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Rethinking Education in the Global Era

HUMAN SOCIETIES, in all their breathtaking differences, face a common task: transferring a range of skills, competencies, values, and sensibilities from one generation to the next. The socialization of the young is culturally defined, highly varied, and constantly evolving. If societies are to succeed, parents and guardians need to enable the next generation to carry on with the work of culture. I argue here that socializing youths to carry on with the work of culture in a global era means preparing them to engage with a world of ever growing diversity and complexity. (1) GLOBALIZATION There are many debates about globalization. The term itself is a bit of a Rorschach test, for it can be quite ambiguous, polymorphous, and mean very different things to different folks. For some it is a panacea; for others, a curse. For some it is radically new; for others, merely old wine in a new bottle. Some aspects of globalization are clear and beyond dispute. Globalization is about flow: mobile capital; the mobile production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; mobile populations; and mobile cultures. The rate of change today is of an order never seen before. (2) In addition to ever more affordable international transportation, the high-octane fuel that gives globalization its speed comes in the form of new information, communication, and media technologies that connect people, ideas, and data across the world instantaneously. These communication innovations, especially high-speed, low-cost connections and the digitalization of data, put a premium on knowledge-intensive work and have made possible the de-territorialization of certain jobs. Jobs that are rules-based and easily broken down into constituent units can now be done from anywhere in the world. For example, data for a tax company based in Boston can be entered in Bangalore, or x-rays for a hospital in Brussels can be read and analyzed in Buenos Aires. And both services can be rendered at a fraction of what they would cost in the home countries. In colloquial American speech, this is known as the "outsourcing" of high-end jobs. (3) Globalization, in John Coatsworth's words, is "what happens when the movement of people, goods, or ideas among countries and regions accelerates." (4) It is relevant to education because it will increasingly define the contexts in which young people growing up today will live, learn, love, and work. In the 21st century, the fortunes, identities, opportunities, and constraints of children and youths growing up in Marrakech, Melbourne, Memphis, Monterrey, Montreal, or Montevideo will be linked to processes in economy, society, and culture that are increasingly global in scope. Globalization will affect schooling worldwide because of a general convergence: by de-territorializing the competencies and sensibilities that are rewarded, it generates powerful centripetal forces on what students the world over need to learn to emerge as productive, engaged, and critical citizens of tomorrow. DEMOGRAPHICS AND CULTURE But globalization should not be reduced to global competition in economy and work; it is also about demographic and cultural transformations. Because of globalization, nearly all regions of the world are deeply involved in growing migratory flows, as countries send emigrants to new destinations, as countries receive large numbers of immigrants, or as countries serve as way stations for these transfers. With global migrations come new demographic realities and cultural formations. The children of immigrants are now the fastest-growing sector of the population of young people in a number of advanced postindustrial nations such as Canada, the United States, Sweden, Germany, and France. But other regions of the world are also experiencing massive population movements because of globalization. The insertion of China into the global economy has led to one of the largest migrations in human history: over 150 million human souls are now migrants from the rural hinterlands of the country into its great coastal cities. …