Convergence, standardisation and globalisation

As Waldow (2012) and Steiner-Khamsi (2012) note, it is contested whether EPB has made national education systems converge towards international standards and practices in the context of globalisation. Crucial questions that arise are:

whether education convergence/standardisation is authentic and substantive, and how EPB associated with globalisation comes into play. This section examines education convergence/standardisation from various perspectives. Among them, world culture theory is highlighted as it has been one of the most powerful approaches to analysing this theme. It lastly focuses on the concept of the ‘spatial turn’ which signals that EPB has increasingly occurred within a global space.

Education convergence/standardisation in the context of globalisation

Steiner-Khamsi (2000) summarises three approaches to global education convergence. The consensus model is rooted in the assumption that all education systems are likely to confront similar challenges in the context of globalisation, or be affected by globalisation in similar ways. This results in the adoption of similar solutions across nations. The conflict model draws on neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism. It argues that international standards do not derive from “a consensual act of borrowing”, but are “propagated” by advanced wealthy countries which have more access to information, expertise, technology, networking and representation in international organisations (p. 161). In this regard, ‘western’ or ‘American’

standards seem to be more accurate than ‘international’ and ‘global’.

In contrast, the culturalist model emphasises how local factors respond to global challenges in diverse ways. Drawing on Appadurai’s (1996) work,

Steiner-Khamsi notes that transnational flows – such as people, technology, media images and information, and ideologies – do not necessarily cause conjuncture, but also disjuncture. Besides, there is “a plurality of cultures” (p. 161) within a country; people construct the meaning of education issues and privilege certain education interests and concerns depending on class, race, gender and ethnicity. EPB might

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not result from a global consensus on what constitutes the ‘best’ education system and bring about convergence, but result in local forces and lead to diversity in its implementation.

The global policy network has significantly shaped the ‘planetspeak’ (Nóvoa, 2002) of education governance and schooling through promoting standardised tests and recommendations and ‘world-class’ models. Gorur (2015) criticises PISA as “an exercise in making education systems legible and manageable” through reducing and standardising education into “a single rank” and a set of ‘best

practices’. Meanwhile, Alexander (2010) argues that the quest for ‘world class’ by national governments has been more like a concept, slogan, aspiration or claim, meaningless in practice. Similarly, Steiner-Khamsi (2014) points out that, terms, such as ‘international standards’ and ‘21st

century skills’, serve as “empty vessels” which can be filled with different local meanings according to specific needs.

World culture theory

Instead of seeing ‘convergence’ as a result of common challenges and contexts (i.e. consensus model), proponents of ‘world culture’ theory, such as John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez, emphasise that the driving forces behind ‘convergence’ are “the logic of science and the myth of progress” (Carney, Rappleye & Silova, 2012, p. 366). This theory was first established by arguing that mass schooling systems around the world spread from a common source and share similar features over time (Meyer, Ramirez & Soysal, 1992). The education model has been

subsequently developed into a more general culture model of the modern

nation-state (Meyer, Boli, Thomas & Ramirez, 1997). As Rappleye (2012) argues, this is based on a belief that human society should be organised around “a set of ‘rationalised myths’” – believing in process, rationality and science; and institutions – such as states, organisations, schools and firms – are supposed to “embody, reflect and promote” this consensus and eventually become ‘isomorphic’ (p. 124).

In recent years, academics adopting the world culture stances have increasingly engaged in the discussion about EPB. For example, Wiseman and

Baker (2005) consider that ideas and concepts for policy-making, starting from a few nations, “flow out to others” and eventually “become a part of policy-makers’ fundamental understanding of educational systems and schooling” (p. 4). From this perspective, EPB is authentic and substantive (Rappleye, 2012). By employing the concept of ‘loose coupling’, they have, at least implicitly, acknowledged the existence of education divergence (Carney et al., 2012). As Meyer and Ramirez (2000) put it, “standardisation is a manual cut and paste process in which what exactly gets cut and how precisely it gets pasted varies” (p. 128). They have

highlighted the generic themes promoted around the globe, such as decentralisation, marketisatoin, privatisation and accountability, and from this claimed that there is a convergence towards a ‘world model’ (Silova, 2012).

However, world culture theory has triggered considerable criticisms. As Rappleye (2014) argues, the methodological strategy that it adopts sets its own conceptual categories and defines the “parameters” of those categories (p. 22); empirical evidence is then gathered in ways which confirm the convergence envisaged. Carney et al. (2012) note that it creates an ‘imagined world society’ characterised by consensus and homogeneity, but lacks a “deep engagement” with the world in which “one can experience coherence and chaos, ambition and

ambivalence” (p. 385). Comparing to the conflict model, world culture theory fails to recognise the uneven flow from ‘powerful’ western countries to the rest of the world. As highlighted in the culturalist model, global models tend to be resisted, reinterpreted, and indigenised locally, which leads to ‘hybridisation’ and ‘new local particularities’ (Anderson-Levitt, 2003). Hence, Silova (2012) argues that education convergence, as a consequence of ‘world culture’ seems to be “primarily discursive and imagined” (p. 239).

The stance of world culture theory and the position of culturalists and

anthropologists seem to be the opposite, or as Carney, Rappleye and Silova (2012) put it, has reached “an impasse”. Nevertheless, Anderson-Levitt (2003) and

Waldow (2012) both argue that these two approaches are complementary to each other and capture different but valid aspects of social reality. Schriewer (2003) thus conceptualises the ‘global/local nexus’ to examine EPB, which involves the

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global-level interaction and the local context which interprets and recontextualises global forces.

The ‘spatial turn’

EPB has been long examined in the geographical sense – how policy moves across national territorial borders (Lawn & Nóvoa, 2002). Many academics argue that there is a growing ‘spatial turn’ in education, which overlaps and integrates geographic and social space. For example, Carney (2012) coins the term

‘policyscape’ to ‘decentre’ physical landscape and construct a ‘scape’ in which local education phenomena are “constituted mutually and dialectically” and “mediated through transnational bodies and agencies” (p. 350). Wiseman (2010) similarly acknowledges an “intellectual space” which is “bounded by the extent of the legitimated evidence used to support one decision or policy versus another” (p. 18). Dale and Robertson (2012) take the Bologna Process as an example to

illustrate how the global and the national interact relationally across “diverse cultural, political and economic topographies” (p. 35). With the growing influence of large-scale international surveys, Sellar and Lingard (2013a) specifically define the ‘global education policy field’ as a “commensurate space of measurement of the comparative performance of schooling systems” (p. 201).

This section examines the perceived implication of EPB in a broader sense of education ‘space’. This is one of the foci in this study – whether EPB from East Asia in England results in education convergence between these two regions and whether East Asian education systems can be homogeneously portrayed as a ‘world-class’ model reflecting international standards. After examining all the factors and elements involved in EPB, the next section specifically reviews postcolonial theories and conceptions to enunciate ‘East-to-West’ EPB.