Globalization and the incorporation of education

Globalization and the incorporation of education. Here we draw out some of the profound implications of globalization for education and the work of educators. As part of this we also look at some of the issues surrounding the increased presence of corporations and branding in education.

Contents: introduction · globalization, commodification and the corporate takeover of education · globalization and the governance of education · de-localization and changing technologies and orientations in education · branding, globalization and learning to be consumers · conclusion · further reading and references · links · how to cite this article · see, also, globalization

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society… Robbed on the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. (Karl Polanyi 1957: 73, quoted in Leys 2001: 4)

Such is the nature and complexity of the forces involved in globalization that any discussion of its impact upon education raises fundamental issues and is a matter of considerable debate Scholte 2000). The term itself is subject to dispute – whether we take a narrower, economic, focus on the removal of barriers to free trade and the integration of national economies (see for example Stiglitz 2002), or the broader view of a growing interdependence of social processes. However, what is clear is that there has been a significant shift in terms of the ‘processes, interconnections and exchanges that are global’ (MacGillivray 2006: 6 – emphasis in original) and in motive (the ‘ization’ of globalization).As MacGillivray (2006: 7) again comments, reserving ‘globalization’ ‘for players and events that deliberately embraced the globe invests the terms with meaning’.

The forces associated with such globalization (whether economic or social) have conditioned the context in which educators operate, and profoundly altered people’s experience of both formal and informal education. Schools and colleges have, for example, become sites for branding and the targets of corporate expansion. Many policymakers automatically look to market ‘solutions’. The impact and pervasiveness of these forces of globalization also means that they should be a fundamental focus for education and learning – but there are powerful currents running against honest work in this area. In this article we will explore some of what we believe to be the more significant aspects with regard to the practice and experience of education. These include:

Commodification and the corporate takeover of education.
The threat to the autonomy of national educational systems by globalization.
De-localization and changing technologies and orientations in education.
Branding, globalization and learning to be consumers.

This is not an exhaustive listing of issues – but it does bring out some of the key dynamics and highlights some important areas of action (and reaction) for educators and learners with respect to globalization.

Commodification and the corporate takeover of education

To begin it is helpful to distinguish between the rise of the market, ‘with its insidious consumer-based appropriations of freedom and choice’ (Giroux 2000: 6) and its impact on education, and globalization. As we have already seen, they are wrapped up – one with another – but it has been possible to talk of the marketization of education without having to refer to delocalization and the activities of multinationals (classic features of globalization). Now, that is increasingly difficult. As we know, commercial concerns look constantly for new markets and areas of activity. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, and particularly in those states where neo-liberal economic policies dominated, there was strong pressure to ‘roll-back’ state regulation, and to transform non-market and ‘social’ spheres such as public health and education services into arenas of commercial activity. According to Colin Leys, such a transformation – the making of a market – entailed the meeting of four requirements:

The reconfiguration of the goods and services in question so that they can be priced and sold.

The inducing of people to want to buy them.

The transformation of the workforce from one working for collective aims with a service ethic to one working to produce profits for owners of capital and subject to market discipline.

The underwriting of the risks to capital by the state. (2001: 4)

What we have here is a process of commodification – and the development of attempts to standardize ‘products’ and to find economies of scale. The expansion of higher education in Britain and Northern Ireland during this period, for instance, involved a the restructuring of courses and programmes so that they could be marketed. This included marketing new courses such as MBAs, modulization (to achieve economies of scale), and the increased use of part-time and distance learning programmes (to target those already in work). The introduction of student loans and course fees has raised, significantly, the direct cost placed upon students – and helped to change people’s orientation to higher education away from that of participants towards being consumers. The massive increase in university enrolment was, however, less a consequence of government policy, than the impact of changing perceptions of the labour market. The surge in student numbers occurred because it became clear to large numbers of people that not having a degree disadvantaged them in the labour market.

At a certain point in what had been a steady, slow expansion, large numbers of people started to feel they really had better get a degree, because not doing so would be such a bad move. The first wave set off another and so on. (Wolf 2002: 178)

There has also been a transformation of the labour force in UK higher education – and a growing orientation to profit generation. Salary levels have decreased significant relative to other key groupings; increased bureaucratization and pressures on universities to reduce costs have reduced the time for ‘scholarship and disinterested learning’ and the doubling in the numbers of students per lecturer has led to a progressive decline in the quality of teaching and the satisfaction it gives to learners and teachers (see Wolf 2002: 200-43). Similar pressures can be found at work in other areas of education.

