Contested Terrain of Educational Transfer in the context of Globalization:

A commentary by Mousumi Mukherjee*

 Education Transfer and Globalization

             Educational system transfer has always been a contentious issue but in the context of this global world it has
become all the more complex. It is no longer the tension between one borrowing and one lending country or the hegemonic
imposition of a colonial imperial power on its subjects. Rather it is a complex network of various formal intergovernmental
donor organizations directly exerting their hegemonic influence on domestic educational policies as they construct their own interpretation (mostly based on nomothetic quantitative research) and set of responses to worldwide educational needs.

In a market oriented competitive world unleashed by the forces of globalization, educational borrowing, lending and transfer
have become very complex. Education systems across the world cannot afford to be conventional, rigid and impervious to
change. It has to keep abreast of the latest developments in various fields and be capable of creating, absorbing and
transacting neo-technology and information systems that are sweeping across the countries of the world. There has also to
be a paradigm shift in the contents of education with substantial emphasis on the productivity aspect of the curriculum.
It would also call for adequate emphasis on research and development.

This surely complicates our understanding of foreign influences in education. Theories of educational transfer have been
mostly centered on relations between nation- states. But in a “global society” (as a society without borders) in which no one
is outside, pre-existing traditions cannot escape having contact with “the other”, and with alternative ways of life. In such
context, significant social relations exist which neither are between nor outside states, “but simply crosscut state divisions”. Therefore, in order to analyze foreign influence in education a wider concept of space is needed. Of course current theories
of foreign influences in education should still consider the state as a fundamental actor. However such theories should also
be able to take into account other supra-national actors in the educational field, such as international agencies and regional
blocks, and also sub-national actors such as local authorities and institutions.

 Contested Terrain

Given the array of theoretical and epistemological perspectives presented in the general social science literature on
 ‘globalization’, it should be possible not only to assess the nature and dimensions of the globalization, but also what it might
 mean to the field of education. Education, as a service industry, is part of the formal globalization process under the umbrella
 of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).  There is the distinct possibility that this might force countries with
quite different academic needs and resources to conform to structures inevitably designed to serve the interest of the most
powerful academic systems and corporate educational providers… breeding inequality and dependence.  Further,
“globalization... can lead to unregulated and poor quality higher education, with the world wide marketing of fraudulent degrees
 or other so-called higher education credentials…”(World Bank’s Task Force, 2000). Philip Jones points out in his revealing
study of the World Bank, “It is now possible to speak of an international system of influence powerful enough to bind up the educational destinies of the world’s peoples. If such a network of global influence limits the discretion of peoples to shape
their own educational destinies and imposes its own solution to the material-moral dilemma facing educational policy, then it
is worthy of investigation.”

Reviewing the mounting literature on globalization tells us that, a complex body of international nongovernmental actors and
new nongovernmental organizations (NGO) are emerging as “transnational advocacy networks” (TANs) or “transnational social movements” (TSMs) engaged in activism that target global-level-institutions like the World Bank, WTO, IMF, UNESCO etc. In
 the ethically inspired literature these TANs and TSMs are regarded as building blocks of a “global civil society”, with the
power to influence, and perhaps democratize, the structure of world politics, both through their increasing influence within
existing international institutions and through their capacity to use this influence to leverage change in individual nation-states. Working without significant financial or human resources, these new nongovernmental actors use telecommunications and transportation technologies to build networks and generate international public interest in an issue. But the question that
arises here is how successful are they? Based on the literature on social movements and Gramscian theories of civil society,
 one key measure of contention will be the extent to which initiatives are autonomous and provide forceful alternatives to the
current structure of world order. Another measure might be the extent to which transnational initiatives have a self-reflexive
strategy that targets changing global decision-making structures and supporting local level struggles.

There has been a qualitatively different wave of transnational nongovernmental advocacy initiatives in education, especially
around the idea of “education for all”. They explore it in detail by comparing nongovernmental participation in international
educational forums over time, by looking more closely at the recent NGO-led “Global Campaign for Education”, and by
analyzing nongovernmental activism at the most recent international meeting on education, the World Education Forum,
which was held in April 2000 in Dakar, Senegal, as a 10 year follow-up to the World Conference on Education for All WCEFA
 at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990. The Global Campaign has shown that it has much to contribute to the development of civility
and democracy at the international level, and it has introduced a potentially contentious reframing of global educational needs
. But it is not without its limitations and tensions. The dismal result of global efforts to implement “education for all” without understanding the socio-cultural context of the specific country in question can be seen, if we take into consideration a
particular case study.

The challenge

            Educating a huge mass of population in a developing country like India with over 100 million primary school age children
 and a lot more illiterate adults poses a lot of practical problems and challenges in terms of resources. But there are more
serious socio-cultural reasons responsible for the dismal state of primary education in India. The Public Report on Basic
Education in India by the PROBE team (1999) explores the necessity and enormity of the task of achieving widespread
primary education as well as the challenge of achieving “Education for All” in India, taking into consideration the various
socio-cultural complexities involved in implementing EFA. For instance, rather than giving a simplistic reason regarding the
lack of interest in girls’ education and the challenge of regular school attendance for students from poor families, the PROBE
 team delves deeply into the problem and analyses the complex chain of circumstances which creates this problem. They
combine carefully collected statistical data with intense qualitative field research in the form of interviews with people in village
s to give a more or less authentic picture of the problem. This kind of work illustrates the misleading consequences of
simplistic characterizations of complex human behavior for global educational policy. In the past it has lead to and in the
future it will lead to great waste of resources. The formulation of a global education policy like EFA can be based on universal
 human rights but its successful execution needs careful attention paid to the specific context and the invention of new
methods (which address the needs of the specific socio-cultural, political and economic context) to implement them.

*Mousumi Mukherjee
The Graduate School
Loyola University Chicago
6525 N Sheridan Road
Chicago, Illinois 60626
mmukher@luc.edu