INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD ISSN – 2455-0620 Volume - 1, Issue - 3, Oct - 2015

GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATION

Priyanka Agarwal - Assistant Professor (Accountancy), Madhav University, Sirohi , Rajasthan.

Email: agrwalpriyanka746@gmail.com

Abstract: In popular discourse, globalization is often synonymous with internationalization, referring

to the growing interconnectedness and interdependence of people and institutions throughout the world.
Internationalization is the less theorized term. Globalization, by contrast, has come to denote the
complexities of interconnectedness, and scholars have produced a large body of literature to explain what
appear to be ineluctable worldwide influences on local settings and responses to those influences.

Influences of a global scale touch aspects of everyday life. For example, structural adjustment policies
and international trading charters, such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), reduce barriers to commerce, ostensibly promote jobs, and
Introduction:
reduce the price of goods to consumers across nations. A massive spread of education and of Western
oriented norms of learning at all levels in the twentieth century and the consequences of widely available
References:
schooling are a large part of the globalization process. With regard to the role of schools, globalization
has become a major topic of study, especially in the field of comparative education, which applies
historiography and social scientific theories and methods to international issues of education.

Key words: Origins of Globalization, Globalization Theory, The Role of Education,

Characteristics of Globalization.

What are the Origins of Globalization?

Theoretically, a central dilemma is whether to place the origins of contemporary globalization
around 1971-73, with the petroleum crisis that prompted several important technological and
economic changes directed toward finding replacement sources for strategic raw materials and
searching for new forms of production that would consume less energy and labor. Alternatively, one
may, as some authors in this book have done, pinpoint the origins of globalization more than a
century ago with changes in communication technologies, migration patterns, and capital flows (for
instance, as these affected the process of colonization in the Third World).
An important question for many observers is whether we are facing a new historical epoch, the
configuration of a new world system, or whether these changes are significant but not unprecedented,
paralleled for example by similar changes in the late Middle Ages. But in our view this issue is not a
matter of either/or. We are in a new historical epoch, a new global order in which the old forms are
not dead but the new forms are not yet fully formed. Held has suggested in his Democracy and
Global Order, for instance, that we are in a new "global Middle Ages," a period reflecting that while
the nation-states still have vitality, they cannot control their borders and therefore are subject to all
sorts of internal and external pressures. Furthermore, even if this new global order shows the end of
the sovereignty of the nation-state, this situation nevertheless has differential impacts on states
according to their position in the world order: states unified in regional alliances, such as NAFTA or
the E.U.; emerging or intermediate states, such as Brazil, Korea, India, and China; less developed

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states, such as Argentina, Hungary, Chile, and South Africa; developing states, including many in
Latin America, Asia, and Africa; and underdeveloped states mired in an extreme state of
dependency, such as Haiti, some Central American states, Mozambique, Angola, and Albania. Not
only is the meaning and impact of "globalization" unsettled, it may operate differently in different
parts of the world, and in some contexts have little impact at all. Here, again, globalization is not
itself a unified, global phenomenon.
Hence while globalization may reflect a set of very definite technological, economic, and cultural
changes, the shape of its significance and its future trends are far from determined. As we have just
noted, the historical specificity of this process does not necessarily guarantee a symmetrical or
homogeneous impact worldwide. This account of globalization is quite different from the neoliberal
account, a discourse about progress and a rising tide that lifts all boats, a discourse that takes
advantage of the historical processes of globalization in order to valorize particular economic
prescriptions about how to operate the economy (through free trade, deregulation, and so on) -- and
by implication, prescriptions about how to transform education, politics, and culture.
Globalization Theory:
Globalization is both a process and a theory. Roland Robertson, with whom globalization theory is
most closely associated, views globalization as an accelerated compression of the contemporary
world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a singular entity. Compression makes
the world a single place by virtue of the power of a set of globally diffused ideas that render the
uniqueness of societal and ethnic identities and traditions irrelevant except within local contexts and
in scholarly discourse.
The notion of the world community being transformed into a global village, as introduced in 1960 by
Marshall McLuhan in an influential book about the newly shared experience of mass media, was
likely the first expression of the contemporary concept of globalization. Despite its entry into the
common lexicon in the 1960s, globalization was not recognized as a significant concept until the
1980s, when the complexity and multidimensionality of the process began to be examined. Prior to
the 1980s, accounts of globalization focused on a professed tendency of societies to converge in
becoming modern, described initially by Clark Kerr and colleagues as the emergence of industrial
man.
What makes globalization distinct in contemporary life is the broad reach and multidimensionality of
interdependence, reflected initially in the monitored set of relations among nation-states that arose in
the wake of World War I. It is a process that before the 1980s was akin to modernization, until
modernization as a concept of linear progression from traditional to developing to developed–or
from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as expressed by Ferdinand Tennis–forms of society became
viewed as too simplistic and one-dimensional to explain contemporary changes. Modernization
theory emphasized the functional significance of the Protestant ethic in the evolution of modern
societies, as affected by such objectively measured attributes as education, occupation, and wealth in
stimulating a disciplined orientation to work and political participation.