We have also seen some very significant movements towards corporatization in schooling and non-formal education. In the 1980s and early 1990s this was initially carried forward by the rise of managerialism in many ‘western’ education systems. Those in authority were encouraged and trained to see themselves as managers, and to reframe the problems of education as exercises in delivering the right outcomes. The language and disposition of management also quickly moved into the classroom via initiatives such as the UK national curriculum. There has also been the wholesale strengthening of the market in many education systems. Schools have to compete for students in order to sustain and extend their funding. This, in turn, has meant that they have had to market their activities and to develop their own ‘brands’. They have had to sell ‘the learning experience’ and the particular qualities of their institution. To do this complex processes have to be reduced to easily identified packages; philosophies to sound bites; and students and their parents become ‘consumers’. As Stewart demonstrated some time ago there is a fundamental problem with the way that such business models have been applied to educational and welfare agencies.

The real danger is that unthinking adoption of the private sector model prevents the development of an approach to management in the public services in general or to the social services in particular based on their distinctive purposes, conditions and tasks. (Stewart 1992: 27)

The result has been a drive towards to the achievement of specified outcomes and the adoption of standardized teaching models. The emphasis is less on community and equity, and rather more on individual advancement and the need to satisfy investors and influential consumers. Education has come to resemble a private, rather than public, good.

As might be expected, such marketization and commodification has led to a significant privatization of education in a number of countries. In the United States, for example, schooling, higher education and training have been seen as lucrative markets to be in. Giroux (2000: 85) reports that the for-profit education market represented around $600 billion in revenue for corporate interests. Over 1000 state schools have been contracted out to private companies (Monbiot 2001: 336). In Britain education management, ‘looks like it is about to become big business’ (op. cit.). Educational Action Zones (beginning in 1998) have had significant corporate involvement. The Lambeth Zone is run by Shell, for example, not the local education authority. In Southwark, the education service has been contracted out to Haskins, and Kings Manor School, Guildford became the first state school to have its administration has been handed to a private company (in 1999). Kenway and Bullen (2001) have charted similar shifts in the marketization of Australian schooling. Classically, policymakers have looked to experience in other countries when framing these efforts. Furthermore, a significant number of the companies moving into this area have been trans-national corporations.

Seeking to turn education into a commodity, framing it in market terms, and encouraging the entry of commercial concerns could be seen as simply an expression of neo-liberal politics in a particular state or area. However, we need to understand the nature of the forces that have pushed (or seduced) governments into adopting such policies – and it is here that we can see the process of globalization directly at work.

Globalization and the governance of education

Globalization has impacted upon the nature of the agencies that ‘school’ children, young people and adults.

The question we are facing now is, To what extent is the educational endeavor affected by processes of globalization that are threatening the autonomy of national educational systems and the sovereignty of the nation-state as the ultimate ruler in democratic societies? At the same time, how is globalization changing the fundamental conditions of an educational system premised on fitting into a community, a community characterized by proximity and familiarity? (Burbules and Torres 2000)

At first glance it would seem that national governments still have considerable freedom to intervene in education systems. UK government (in its various forms), for example, has significantly increased the scale of central direction and intervention through the use of national curriculum requirements, special initiatives (involving direct funding) and other, institutional means. However, as soon as we examine the nature of this expansion of intervention we can see that the overriding concern is with economic growth and international competitiveness – and that the efforts of politicians have been deeply flawed and their record dismal.

The more overtly and the more directly politicians attempt to organize education for economic ends, the higher the likelihood of waste and disappointment… What marks (British politicians) from their international counterparts is simply the speed with which, in our hugely centralized system, they launch one educational broadside after another.

In the process we have almost forgotten that education ever had any purpose other than to promote growth. (Wolf 2002: xiii)

While there is some direct intervention in the governance of national educational systems by trans-national agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, the impact of globalization is most felt through the extent to which politics everywhere are now essentially market-driven. ‘It is not just that governments can no longer “manage” their national economies’, he comments, ‘to survive in office they must increasingly “manage” national politics in such a ways as to adapt them to the pressures of trans-national market forces’ (Leys 2001: 1).

The initiation, or acceleration, of the commodification of public services was… a logical result of government’s increasingly deferential attitude towards market forces in the era of the globalized economy… A good deal of what was needed [for the conversion of non-market spheres into profitable fields for investment] was accomplished by market forces themselves, with only periodic interventions by the state, which then appeared as rational responses to previous changes. (Leys 2001: 214)

In other words, the impact of globalization is less about the direct way in which specific policy choices are made, as the shaping and reshaping of social relations within all countries.

