39
education, and/or religious training. 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.

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Globalization and Education

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
40
oppression on psychological, cultural, and material levels. 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
41
English as an elite language of communication across the globe.

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
42
and regional scientific and cultural developments. 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
43
in the first half of the 20th century, and expanded in the 1950s and 1960s. 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.

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Globalization and 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
44
development, and related initiatives. 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
45
centers, to enhance global employability, and so on). 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.

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Globalization and Education

How economic integration under globalization impacts local educational systems has been
46
traced by Rizvi and Lingard. 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
47
governments and their educational policy units. 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
48
focal point for education systems around the globe in the era of globalization. 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
49
systems.

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
50
the tests. 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
51
consider emulating Finnish education in the 2010s.

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Globalization and Education

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
52
preservation are being sacrificed for elite national and international interests. There can be
no doubt that language diversity has been decreasing over time, while indigenous knowledge
53
is being reframed within globalist culture as irrelevant to individual youths’ material needs.
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
54
student views). 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,
55
and challenges many face.

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
56
to quantitative educational researchers. (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
57
across countries. ) 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
58
forums. 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.

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Globalization and Education

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
59
human resources. 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
60
members becoming ghettoized on campus. International exchanges of youth and educators
for global citizenship education can reflect political and economic differences between
61
communities, not merely harmonious interconnection and mutual appreciation. 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
62
beyond national borders. 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
63
processes. In relation to this, UNESCO and nongovernmental organizations and foundations

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Globalization and Education

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
64
the future in the service of social justice and peace, locally and globally.

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
65
divergent as regards Western versus Eastern and African societies (for example). 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
66
social justice issues that can be approached rationally and constructively. 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
67
brought about by globalization. In particular, education for sustainable development has
seen global progress, like globalization, as enmeshed in intersecting cultural, social, and

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Globalization and Education

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
68
around the world, as well as future generations.

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
69
attitudes. 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
70
complex and dynamic. 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
71
nationalism.” 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
72
global processes impact them in disparate ways). Thus, Rizvi has articulated global
ethnography as a focused approach to the analysis of international educational projects that
73
traces interconnections and interactions of local and global actors. In comparative

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Globalization and Education

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
74
educational interactions to higher-level policy-making processes in one society).

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
75
trends.

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
76
contexts. 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
77
process. In 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
78
studying global studies in education, or in leading research journals. 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.

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Globalization and Education

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.

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Globalization and Education

References
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Bray, M., Adamson, R., & Mason, M. (2015). Comparative education research: Approaches and
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Held, D., & McGrew, A. (Eds.). (2000). The global transformation reader: An introduction to the
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Ritzer, G. (Ed.). (2007). The Blackwell companion to globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Notes

1. W. I. Robinson (2007), Theories of globalization, in G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion

to Globalization (pp. 125–143) (Malden, MA: Blackwell).

2. R. Robertson (1992), Globalization: Social theory and global culture (Thousand Oaks: SAGE,
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3. Robertson, Globalization.

4. Robertson, Globalization.

5. For an historical example of how negative cultural comparison has interconnected with international political
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gender, and empire in Western political thought, Political Theory, 43, 334–355.

6. B. Anderson (1983), Imagined communities (London: Verso).

7. Anderson, Imagined communities.

8. M. Nussbaum (1996), For love of country? (Boston: Boston Press).

9. I. Wallerstein (1974), The modern world system (New York: Academic Press).

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Globalization and Education

10. I. Wallerstein (2000), Globalization or the age of transition? International Sociology, 15, 249–
265.

11. Wallerstein, Globalization.

12. Robinson, Theories.

13. F. Rizvi and B. Lingard (2010), Globalizing educational policy (London: Routledge).

14. L. Sklair (2002), Globalization: Capitalism and its alternatives (New York: Oxford University
Press).

15. W. I. Robinson (2003), Transnational conflicts: Central America, social change, and
globalization (London: Verso)

16. Robinson, Theories.

17. M. Castells (1996), The rise of the network society (Oxford: Blackwell).

18. A. Giddens (1990), The consequences of modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity), 64; see also D.
Harvey (1990), The condition of post-modernity (London: Blackwell).