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The Role of Education:

As the major formal agency for conveying knowledge, the school features prominently in the process
and theory of globalization. Early examples of educational globalization include the spread of global
religions, especially Islam and Christianity, and colonialism, which often disrupted and displaced
indigenous forms of schooling throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s.
Postcolonial globalizing influences of education have taken on more subtle shapes. In globalization;
it is not simply the times of economic exchange and political agreement that bind nations and
societies, but also the shared consciousness of being part of a global system. That consciousness is
conveyed through ever larger transnational movements of people and an array of different media, but
most systematically through formal education.
Structural adjustment policies:
Much of the focus on the role of education in globalization has been in terms of the structural
adjustment policies of the World Bank and other international lending organizations in low-income
countries. These organizations push cuts in government expenditures, liberalization of trade
practices, currency devaluations, reductions of price controls, shifts toward production for export,
and user charges for and privatization of public services such as education. Consequently, change is
increasingly driven largely by financial forces, government reliance on foreign capital to finance
economic growth, and market ideology.
Democratization:
As part of the globalization process, the spread of education is widely viewed as contributing to
democratization throughout the world. Schools prepare people for participation in the economy and
polity, giving them the knowledge to make responsible judgments, the motivation to make
appropriate contributions to the well-being of society, and a consciousness about the consequences of
their behavior. National and international assistance organizations, such as the U. S. Agency for
International Development and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), embrace these objectives. Along with mass provision of schools, technological advances
have permitted distance education to convey Western concepts to the extreme margins of society,
exposing new regions and populations to knowledge generated by culturally dominant groups and
helping to absorb them into the consumer society. A policy of using schools as part of the
democratization process often accompanies structural adjustment measures. However, encouraging
user fees to help finance schooling has meant a reduced ability of people in some impoverished areas
of the world to buy books and school materials and even attend school, thus enlarging the gap
between rich and poor and impeding democracy. Even in areas displaying a rise in educational
participation, observers have reported a reduction in civic participation. Increased emphasis on
formalism in schooling could plausibly contribute to this result. An expansion of school civics
programs could, for example, draw energy and resources away from active engagement in political
affairs by youths, whether within or outside of schools. Increased privatization of education in the

