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On Thursday, February 26, 2004, HGSE partnered with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Ross Institute to host Globalization and Education: Scholarly and Journalistic Perspectives. At the conference, leading scholars and journalists discussed the evolving role of education in a globalized world, in light of an upcoming book, Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium (University of California Press and Ross Institute), available in March 2004. Below is an interview with Thomas Professor of Education Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, who edited Globalization and led the conference.
Q: In the book’s introduction, you mention the various interpretations of the term "globalization" by academics in different disciplines (i.e., economics, anthropology, etc.). How do you define/interpret the term in relation to culture and education? A: The term “globalization” conjures up multiple meanings, particularly in regards to education. Two weeks ago, I visited a high school outside of Stockholm, in Kista, more or less the Silicon Valley of Europe, and what I saw there defines globalization today, as I see it. The students in the biology class I observed were from Somalia, Ethiopia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Chile, and even a few students from Sweden. More than 80 percent of the students in the school were of immigrant and refugee origin; approximately 40 percent of all students in Stockholm schools are foreign-born or children of foreign-born parents. The kids at this school all spoke English, in addition to their own home languages, and, of course, Swedish. Of particular interest to me was that they all had wireless PCs and were quite involved in an Internet-based research project, visiting sites in multiple languages, and e-mailing each other across the aisles, as well as companions around the world. This is a scene that is increasingly common in schools all over the world, which encapsulates the main vectors that define globalization today: the movement of people, ideas, goods, services, and capital across the world—from Santiago to Stockholm and back to Santiago. This back-and-forth movement is fueled by the high octane of new information, communication, and media technologies as well as ever more affordable and efficient mass transportation systems, much of which is addressed in Globalization. Q: What characterizes the wave of globalization we are currently experiencing?
A: I contend there are four factors at the heart of the current wave of globalization, the first of which is growing worldwide immigration. Sweden, a country of nine million people has about one million immigrants; the United States now has more immigrants (about 33 million people) than the entire Canadian population; and China alone has well over 100 million rural-to-urban migrants. The second dominant feature of globalization is the power and ubiquity of new global technologies. Antonio Battro, the former Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at HGSE, has examined how deaf children in the poorest and most remote places in rural Latin America can be integrated into growing reciprocal networks of belonging and educational opportunity via new digital technologies. Of course, much more needs to be done in the area of the digital divide. But, the potential for exchanges and new communication channels is there. The third critical feature of globalization is the post-nationalization of production and distribution of goods and services. Economies are growing more integrated, making it increasingly difficult to talk about the “Swedish economy,” the “Indian economy,” or even the “Cuban economy.” The fourth important characteristic of globalization is in the area of back-and-forth cultural flows. While some view globalization as synonymous with Americanization (or "McDonaldization," cultural imperialism, or cultural homogeneity), new research released in Globalization provides a much more nuanced and textured interpretation of how these cultural flows—aided by the movement of people and by global technologies—are reshaping the basic units of culture that anthropologists and other social scientists tend to privilege. Q: Do you think education will play a different role in the globalization process than we have witnessed in the past? A: A big part of the evolving definition of 21st-century globalization is the role of education. Even a century ago, education’s role in globalization was much more modest and underwhelming—the vast majority of the Italian and Irish immigrants who settled in New York left schools without graduating or even mastering the basic rules of literacy and mathematics. Yet, over time and across generations, they were able to gain a decent middle-class standard of living. Today, because of globalization, that is no longer a realistic possibility. In the advanced postindustrial democracies, jobs that were once highly sought after are becoming extinct, as the logic of work has shifted dramatically. What are these shifts? First, as new research in Globalization suggests, global technologies will continue to play a greater role in human affairs, including the production and distribution of goods and services. Second, because of globalization, the fortunes of citizens in one region of the world will be ever more intimately tied to the fortunes of citizens halfway around the world. As Intel’s Craig Barrett famously said, there are now hundreds of millions of highly educated Indians, Chinese, and Russians who can “do effectively any job that can be done in the United States.” Third, as John Coatsworth persuasively argues in Globalization, accumulated knowledge about past waves of globalization can and should be mined to better prepare children and youth for the future.