De-localization and changing technologies and orientations in education

As well as conditioning the political context, globalization has found expression in some very direct ways – via , for example, the de-localization of schooling. Since the 1980s, there has been a degree of ‘parental choice; within state schooling. It has been possible to choose which schools to apply to at both primary and secondary levels. While much primary school application is local, a significant proportion of secondary school application is not. This has both severed the link between locality and schooling and undermined the idea of community schooling. A further degree of delocalization has occurred as a result of scares around child protection and truancy. While schools might be local, access to the neighbourhood and of neighbours to the school has been restricted. The most visible signs are the security gates and fences that are part of the perimeter of schooling. Such measures inevitably strengthen the idea that the school is somehow separate from the community where it is located – and this is further intensified by the regime of testing and centralized curriculum construction that has been the hallmark of the UK education system since the early 1980s. There has been significantly less room for more local community-oriented explorations and student projects. As we have seen, the main forces framing the centralized curriculum are economic and directly linked to globalization.

To these developments must be added changes in educational technology – especially the use of the internet and other computer forms, and the growth of distance learning. At one level these can be seen as an instrument of localization. They allow people to study at home or at work. However, they usually involve highly individualized forms of learning and may not lead to any additional interaction with neighbours or with local shops, agencies and groups. They also allow people from very different parts of the world to engage in the same programme – and student contact can be across great physical distance.

The term adult learning has been substituted for adult education in many policy and academic discussions in recognition of these sorts of shifts (Courtney 1979: 19) and more recently there has been a major growth in attention to notions of lifelong learning. The shift may, as Courtney suggests, reflect a growing interest in learning, ‘however unorganized, episodic or experiential’ (ibid.), beyond the classroom. In Britain, this has been seized upon by New Labour thinkers like Tom Bentley (1998) (head of Demos and a former special advisor to David Blunkett). He describes ‘Labour’s learning revolution’ as follows:

It requires a shift in our thinking about the fundamental organizational unit of education, from the school, an institution where learning is organized, defined and contained, to the learner, an intelligent agent with the potential to learn from any and all of her encounters with the world around her. (Reported in The Economist, October 9, 1999, page 42)

The problem, as we have seen, is that the sort of learning concerned is highly individualized and often oriented to employer or consumer interests.

Field (2000: 35) has argued that there has been a fundamental shift in the behaviour of ‘ordinary citizens’, ‘who increasingly regard the day-to-day practice of adult learning as routine, perhaps so routine that they give it little explicit attention’. Economic, social and cultural changes mean that many now live in ‘knowledge’ or ‘informational societies’ that have strong individualizing tendencies and a requirement for permanent learning (reflexivity) (after Ulrich Beck [1992] and Anthony Giddens [1990, 1991]). As a result, Field goes on to suggest, many adults now take part in organized learning throughout their lifespan; that the post-school system is populated by adults as well as by young people; and that ‘non-formal’ learning permeates daily life and is valued (ibid.: 38-49). Typical of the last of these has been a substantial increase in activities such as short residential courses, study tours, fitness centres, sports clubs, heritage centres, self-help therapy manuals, management gurus, electronic networks and self-instructional videos (ibid.: 45). In these latter examples we can see an important aspect of the growing trans-national corporate presence in education and learning – and the extent to which profits are dependent on people continuing and extending their self-directed learning projects and activities.

Branding, globalization and learning to be consumers

It is time to recognize that the true tutors of our children are not schoolteachers or university professors but filmmakers, advertising executives and pop culture purveyors. Disney does more than Duke, Spielberg outweighs Stanford, MTV trumps MIT. (Benjamin R. Barber quoted by Giroux 2000: 15)

As George Monbiot (2001: 331) put it, there are many ways of making money from formal education, ‘but the most widespread is the use of the school as an advertising medium’. The attraction is obvious – schools represent a captive market. Through the use of teaching packs, sponsored videos, advertisements on school computer screen savers and the like, large companies are able to bring their brand directly into the classroom. In so doing they are looking to gain a certain legitimacy (after all the use of their materials etc. has been ‘approved’ by the school) as well as the raising general brand awareness. Schools also have the distinct advantage for corporates of organizing their students along key demographics such as age and supposed academic ability – so it is possible to target advertising and marketing. The shortfall of funding for key aspects of schooling such as computing, sport and recreational and eating facilities: fast-food, athletic gear and computing companies have stepped in. However:

… they carry with them an educational agenda of their own. As with all branding projects, it is never enough to tag the school with a few logos. Having gained a foothold, the brand managers are now doing what they have done in music, sports and journalism outside the schools: trying to overwhelm their host, to grab the spotlight. They are fighting for their brands to become not the add-on but the subject of education, not an elective but the curriculum. (Klein 2001: 89)

Many teachers and their managers remain ‘deeply ambivalent’ about the movement of commerce and advertising into schools (Kenway and Bullen 2001: 102). There is a belief that children need at least one ‘commercial-free zone’. Commenting on the Australian situation, Kenway and Bullen argue that schools have found themselves in a problematic situation.

High ideals tend to fade away as State-provided finances decline and as the State ‘encourages’ closer partnerships between education and industry. Educationally sound and attractively packaged curriculum materials fill the hole in the resources budget of schools and offer technologically sophisticated ‘solutions’ to the pedagogical problems of overworked teachers. These pressures have created a conflict of interest between schools’ mandate to educate, and their moral and ethical duties to protect children from exploitation by consumer culture. Corporations have recognized and taken advantage of this dilemma. (op. cit.)

Students in many northern counties are, generally, ‘intense consumers’. They are prepared to and/or want to ‘spend large amounts of money on brand names and fashionable and popular items’ (Kenway and Bullen 2001: 120). However, while many may be critical of certain aspects of consumer culture, they are far less likely to be critical of consumption itself.

As educational systems become more marketized, colleges, schools and non-formal education agencies seeks to build relationships based more on viewing learners as customers rather than participants

The main role of the teacher-turned-classroom manager is to legitimate through mandated subject matter and educational practices a market-based conception of the learner as simply a consumer of information. (Giroux 2000: 92)

The result of this incursion by commerce, and the widespread seeping of managerialism, market-thinking and consumerism into the orientation of educators is a basic inability within many schooling systems and agencies of informal education to address critically questions around globalization, branding and consumption.

Conclusion

The perversion of education and the exploitation of learners that we have catalogued here is a matter of profound concern. We have witnessed a fundamental attack on the notion of public goods, and upon more liberal ideas of education. Learning has increasingly been seen as a commodity or as an investment rather than as a way of exploring what might make for the good life or human flourishing. Teachers’ and educators’ ability to ask critical questions about the world in which live has been deeply compromised. The market ideologies they have assimilated, the direction of the curricula they are required to ‘deliver’, and the readiness of the colleges, schools and agencies in which they operate to embrace corporate sponsorship and intervention have combined to degrade their work to such an extent as to question whether what they are engaged in can be rightfully be called education. In a very real sense they are engaged in furthering what Erich Fromm described as alienation:

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. (Fromm 1957: 67)

It is a form of education that looks to ‘having’ rather than ‘being’ (Fromm 1976).

Just what is needed to push back and undermine this pernicious process is fairly clear. We need, for example, to adopt ways of thinking about, and acting in, the world that have at their core an informed commitment to human flourishing in its fullest sense. It is necessary to reassert the public domain and to police the boundaries between it and the market sector with some vigilance (Leys 2001: 222). Furthermore, we need, as educators, to be able to do what is right rather than what is ‘correct’. But how is all this to be achieved within societies and systems conditioned by globalization and neo-liberalism and in which there are asymmetrical relations of power? The answer, of course, is that cannot. But we can, at least, seek to undermine the narrowing and demeaning processes that pass under the name of education in many systems. Alternative ways of educating that look to well-being and participation in the common life have been well articulated. Whether they can be realized is is down in significant part to our courage as educators, and our ability to work with others with a similar vision.

References

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Links

The American Prospect – special segment on globalization: helpful collection of articles and links.

Development Gateway Foundation: Useful set of pages on the knowledge economy + plenty of other resources.

Global Policy Forum. Useful set of resources and links that explore the nature of globalization.

No Logo: website linked to Klein’s book with bulletin board and various resources.

World Bank Research on Globalization. Collection of topic papers and reports.

Acknowledgement: Picture: Australia supports the Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme and Fiji’s Ministry of Education to incorporate financial education into Fiji’s national school curriculum, July 2013. Photo- Australia High Commission, Suva | Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

To cite this article: Smith, M. K. (2002, 2008). ‘Globalization and the incorporation of education’, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. [https://infed.org/mobi/globalization-and-the-incorporation-of-education/. Retrieved: insert date].