19. A. Appadurai (1997), Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press).

20. See also D. Held, A. G. McGrew, D. Goldblatt, and J. Perraton (1999), Global transformations:
Politics, economics, and culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); M. Waters (1995),
Globalization (London: Routledge).

21. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

22. M. P. Smith (2001), Transnational urbanism: Locating globalization (Oxford: Blackwell).

23. G. Ritzer (1993), The McDonaldization of society (Boston: Pine Forge).

24. G. Mathews (2011), Ghetto at the center of the world (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press).

25. B. Barber (1995), Jihad versus McWorld (New York: Random House).

26. S. Huntington (1993), The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49.

27. F. Fukuyama (1992), The end of history and the last man (London: Free Press).

28. U. Beck (1992), The risk society: Toward a new modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity).

29. M. Hardt and A. Negri (2000), Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Hardt and
Negri (2004), Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire (New York: Penguin).

30. W. Bello (2004), Deglobalization: Ideas for a new world economy (London: New York
University Press); Bello (2013), Capitalism’s last stand? Deglobalization in the age of austerity
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31. C. Hines (2000), Localization: A global manifesto (New York: Routledge).

32. See D. Harvey (1989), The condition of post-modernity: An enquiry into the conditions of
cultural change (Oxford: Blackwell).

33. A. Giddens (1990), The consequences of modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity).

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Globalization and Education

34. S. Burchill (2009), Liberalism, in S. Burchill, A. Linklater, R. Devetak, J. Donnelly, T. Nardin,

M. Paterson, C. Reus-Smit, and J. True (Eds.) (pp. 57–85), Theories of international relations
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

35. See, for instance, J. Stiglitz (2006), Making globalization work (New York: W. W. Norton).

36. D. Held and A. McGrew (Eds.) (2000), The global transformation reader: An introduction to
the globalization debate (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity).

37. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

38. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing, 24.

39. T. Reagan (2000), Non-Western educational traditions: Alternative approaches to educational

thought (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Of course, scholars such as Michael P. Smith would reject
describing these processes as belonging to globalization, as people, nations, and communities played significant
roles.

40. P. Freire (1972), Pedagogy of the oppressed (Victoria: Penguin).

41. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin (Eds.) (1995), The post-colonial studies reader (London:
Routledge).

42. R. E. Wanner (2015), UNESCO’s origins, achievements, problems and promise: An inside/
outside perspective from the US (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre/
University of Hong Kong).

43. M. Manzon (2011), Comparative education: The construction of a field (Hong Kong:
Comparative Education Research Centre/University of Hong Kong).

44. S. Walby (2009), Globalization and inequalities (London: SAGE).

45. See for instance J. Stier (2004), Taking a critical stance toward internationalization ideologies in
higher education: idealism, instrumentalism and educationalism, Globalisation, Societies and
Education, 2, 1–28.

46. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

47. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

48. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

49. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing.

50. See for instance M. S. Tucker and L. Darling-Hammond (2011), Surpassing Shanghai: An agenda
for American education built on the world’s leading systems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).

51. See for instance P. Sahlberg (2014), Finnish lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from
educational change in Finland? (New York: Teachers College Press).

52. A. Darder (2015), Paulo Freire and the continuing struggle to decolonize education, in M. A
Peters and T. Besley (Eds.), Paulo Freire: The global legacy (pp. 55–78) (New York: Peter Lang).

53. S. J. Shin (2009), Bilingualism in schools and society (London: Routledge); H. Norberg-Hodge
(2009), Ancient futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a globalizing world (San Francisco: Sierra
Club).
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54. L. Jackson (2015), Challenges to the global concept of student-centered learning with special
reference to the United Arab Emirates: “Never Fail a Nahayan,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory, 47, 760–773.

