Globalisation and education 46

As mentioned earlier, education is becoming tied to national economic necessities – or the necessities of competition – due to globalisation. Education is increasingly a site of production and reproduction in connection with the knowledge economy (Ball, Goodson and Maguire, 2007), with its priorities being reorganised to make them more competitive (Dale, 2007). Seller and Lingard (2013) state that globalisation is bringing about ‘economisation of education’ and ‘educationalisation’ of economic policy (Takayama, 2013: 540). Among the globalisation influences on education that are associated with neoliberalism, as suggested by Ball (1998: 123), are (1) ideologies of the market; (2) new institutional economics using devolution, targets and incentives combined; (3) performativity, i.e. a steering mechanism which is indirect steering or steering from a distance, which replaces intervention and prescription with target settings, accountability and comparison; and (4) new managerialism involving the insertion of theories or techniques of business management, and the cult of

excellence into public sector institutions, emphasising quality, being close to the customer, and the value of innovation. In a similar vein, Carter and O’Neill (1995, cited in Ball, 1998: 122) have identified five elements that bring about a shift in the relationship between education, government and politics in Western post-industralised countries. These are: (1) tightening the connection between schooling, employment, productivity and trade to stregthen the national economy; (2) improving student outcomes in employment-related skills and competencies; (3) having more direct control over curriculum content and assessment; (4) diminishing the costs of education for the government; and (5) augmenting community input to education by closer involvement in school decision-making and market choice pressure.

3.3.3.1  Globalisation  of  education  values  and  ideas    

While globalisation is a heterogenous process, with regard to education, there is convergence of its policies between countries with very different political and social welfare histories, something that can be called ‘a global education policy’ – ‘a generic set of concepts, language and practices that is recognisable in various forms and is for sale’ (Ball, 2012: 115). Suggesting a global trend toward a convergence in thinking about educational values, Rizvi and Lingard (2010) observe that policymakers and experts coming from different social, political and economic traditions frequently put forward similar diagnoses of and solutions to the problems facing education systems, rooted in neoliberal orientations, such as privatisation. In education policy discourses, focus has shifted from democracy and equality to efficiency and accountability, with a stronger emphasis on human capital formation, required by the building of the knowledge economy. This has not involved the abandonment of the values of democracy and equality, but rather, their rearticulation and subordination to dominant economic concerns. Similarly, David Labaree (2003) states that education has traditionally involved struggle over three competing values: democratic equality, social mobility and social efficiency. Labaree maintains that these are not mutually exclusive, and are interpreted differently by different countries. In addition, one has been dominant over the others over the course of history; however, the social efficiency view of education seems increasingly prominent in recent years.

Globalisation has given rise to a new human capital theory that entails a reconceptualisation of the very purposes of education. This theory responds to the requirements of the global economy as well as to the ‘competitive advantage of individuals, corporations and nations within the transational context’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 80). Increasingly, performance is connected to people’s knowledge base, level of skills, learning capabilities and cultural adaptability, which in turn call for education and training policy frameworks that better align with the evolving nature of economic activity. Requirements to produce different kinds of persons – lifelong learners who are flexible, adaptable, mobile, cosmopolitan, interculturally confident and competent, being able to work creatively with knowledge (OECD, 1996) – are

greater than ever. Education is strongly linked to the instrumental purposes of human capital development and economic self-maximisation (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 81) while its relationship with ethical and cultural issues continues to exist but ‘within the broader neoliberal social imaginary’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 81).

Children as human capital in the making and early education as a smart investment strategy has also entered the discourse in early childhood education and care. OECD’s advocacy brief entitled Investing in High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)17 highlights that ‘ECEC has significant economic and social payoffs’ as the very first rationale. It reads: ‘Why talk about ECEC as an investment? An investment is simply a way of looking at costs and benefits of different periods of time. So if you spend a dollar, euro or yen today on ECEC, what benefits can you expect this spending to genrate in future years? Benefits can be financial benefits or non-monetary ‘in-kind’ benefits’ (p. 1). The ‘Heckman curve’, showing that the greatest investment returns are to be generated in preschool years, is presented in this OECD document as well as in numerous advocacy materials published by national and international entities. Penn (2011) argues that the recent narrative about early childhood development by major international NGOs, in particular the World Bank, is derived from human capital theory which focuses on economic productivity, and emphasises a neoliberal approach of enabling individual success and striving. Science is often protrayed as the most important and infalliable base for promoting and developing early childhood programmes in international advocacy literature, such as the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Development (2013), and UNICEF’s Building Better Brains (2014). These kinds of discourse are also found in national policy statements (Moss, 2015). These claims, influenced by neoliberal orientations, have been critiqued by authors, such as Penn (2002), Dahlberg and Moss (2008) and Moss (2015), as uncritical, one-dimensional, linear, instrumental and technical in nature, employing a reductionist logic that cannot embrace complexity and context.

