1. Education, Markets and
Globalisation
Presenter: Dr Muavia Gallie (PhD)
Lecture 9 - 12
Week 3: 22 - 25 February 2010
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Introduction
1. Assignment (500 - 550 words) - Choose a topic on
Globalisation from within your field of specialisation;
2. Design and produce an A3 poster on the assignment;
3. Work in groups of three (3) - produce your own work (different
topics) - read each other‟s essay and make constructive
suggestions - final product must be marked out of 10 -
declaration - hand in on 8 March 2010 by 14h00;
4. Test on 4 March 2010, at 17h30 at Groenkloof, will cover from
page 1 – 96, Questions on (i) Multiple questions, (ii) Concepts
and short questions, and (iii) Case studies – 100 marks;
5. Examination in June (100 marks);
6. References of articles on Globalisation on page 37.
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2. Lecture 9
Globalisation, educational trends, and the open society –
Martin Carnoy (2005)
9.1 Introduction
- National economies and cultures are globalised – more
competition;
- National borders don‟t limit a nation‟s investment, production
and innovation;
- Everything is becoming organised around a much more
compressed view of space and time;
- Companies produce and sell worldwide, barely concerned
about the long distances or variety of cultures;
- Children watch TV that reconceptualise their „world‟;
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- Global economy is not a world economy – one where
strategic, core activities, including innovation, finance, and
corporate management, functions on a planetary scale on
real time – made possible by technological infrastructure
provided by improved telecommunication networks;
- Capital, technology, management, information and core
markets are globalised;
- This new information technology and innovation processes
are driving a revolution that is changing the very
fundamentals of human relations and social life;
- Profound impact on the transmission of knowledge –
effects are felt throughout the education system;
- First – increase in demand for education;
- Second – produces a reaction, search for identity,
interpretation by West
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3. 9.2 Globalisation and the increased demand
for education
• Reason for increase demand:
• 1. Economic – rising payoffs to higher education in
a global, science based, knowledge intensive
economy – necessity to get a ‘good’ job;
• This changes the stake at lower levels of
schooling;
• 2. Socio-political – demographics (changing family)
and democratic ideals increase pressure on
universities to provide access to groups
traditionally not attending;
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9.2.1 Globalised markets and Globalisation of skills
1. Governments need to stimulate investment, attract
foreign capital and increase knowledge intensive
capital – pressure to increase the average level of
education in the labour force;
2. Rising relative incomes for higher education –
expand higher education systems, and increase
number of secondary school matriculants – also
expansion of women’ educational opportunities;
3. Expansion of primary and secondary education
systems – basic education should be available to
children as a right, even in debt-ridden countries;
4. Communist regimes – relatively high skilled labour
forces and highly literate population;
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4. 5. Expansion of University education – rates of
return to higher levels of education are also
pushed up by structural adjustment policies.
• Rates of return of university education risen
relative to primary and secondary rates.
• Higher unemployment among sec + prim
than university graduates;
• Globalisation is reducing the demand for
unskilled and semi skilled labour – new
technology – real wages are falling;
• New information technology displaces many
workers;
• Increased individualisation of workers – new
centres of knowledge communities.
9.2.2 Globalisation of skills and increased
income and educational inequality
• Those who get higher levels of schooling
are also those from higher social class
background;
• Increase in Inequality;
• Higher socio-economic status (SES)
students get access to ‘better’ schools;
• Increase competition – where children
attend school;
• Parents willing to spend on the ‘best’
school – fighting for higher quality; 8
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5. • Former Soviet Bloc focused on
vocational education and increased
private schools;
• Pressure on universities to
accommodate more students;
• Rapid growth of private universities;
• most students are not ‘good enough’ to
get into top public universities;
• ‘Diploma mills’ serving students from
lower rather than higher income
families.
9.2.3 Globalisation and increased payoff to
women’s education
•Raised the rate of return to women’s
education;
•Two main reasons:
-Spread of feminist ideas and values;
-Increased demand for low-cost semi-
skilled labour;
-World wide movement for women’s rights
-Women’s increased participation in wage
labour markets, and women’s right to vote;
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6. • Not yet resulted in receiving wages equal
to men;
• Positive reasons – flexible labour,
women are as as or more flexible than
men;
• Negative reasons – profitable for firms to
hire women and pay them lower wages
than men;
• Increased ‘professionalisation’ of women
may contribute to the transformation of
family live.
