Globalization, Educational Trends, and the Open Society

1
Globalization, Educational Trends, and the Open
Society

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University

2
Globalization and the Knowledge Economy

• The world economy has become more competitive
  because of many new players and new technologies.
  Employers want more flexibility to compete.
• The workplace is becoming a less permanent social
  site-- increasingly, individual employees define
  themselves socially and economically in terms of
  their own characteristics rather than where they
  work.
• Main bases of globalization are information and
  innovation, and they are knowledge intensive.
• Globalization has a profound impact on the
  transmission of knowledge.

3
Effects of Globalization on the Transmission of
Knowledge

• Globalization increases demand for education
  this increases pressure on the system for higher
  quality schooling, often producing perverse
  consequences, mainly from standpoint of
  educational equity.
• Is higher quality education for all is
  necessarily consistent with individual-centric
  democracy, particularly in societies marked by
  deeply-rooted ethnic conflicts and weak states?
• Globalization also produces reaction, often in
  form of ethnic-religious nationalism/regionalism.
  This represents a search for identity--can be
  antithesis of globalism/internationalism and even
  of individualism

4
Globalization and Labor Markets

• Employers in developed countries are also more
  likely to hire part-time or temporary labor. The
  proportion of non-standard work arrangements is
  increasing in most developed countries.
• With increased competition, employers attempt to
  move to just-in-time labor.
• One apparent result of increased competition is
  increased inequality of wage distribution.
• The feminization of the labor market is one of
  the most salient characteristics of the growth of
  the new information economy.

5
Rising Payoffs to University Education

• Increasing emphasis on knowledge industries and
  more information-based technologies increase
  relative demand for higher education.
• New organization of labor force emphasizing
  changing workplace and multitasking increases
  demand for higher levels of education.
• Tendency for governments to abandon politics of
  income equalization (welfare state), increases
  income inequality, with a bias to falling
  relative real incomes for the less educated,
  hence higher payoffs to university education.
• Although women are paid less than men, the
  payoffs to women for completing university may be
  higher.

6
Increased Pressure for Students to Get Into
University

• Increased competition at lower levels of
  schooling.
• Development of private education.
• Increased pressure on students to succeed, and on
  families to invest in their children so that they
  can succeed academically.
• Increased inequality of schooling quality.

7
Changes in Education in the Former Soviet Bloc

• In countries of former Soviet bloc, now
  democracies or transitioning to democracy,
  transition from state schooling and focus on
  vocational education to increased privatization
  and general education.
• Under Communism, teachers and students
  distributed by centralized state insulated from
  influence of international competition.
• In new democracies, educational system no longer
  insulated, and quality teachers and students
  increasingly distributed among schools according
  to families ability to pay.

8
Increased Pressure on Universities to Expand

• Higher rates of return mean that more students
  want to attend universities.
• Universities feel pressure to accept more
  students.
• Increased pressure on public finances since
  universities are more expensive per student than
  lower levels of education.
• This may tend to reduce public spending on lower
  levels of schooling or, alternatively, may
  increase privatization of universities, making
  them accessible only to those who can afford to
  pay.

9
Globalization and the Increased Payoff to Womens
Education

• Globalization has raised the rate of return to
  womens education.
• The spread of feminist ideas and the increased
  demand for low-cost semi-skilled and skilled
  labor.
• Worldwide movement for womens rights.
• This, in turn, has increased the demand by women
  for higher and higher education levels.
• Women are still discriminated against in labor
  markets and are still under-represented in the
  most lucrative professions even in the most
  feminized countries, Sweden and the U.S.
• But globalization is changing that because it
  requires flexible labor.

10
Changing Demographics and the Impact on Education

• Families have changed in developed
  countries--later marriage, fewer children, more
  likely divorce and remarriage.
• The family began these drastic changes before the
  onset of the current phase of globalization and
  work restructuring. The source of family changes
  is in women demanding changes in their status in
  society.
• However, once women began opting out of the
  domestic roles allocated to them, the
  increasingly flexible labor market was ready to
  accept them into more and more wage jobs, and
  eventually into more professional jobs.

