Globalization and Education: Characteristics, Dynamics, Implications

Globalization has wrought transformations of similar scale: in how people live, work, identify and aggregate, communicate and engage – locally, nationally, internationally, globally, and how they are educated. Changes are taking place in the nature of the state itself, in how states interact, and in the roles of supra- and non-state actors in organizing and affecting human behavior. At the core of contemporary globalization are transformations in how capital flows throughout the globe and is linked to production and consumption, in how energy is harnessed and consumed, in how information and knowledge are created, transmitted and conserved, how labor is employed and deployed, and how value is created, distributed, conserved and destroyed.

This chapter provides some suggestions for navigating this terrain: a set of observations, questions, propositions, perhaps even insights, into possible courses of action directed at aligning emergent education with parallel social, economic and political needs. The task is complicated if only because the processes of education are long and drawn out, whereas the pace of change associated with globalization has quickened and its consequences are far-reaching and substantial. At times it would seem as if the challenge confronting contemporary education is to prepare a generation for hoped-for successes in a world the contours of which we have only begun to glimpse (Friedman 2005).