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name of capitalist democratization could invite greater participation of corporate entities, with the
prospect of commercializing schools and reducing their service in behalf of the public interest.
Penetration of the periphery:
Perhaps the most important question in understanding how education contributes to globalization is,
what is the power of schools to penetrate the cultural periphery? Why do non-Western people
surrender to the acculturative pressure of Western forms of education? Evidence on the
accommodation of people at the periphery to the dominant ideology embodied in Westernized
schooling is thus not consistent. In all three societies he studied, globalization influences were abrupt
and pervasive, but they were resisted most palpably not at the remote margins, but in the towns and
places closer to the center, where the institutions representative of the mainstream–including law
enforcement, employment and welfare agencies, medical facilities, and businesses–were newly
prevalent and most powerfully challenged traditional community values. Epstein explained these
findings by reasoning that it is easier for children living in more remote areas to accept myths taught
by schools regarding the cultural mainstream. By contrast, children living closer to the mainstream
cultural center–the more acculturated pupils–are more exposed to the realities of the mainstream way
of life and, being worldlier, is more inclined to resist such myths. Schools in different areas do not
teach different content; in all three societies, schools, whether located at the mainstream center or
periphery, taught an equivalent set of myths, allegiances to national symbols, and dominant core
values. Rather, schools at the margin are more effective in inculcating intended political cultural
values and attitudes because they operate in an environment with fewer competing contrary stimuli.
Children nearer the center, by contrast, having more actual exposure to the dominant culture, are
better able to observe the disabilities of the dominant culture–its level of crime and corruption, its
reduced family cohesion, and its heightened rates of drug and alcohol abuse, for example. That
greater exposure counteracts the favorable images all schools convey about the cultural mainstream,
and instead imbues realism–and cynicism–about the myths taught by schools. In other words,
schools perform as a filter to sanitize reality, but their effectiveness is differential; their capacity to
filter is larger the farther they move out into the periphery. As extra-school knowledge progressively
competes with school-produced myths, the ability and inclination to oppose the dominant ideology
promoted by schools as part of the globalization process should become stronger. This filter-effect
theory could clarify the impact of schools as an instrument of globalization and invites corroboration.
What are the Crucial Characteristics of Globalization?
In light of these many debates, it could be extremely risky to advance a description of the
characteristics of globalization that most closely affect education, but these seem to include, at the
very least:
• In Economic Terms, a transition from Florist to Post-Florist forms of workplace organization; a rise
in internationalized advertising and consumption patterns; a reduction in barriers to the free flow of
goods, workers, and investments across national borders; and, correspondingly, new pressures on the
roles of worker and consumer in society.

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• In Political Terms, a certain loss of nation-state sovereignty, or at least the erosion of national
autonomy; and, correspondingly, a weakening of the notion of the "citizen" as a unified and unifying
concept, a concept that can be characterized by precise roles, rights, obligations, and status (see
Canella, in this volume).

• In Cultural Terms, a tension between the ways in which globalization brings forth more
standardization and cultural homogeneity, while also bringing more fragmentation through the rise of
locally oriented movements. Benjamin Barber characterized this dichotomy in the title of his
book, Jihad vs. McWorld; however, a third theoretical alternative identifies a more conflicted and
dialectical situation, with both cultural homogeneity and cultural heterogeneity appearing
simultaneously in the cultural landscape. (Sometimes this merger, and dialectical tension, between
the global and the local is termed "the global.")

See also: International Education Agreements; International Education Statistics; Rural Education,
subentry on International Context.
Conclusion:
We hope by now that the main purposes of this book have become clear: first, to identify,
characterize, and clarify some of the debates surrounding the phenomenon of globalization; and
second, to try to understand some of the multiple and complex effects of globalization on educational
policy and policy formation. In summarizing some of the consequences of globalization for
educational policy. Finally, global changes in culture deeply affect educational policies, practices,
and institutions. Particularly in advanced industrial societies, for instance, the question of
"multiculturalism" takes on a special meaning in a global context. What is the role of education in
helping to shape the attitudes, values, and understandings of a multicultural democratic citizen who
can be part of this increasingly cosmopolitan world? At least some of the manifestations of
globalization as a historical process are here to stay. Even if the particular form of "globalization"
presented by the neoliberal account can be regarded as an ideology that serves to justify policies
serving particular interests but not others, the fact is that part of this account is based in real changes
(and to be fair, real opportunities, at least for certain fortunate people). Public education today is at a
crossroads. It can carry on as usual, as if none of these threats (and opportunities) existed, with the
risk of becoming increasingly superseded by educational influences that are no longer accountable to
public governance and control. In our view, nothing less is at stake today than the survival of the
democratic form of governance and the role of public education in that enterprise.

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References:
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