Lecture 10
Globalisation, educational trends, and the open society – Martin Carnoy (2005)
10.1.1 Changing demographics and the impact of education
•Except in few places (like Sweden) fertility rates
rose on the effect of postponed bearing of third
child;
•Stimulate by a generous paid parental leave
system;
•Women in OECD countries are averaging far fewer
children than a generation ago;
•Trend is also spreading to developing countries;
•Greater fertility among less-educated, lower-
income families affects societies;
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7. • On average, less-educated parents are
increasingly at a disadvantage to give to their
children, and to prepare them well;
• Three factors causing this:
• Income distribution in many countries very
unequal;
• High fraction of females heading households
are not only poor because they are women,
but are doubly poor due to low schooling;
• Public investment in early care and education
of children worldwide is low;
10.1.2 Changing demographics and the impact
of education
•Access to information and networks are likely to
be reproduced from generation to next;
•State can and should play an important role in
offsetting differences in access to resources and
information.
•Changing labour market and demographics
combine to create major changes in universities as
well;
•Rise in lower-middle social class and women
students at university;
•But growth in population and very low-educated
families; 14
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8. • Disadvantaged majorities in developing
countries and disadvantaged minorities in
developed countries;
• Secondary school level valuable – students
go to college, but they may not be prepared;
• Poverty rate in developing countries much
higher – universities face problems as they
expand that those in developed countries;
• These ‘disadvantaged’ will be concentrated in
less endowed institutions – low completion
rates and low economic returns.
Lecture 11
11.1 Increase income inequality and declining educational quality
• Increased pressure to improve the quality of schooling;
• Results of the increased pressure on economies to be more productive;
• Decentralisation of educational administration, including promoting
competition;
• Notion of dismantling centralised educational bureaucracies in favour of
school autonomy and school competition – intend to deliver greater
efficiency associated with markets and local control;
• Decentralised can contribute to great inequality in the quality of
schools;
• Assumption is that management and teaching capacity exists across
schools to respond to increased competition;
• Lower-income areas – less capacity to increase quality in response to
competition;
• Loose better students to schools with higher social class bodies 16
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9. • Other factors associated with democratisation of centralised,
authoritarian societies that may reduce the quality of schooling:
- centralised, authoritarian societies tend to be more
economically equal and more socially ordered societies;
- democratisation and marketisation is associated with
increased income and social inequality, greater choice and less
order, greater violence, more child labour and greater spatial
mobility;
- unless there is a strong civil society to replace centralised
authoritarian institutions, state-driven social capital is not
replaced by family and community social capital;
- and schools become less effective because it becomes more
costly to produce student achievement than before the
democratic transition;
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• This is a great contradiction of Globalisation – it
should represent the next stage of
democratisation, but it threatens
democratisation within increased social
inequality and increased inequality in access to
high quality of education needed to develop
democracy to that next level;
• It may also weaken the power of national state
or regional governments to control economic
development and demand for education.
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10. 11.2.1 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Education does much more than to
impart skills needed for work;
- transmitting the modern society;
- redefines culture because it stretches
boundaries of time and space;
- it reduces the legitimacy of national
political institutions;
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11.2.2 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Globalisation necessarily changes the conditions of
identity formation;
- individuals in any society have multiple identities;
- globalised identity is defined i.t.o. the way that
global markets value individuals traits and
behaviour;
- it is knowledge centred – need for some skills
more than others;
- it places high value on scientific and technical
knowledge;
- less on the kinds of local, artisan skills
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11. 11.2.3 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Global market does not work well as a source
of identity for everyone:
- increase material differences among
individuals;
- creates a sense of community among those
who share the same professional network;
- continuously destroys communities;
- isolating individuals until they are able to
find new networks and new sources of social
worth; 21
11.2.4 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• For those less successful in the global marketplace, the search for
identity turns in other directions and does so more intensely than in
the past
- they also seek to redefine nationality;
- religious identity is another (Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu
fundamentalism);
- even ethnic movements move away from their inclusionary focus;
- focus on cultural identifies independent from the national project
or seek recognition in global terms above nationality;
- all the information you need to lead a fulfilling life is in the Quran,
and Bible and Torah;
- fundamentalism is stronger for those who feel simultaneously
threatened by the „inclusiveness‟ of multi-cultural version of welfare
democracy;
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12. 11.2.5 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Cultural identity is an antidote to the complexity and harshness of the global
market, and bureaucratic state;
- all tend to play to the sense for many of exclusion from participation in
