Topic > The Place of Globalization Theory in Education

In popular discourse, globalization is often synonymous with internationalization, referring to the growing interconnectedness and interdependence of people and institutions around the world. These terms, despite having elements in common, have taken on technical meanings that distinguish them from each other and from common use. Internationalization is the least theorized term. Globalization, in contrast, has come to denote the complexity of interconnectedness, and scholars have produced a large body of literature to explain what appear to be inevitable global influences on local environments and responses to those influences. Influences on a global scale affect aspects of daily life. For example, structural adjustment policies and international trade charters, such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), reduce barriers to trade, ostensibly promote jobs, and reduce price of goods to consumers. across the nations. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Yet they also shift support from “old” industries to newer ones, creating dislocation and forcing some workers out of their jobs, and have provoked large and even violent demonstrations in several countries. The spread of democracy is also part of globalization, giving more people access to the political processes that affect their lives, but also, in many places, hiding deeply entrenched socioeconomic inequalities as well as policy areas over which very few individuals have control. voice. Organized international terrorism, fueled by Islamic fanaticism, can also be seen as an oppositional reaction – a deglobalization effort – to the pervasiveness of Western capitalism and the secularism associated with globalization. The influences of globalization are multidimensional and have broad social, economic and political implications. The massive spread of Western-oriented education and learning norms at all levels in the twentieth century and the consequences of widely available school education represent an important part of the globalization process. Regarding the role of schools, globalization has become an important topic of study, especially in the field of comparative education, which applies historiographical and socio-scientific theories and methods to international issues of education. Globalization Theory Globalization is both a process and a theory. Roland Robertson, with whom globalization theory is most closely associated, sees 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 globally diffused set of ideas that render the uniqueness of social and ethnic identities and traditions irrelevant except within local contexts and academic discourse. The notion of the transformation of the world community into a global village, introduced in 1960 by Marshall McLuhan in an influential book on the new shared experience of mass media, was probably the first expression of the contemporary concept of globalization. Despite entering 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. Before the 1980s, theories of globalization focused on the stated tendency of societies to converge inbecome modern, initially described by Clark Kerr and colleagues as the emergence of industrial man. Although the theory of globalization is relatively new, the process is not. History bears witness to many globalization trends involving grand alliances of nations and dynasties and the unification of previously seized territories under empires such as Rome, Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, but also to events such as the widespread acceptance of germ theory and of heliocentrism, the rise of transnational agencies concerned with regulation and communication, and an increasingly unified conceptualization of human rights. What distinguishes globalization in contemporary life is the broad scope and multidimensionality of interdependence, initially reflected in the monitored set of relationships between nation-states that arose in the wake of the First World War. This is a process that before the 1980s was similar 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 Toennies – forms of society were seen 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 influenced by objectively measured attributes such as education, employment, and wealth in stimulating a disciplined orientation to work and political participation. The main difficulty with modernization theory was its focus on changes within societies or nations and comparisons between them – with Western societies as the main points of reference – while neglecting the interconnectedness between them and, indeed, their interdependence and the role played by non-Western countries in the development of the world. West. Immanuel Wallerstein was among the first and most influential scholars to show the weaknesses of modernization theory. He developed world system theory to explain how the world expanded through an ordered pattern of relationships between societies driven by a capitalist system of economic exchange. In contrast to the emphasis on linear development in modernization theory, Wallerstein demonstrated how rich and poor societies were tied together within a world system, bringing forth relative economic advantages and disadvantages that played out in politics and culture. Although globalization theory is broader, more varied in its emphasis on the transnational diffusion of knowledge, and generally less deterministic regarding the role of the economy, world system theory has been instrumental in shaping its development. The role of education as the main formal agency for the transmission of knowledge, school occupies an important place in the process and theory of globalization. Early examples of the globalization of education include the spread of global religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, and colonialism, which often disrupted and replaced indigenous forms of education throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Postcolonial globalized influences on education have taken more subtle forms. In globalization, it is not simply the bonds of economic exchange and political agreement that unite nations and societies, but also the shared awareness of being part of a global system. That consciousness is transmitted through ever-widening transnational movements of people and a variety of different media, but most systematically through formal education. The inexorable transformation of consciousness brought about by globalization alters its content and contours.