Furthermore, globalisation is supporting a particular notion of lifelong learning which is useful for increasing economic efficiency of individuals and societies and which serves the knowledge economy. To thrive in the global economy, it is considered vital to make learning continuous and not restricted to formal learning, since the creation of wealth - of individuals, corporations and nations - is viewed proportionate to their capacity to learn and share innovation (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). Thus, the contemporary notion of lifelong learning is linked to different claims about the knowledge economy, located within ‘the neoliberal imaginary of globalisation’ (ibid: 82). However, the idea of lifelong learning is not new. It first emerged in the 18th century, and has been elaborated by thinkers, such as John Dewey and Paulo Freire, as well as by the special commissions set up by UNESCO that produced the Faure report on lifelong education (1972) and the Delors report (1996) conceptualising

learning throughout life. While embodying different approaches, each assumed that education should be continuous if it is to serve broader social purposes. Nevertheless, the recent ideas of lifelong learning embrace a systematic offering of learning pathways from early childhood. They are predicated on the assumptions of social efficiency, considered largely in terms of economic efficiency, and linked to the production of ‘self-responsibilizing’ individuals (Rose 1999, cited in Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 85). Moreover, they are deemed necessary as a way of establishing an informed and self-reflective community, but also ‘as an investment with which individuals, corporations and nations can maximize their economic advantage’ (ibid: 86).

3.3.3.2.  Globalisation  of  education  governance  

The above-mentioned education values and ideas are transferred through several mechanisms of globalisation. Dale (2007) suggests five such mechanisms, including dissemination, standarisation, harmonisation, installing interdependence, and imposition (pp. 76-80). As part of globalisation effects, these mechanisms are characterised by the locus of viability being outside of nation states, the use of less direct forms of power, being externally initiated and extending to policy goals as well as policy processess. Intergovernmental organisations play an important role in shaping particular discourses on education, such as that of ‘imperatives of the global economy’ for education, and have become major sites for the organisation of knowledge about education (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 79). Exploration, exchange, promotion and steering of particular values and ideas across national borders have been facilitated by the development of ICTs (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010).

Globalisation has thus brought about an expansion of policy space, diminished power of nation states, and multiplication of actors with different levels of power. The locus of policymaking has become unclear, and policymaking processes are increasingly exposed to power games in an expanded field of influence over policy (Ball, 2012: 8). Education is more open to outside control (Levin, 1998); and particularly, small and fragile states see their capacity to steer their education system diminishing. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) state: ‘Policies are developed, enacted and evaluated in various global networks from where their authority is now aptly derived’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 338). Therefore, with globalisation, there is the emergence of a conception of the globe as a single space: there is a move from government to ‘governance’ operating with multiple actors, but with international organisations (e.g. OECD, EU), multinational coroprations and think tanks increasingly playing a role in defining education policy (Lingard et al., 2013).

For example, OECD’s PISA is functioning as a regulatory mechanism of national education systems, offering universal solutions, i.e. ‘best practices’, generated out of PISA’s data analysis (Lingard, et al., 2013). Starting with 45 countries and economies in its first round, the

number of participating countries and economies increased to 65 in the 2012 round.18 PISA increasingly has the power to ‘induce changes in how nations and states organise public education, to what ends, and in what spirit – and whether to do so according to emergent international standards’ (Meyer and Benavot, 2013: 7). The claim that PISA assesses the quality of a nation’s school system and generates politically and ideologically neutral and disinterested data is contested. Concerned with PISA’s dominance in the global educational discourse, critics see a risk of producing an ‘unprecedented process of worldwide educational standarisation for the sake of hitching schools more tightly to the bandwagon of economic efficiency, while sacrificing their role of preparing students for independent thinking and civic participation’ (Meyer and Benavot, 2013: 7).

Ball (2003) speaks of ‘policy technologies’ that constitute a politically attractive alternative to the state-centred, public welfare tradition of educational provision. These technologies are: (1) the market, (2) managerialism, and (3) performativity. Performativity can in fact be considered as a technology, a culture or a mode of regulation that ‘replaces intervention and prescription with target setting, accountability and comparison’ (Ball, 2003: 215-6). Similarly, Levin (2007) suggests three common elements in many reform packages: (1) decentralising authority to schools and creating school or parent councils to share that authority, (2) various market-like mechanisms, and (3) increased use of achievement testing and publication of the results, together with more centralised curriculum (Levin, 2007: 50). Increasingly dominant is the role of numbers and statistics in such technologies through which surveillance can be exercised in the name of improvements in quality and efficiency (Ball, 2012: 98).

However, the nation state is still a valid unit of analysis, and exerts influence over national policy development and implementation (Ball, 2012). While globalisation constitutes a powerful process, it does not lead to the disappearance of national state policies. It is difficult for nation states to avoid global pressures to change their education policies and systems in specific directions; but they are able to adjust and transform them to fit national purposes and opportunities. The influences of globalisation on nation states are far from uniform, and local processes are also very important (Van Zanten, 2002: 97). As evidenced in a number of studies, globalisation ‘does not inevitably override or remove existing national peculiarities’ (Dale, 2007: 68) and leaves the possibility for nation states to interpret and act differently from others. It should also be noted that the same international organisations may provide advice based on distinct philosophical orientations on the same issue, as shown, for example, in the comparison between the work of Starting Strong I and II and the work on Babies and Bosses, produced by different divisions of OECD (Mahon, 2005).