11
Changes in Demographics II

• Perhaps the most profound effect in the developed
  countries is the decline in fertility rates.
  These have dropped to such low levels in some
  countries that severe population declines are
  predicted.
• The offsetting movement is to accept increasing
  numbers of immigrants, and this is changing the
  ethnic and language makeup of nations such as the
  US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.
• A higher percentage of children is being born
  into low-income families the costs of education
  for these children is higher than for the
  children of high-income families, but less is
  spent on them, creating continuing disparities.
• Eventually, these issues reach into the
  university level.

12
Increased Income Inequality and Declining
Educational Quality

• Push for decentralization of education delivery
  increases inequality in the quality of
  educational services because the capacity to
  deliver educational services varies among
  communities.
• Democratization and marketization is associated
  with increased income and social inequality,
  greater choice, and less order.
• State-driven social capital is not replaced by
  family and community social capital in societies
  with poorly organized civil societies.
• Schools become less effective because it becomes
  more costly to produce student achievement than
  before the democratic transition.

13
A Contradiction of the Transition to Democracy

• Democratization may produce a decline in the
  quality of schooling and greater disparity in
  quality.
• Globalization represents the next stage of
  democratization, this time on a world scale, but
  it also threatens democratization with increased
  social inequality in access to high quality
  education and with greater inequality of income
  and wealth distribution.
• It may also pose a threat to democracy by
  decreasing the quality of education or at least
  creating barriers to increasing educational
  quality.

14
Globalization and Identity

• The state in capitalist societies has
  historically attempted to individualize members
  of the working class, separating them from their
  class identity formed in the social workplaces of
  the industrial age.
• In the post-industrial age, workplaces cease to
  form worker identities. Work is no longer
  permanent. Workers form identity around their
  cvs or around an educational institution.
• When the state still tries to individualize
  people into individualized citizenship as the
  workplace ceases to provide social identities,
  workers are disintegrated from society by both
  the workplace and the state.
• Fundamentalist religion is often new source of
  identity for those threatened by global markets
  and multicultural version of welfare democracy.

15
Globalization and Culture Clash

• Global culture values scientific knowledge and
  market rationality, but it is not inclusive, and
  it is highly unequal.
• This clashes with more traditional knowledge and
  more localized forms of identity that give
  impression of greater inclusion.
• Educational institutions are major centers for
  the formation of culture in the knowledge
  society, but they risk becoming a form of
  exclusion, and so are a site of struggle between
  localized and global identity.

16
Educational Institutions and Culture

• Schools and universities are the institution
  responsible for developing the skills that are
  associated with global culture, but at the same
  time, localized cultures seek support there.
• It is also in schools and universities that new
  movements develop and impact global culture--the
  womens movement, the environmental movement, and
  movements against many elements of global culture
  itself.Womens movement has made inroads in
  education even in traditional Muslim countries.
• Knowledge producing institutions simultaneously
  create schisms in national cultures, develop
  global culture and combat global culture.
• Schools and universities need to accept this dual
  role and use it constructively.

17
Implications for Educational Policy in the Open
Society

• Transition societies have generally inherited
  well-developed, high quality and rather inclusive
  educational systems, in which teachers were paid
  same wages as other professionals.
• Now public education suffers severe budget
  constraints, teaching has become low-paid
  profession, and private funding is replacing
  public funding, with predicted increases in
  inequality.
• Rather than being a path to resolving old ethnic
  conflicts, educational system is at the forefront
  of the conflicts.
• Danger in the present environment that societies
  divide into groups incorporated into the
  knowledge economy and those left out..
  Universities can play a constructive role in
  bridging these differences, not exacerbating
  them.
• Danger that universities exacerbate social
  inequalities with inequitable financing and
  exclusion as they expand.
• .

18
Education and the Challenges of Globalization

• Two models for education in global economy
• Highly decentralized, with all community groups
  (ethicity-based organizations, gender-based
  social movements, religious organizations)
  developing their own education.
• Centralized, multi-cultural self-knowledge
  approach to socialize all young people in the
  public system. State continues to impose
  ideological perspective, but one reflecting the
  diversity of todays post-industrial societies.
• Decentralized approach assumes that market
  relations enough to keep diverse societies
  working together successfully.
• State-driven model helps various groups gain
  understanding of their own history and culture
  but helps them think critically about it.
  Consistent with constructive vision of
  post-industrial society.