55. T. Besley (2012), Narratives of intercultural and international education: Aspirational values
and economic imperatives, in T. Besley and M. A. Peters (Eds.), Interculturalism: Education and
dialogue (pp. 87–112) (New York: Peter Lang).

56. W. J. Jacob and D. B. Holsinger (2008), Inequality in education: A critical analysis, in D. B.

Holsinger and W. J. Jacob (Eds.), Inequality in education: Comparative and international
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57. D. Hill, N. M. Greaves, and A. Maisuria (2008), Does capitalism inevitably increase
inequality? in D. B. Holsinger and W. J. Jacob (Eds.), Inequality in education: Comparative and
international perspectives (pp. 59–85) (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre/
University of Hong Kong).

58. D. M. West (2013), Digital schools: How technology can transform education (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institute Press); N. Burbules and T. Callister (2000), Watch IT: The risks and
promises of technologies for education (Boulder, CO: Westview).

59. Burbules and Callister, Watch IT.

60. Stier, Critical Stance.

61. See for example, S. K. Gallwey and G. Wilgus (2014), Equitable partnerships for mutual learning
or perpetuator of North-South power imbalances? Ireland–South Africa school links, Compare: A
Journal of Comparative and International Education, 44, 522–544.

62. M. C. Nussbaum (2001), Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions (Cambridge,

U.K.: Cambridge University Press).

63. K. Hytten (2009), Education for critical democracy and compassionate globalization, in R.
Glass (Ed.), Philosophy of Education 2008 (pp. 330–332) (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education
Society).

64. See for example, Report to the UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the
Twenty-First Century (1996), Learning: The treasure within (Paris: UNESCO); Asia Society
(2015), A Rosetta Stone for noncognitive skills: Understanding, assessing, and enhancing
noncognitive skills in primary and secondary education (New York: Asia Society).

65. See S. Y. Kang (2006), Identity-centered multicultural care theory: White, Black, and Korean
caring, Educational Foundations, 20(3–4), 35–49; L. Jackson (2016), Altruism, non-relational
caring, and global citizenship education, in M. Moses (Ed.), Philosophy of Education 2014
(Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education).

66. Jackson, Altruism.

67. L. Jackson (2016), Education for sustainable development: From environmental education to
broader view, in E. Railean, G. Walker, A. Elçi, and L. Jackson (Eds.), Handbook of research on
applied learning theory and design in modern education (pp. 41–64) (Hershey, PA: IGI Press).

68. Jackson, Education for Sustainable Development.

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69. Jackson, Education for Sustainable Development.

70. P. Vare and W. Scott (2007), Learning for change: Exploring the relationship between
education and sustainable development, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 1,
191–198.

71. P. Kennedy (2011), Local lives and global transformations: Towards a world society (London:
Palgrave).

72. M. Manzon (2015), Comparing places, in M. Bray, B. Adamson, and M. Mason (Eds.),
Comparative education research: Approaches and methods (pp. 85–121) (Hong Kong:
Comparative Education Research Centre/University of Hong Kong).

73. F. Rizvi (2009), Global mobility and the challenges of educational policy and research, in T. S.
Popkewitz and F. Rizvi (Eds.), Globalization and the study of education (pp. 268–289) (Oxford:
Blackwell).

74. Manzon, Comparing places.

75. G. P. Fairbrother, Qualitative and quantitative approaches to comparative education, in Bray,

Adamson, and Mason (Eds.), Comparative education research (pp. 39–62).

76. L. Jackson (2015), Comparing race, class, and gender, in Bray, Adamson, and Mason (Eds.),
Comparative education research (pp. 195–220).

77. M. Bray, B. Adamson, and M. Mason (2015), Different models, different emphases, different
insights, in Bray, Adamson, and Mason (Eds.), Comparative education research, 421.

78. See, for instance, H. Tange and S. Miller (2015), Opening the mind? Geographies of knowledge
and curricular practices, Higher Education, 1–15.

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Globalization and Education

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