All of this suggests that this wave of globalization has made education more important than ever in human history. It is the best predictor of future well-being—personal, social, and cultural. As the research of Harvard economist David Bloom in Globalization suggests, the returns for each additional year of schooling in the developing world today grow exponentially—each year of schooling in developing countries is thought to raise individuals’ earning power, which is closely linked to productivity, by about 10 percent. Children and youth with the skills, competencies, and sensibilities to proactively and critically engage globalization’s new grammar will have huge advantages over those without them. Q: Your book mentions both positive and negative consequences of globalization that may influence education, such as growing worldwide inequality and increased technology. In your opinion, what are the positive/negative impacts of these factors on youth and education today? A: Inequality is the biggest threat for a variety of reasons, including the fact that globalization is raising expectations the world over. Global media are generating new tastes and the growing desire to mobilize to satisfy them. At the same time, the gap between the very rich and the very poor regions of the world is growing. Over a billion people on earth now live on less than one dollar a day and roughly three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Today, well over 100 million children will not be enrolled in school, and millions more will be enrolled in schools that will do little to teach them anything relevant to their futures—and especially worrisome are the schools that inculcate children with rancor and hatred. That has to stop, and education is the camino real because it can generate such powerful virtuous cycles and is the best antidote for growing inequalities and growing hatred among our youth. Q: What do you believe are the skills necessary for youth to thrive in an increasingly globalized world? How should education be changed to meet these demands? A: Children growing up today are more likely than in any previous generation in history to live a life of working and networking, loving and camaraderie with others from different national, linguistic, religious, and racial backgrounds. Globalization engenders difference. Or, put another way, globalization is making difference “normal.” In a globalized world, the ability to cross cultural boundaries, work with others by understanding and empathizing with their points of view, and the ability to consider multiple perspectives will become increasingly important. In addition to diversity, globalization is engendering complexity. In a world where much of accumulated human thought and knowledge is at the reach of a mouse click, we must move away from the mechanical mastication and regurgitation of facts. Instead, as Howard Gardner argues in Globalization, we need to cultivate the cognitive flexibility and agility required to sift through enormous amounts of information and data, much of it of ambiguous educational value, and identify the patterns that are of relevance to the formulation of competing hypotheses or the alternative resolutions of specific problems. Multitasking and multiple learning skills will be increasingly relevant. Education systems will also have to engage students, cognitively, socially, and behaviorally, at a time when, in the post-industrial democracies, boredom has become the elephant in the (class) room. This is because children and youth can and do pursue much more exciting, but, alas, educationally dubious, pursuits outside of schools—much of it in media-saturated spaces enabled by global technologies. All who think new that global technologies are the panacea to today’s educational predicaments should read Sherry Turkle’s cautionary chapter in Globalization on technology in schools. Q: How do experiences of immigrant youth serve as an illustration of the potential effects of globalization? What insight might they provide towards the understanding of globalization's impact on youths and their education? As Carola Suárez-Orozco suggests in Globalization, the ability to cope with and even thrive amidst profound cultural changes, the very basic task facing all immigrants, is now a skill needed by both immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Put differently, globalization makes us all into immigrants of sorts. Globalization is changing in fundamental ways local economies, societies, and cultures—not only in the global cities but also in the most remote places. Even those who live their entire lives in or near their places of birth—the case for the vast majority of people in the world today—need to develop new skills and sensibilities to cope with globalization. The experiences of immigrant youth very much capture the powerful currents of globalization: movement across national boundaries, bi-cultural (in some cases multicultural) consciousness, and hybridity. Globalization is experienced as unsettling in many parts of the world because it threatens deeply held cultural models and social practices. I suspect that the complex challenge of globalization may turn out to be managing to maintain the protective features of local culture—such as local worldviews, values, and morals, local religious beliefs and practices—while acquiring the instrumental skills and sensibilities needed to thrive in the global space. Per secula seculorum has been the immigrant story the world over: keeping the social cohesion and the protective features of home cultures while managing to acquire the skills and competencies needed to thrive in the new country. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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