benefits of globalising national economies;
- the market in itself has never been sufficiently inclusive;
- global marketisation pushes the “dispossessed” to seek refuge in hew and
more exclusive collectives;
- these collectives don‟t have the power or the funds to help the dispossessed
financially;
- they can help develop self-knowledge and therefore self-confidence;
- they provide community and therefore a sense of belonging;
- they define others as “outsiders” without the “true” self-knowledge or the
“right” ancestors;
- if nation-state doesn‟t have the financial capability or the political legitimacy,
they incorporate them into a much broader notion of community – irresolvable
divisions;
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11.2.6 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Conflict in identity formation necessarily affect education;
- we are headed toward forming labour for a market conditioned by
globalisation;
- becoming more inequitable rather then more inclusive;
- central governments must still assume responsibility for levelling the playing
filed for all groups;
- schools and the educational system become primary targets for social
movements organised around “self-knowledge” such as religious or ethnic
identity;
- state has succumbed to crass (insensitive) materialism;
- fundamentalists want to attract those who are not happy with their value in a
world economy;
- educate in order to strengthen religious affiliation, not economic productivity;
- schools and universities are the site of intense struggle over the definition of
culture;
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13. 11.2.7 Globalisation and the struggle for community
• Focus on decentralisation of educational management to;
- empower regional and local social movements;
- push for more power for parent and teachers at the education site;
- promote greater educational productivity;
- promote greater sense of community;
- seek greater self-identity through influencing the production of
knowledge in schools;
- pro-active movements are attempting to redefine the conception of
“global” in the education system;
- they are having a major impact on how schools define new global
culture;
- anti-global movements that are rooted in male-dominated traditional
culture see women‟s equality as a global notion, and oppose it as
part of their resistance to globalisation;
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Lecture 12
12.1 Implications for Educational policy in the newly opened societies
• Globalisation is having significant impact on knowledge formation;
• It re-values different types of knowledge, especially higher levels of
educational knowledge;
• Increases the pressure to expand higher education and increases the
competition at lower levels of schooling – children‟s social mobility;
• This increases the potential for greater inequality of access to quality
education;
• Societies in transition to democracy – this transition in the context of
this economic globalisation poses great challenges for educational
policies;
• Teaching has become a relatively low-paid profession;
• Private funding of schooling has increasingly supplemented public
funding;
• Decline in average student academic performance and increase in
institutional diversity at university level. 26
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14. 12.2Implications for Educational policy in the newly opened societies
A. Ethnic and class competition:
• Colonial relation between Russia and local ethnic groups has created
another level of issues for education in post-Soviet democracy;
• Opening of societies has not overcome the prejudice and conflicts
inherent in their histories;
• Education system in the new democracies is often at the forefront of
conflict rather than solving them;
• Difficulty of maintaining high schooling quality for young people in
opening societies in part of the overall problems created increasing
economic and social inequality;
• But families can‟t be faulted for trying to use private resources to give
their children the best chance possible at social mobility;
• Families want to do what is necessary for the university to make them
valuable in the global economic system;
• Higher education institutions not only sites of community formation but
centres of cultural leadership 27
12.2Implications for Educational policy in the newly opened societies
B1. Multi-cultural education in a global environment
• Need for different approaches to a self-knowledge community:
1. Where the state allows any community group to create a
knowledge institution with public funds as long as it met minimum
legal criteria - a vision where groups with widely different beliefs
are held together by market relations but not necessarily other
common bonds. Assumption: Market relations (the profit
motive) are enough to keep increasingly diverse societies
working together successfully.
2. Where the state uses a multi-cultural self-knowledge approach
to socialise all young people in the public system – all children
attending publicly funded institutions learn about the variety of
cultures in the community (and their point of view. Assumption:
All children of various groups will gain an understanding of their
own history but also allows them to think critically about it.
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15. Conclusion
B2. Multi-cultural education in a global environment:
• Schools and universities may represent for a community a center
of particular culture in a multi-cultural society or may represent a
new definition of multi-culturalism;
• They become important site of conflict – preparing students to be
economically successful in a global economic environment and
local cultural forms that build self-identity;
• Notion of national identity in a period of declining state power
makes it less logical to impose a narrow sense of national,
regional and local culture;
• In practice, groups that do not assimilate well into the global
market knowledge culture have greater political options today
than even a generation ago of forming relatively autonomous
cultural groups with their own knowledge institutions;
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Contact details:
• E-mail: muavia@mweb.co.za;
– Or muavia.gallie@mweb.co.za;
• Fax: 0866720520
• Powerpoint website: www.slideshare.net
Thank You! 30
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