1. Globalization and education
critical perspectives
Nicholas C. Burbules
& Carlos Alberto Torres (ed.)
Chapters 12 and 13
Presented by Seme and Wencke
January 23rd 2012

2. Globalisation and the New
Social Movements:
Chapter 13:
Lessons for Critical Theory and Pedagogy
By Douglas Kellner
by Douglas Kellner

3. The article sorts out some of the dominant uses of the term globalisation and its
challenges for critical pedagogy and radical democratic politics.
• Globalization in Use: Context, purpose and people
against Purpose and effects.
• Theorist urged that the world is organized by
expanding globalization which strengthen the
dominance of the world capitalist economic system
through transnational corporations and organisations
creating a global culture.

4. Meaning of Globalisation.
• Westernization of the world Vs cover for Ascendency of
Capitalism
• Generation of increasing homogeneity Vs production of
diversity and heterogeneity
• Business: strategy for increasing corporate profits and
power
• Government: deployed to promote increase in state power
• NGOs: lever to produce positive social goods like
democratisation or empowering of disempowered groups
through new technology and media.

5. “…….While globalisation can significantly
increases the power of big corporations and big
governments, it can also empower groups and
individuals who were previously left out of the
democratic dialogue and terrain of political
struggle…….”

6. Globalisation: Reality or a Paint?
 There is no such thing as “globalization” as per
see other than being a theoretical construct used
as a cover for heterogeneity of processes such as:
• discourse of “imperialism, (modernist)”
(negative, critical)
• ideological conceptions of “modernization, (Post-
Modernist)”(positive, legitimating)
thus globalisation displaces the discourses of
imperialism(bad) and modernization(good)

7. Agitators and Critics of
Globalisation
• economic and social • devastating destruction
progress, of local traditions
• the continued
• technological innovation, subordination of poorer
nations and regions by
• more diverse products richer ones
and services
• environmental
• a cornucopia of info. and destruction
growing cultural freedom • homogenization/standa
rdization of culture and
• higher standard of living everyday life.

8. Resistance to Globalisation
Imperialism and Modernisation
Education
New technology
Industrialisation
GLOBALISATION culture Modernisation
Commodification
of education
New Technologies and social Business forces in
education
movements

9. Conclusion.

10. Chapter 12:
A Situated Perspective on Cultural
Globalization
By Allan Luke and Carmen Luke

11. A situated account of cultural
globalization
• in Southeast Asia, and Thailand in particular

12. The offical Thai translation of
globalization:
logapiwatanam = the Thai world
combined with
apiwatana = to spread, to reach, to
win over
”the expansion of the world, spread
around the world, and change and
effect all over the world”

13. Educational policy reform
• Australian scolars: contracted to deliver
curriculum on Thai terms
• Thailand tertiery education sector
• Goal: a pedagogy and curriculum, purpuse-
built for problematizing globalization and New
Times
• Locally driven curriculum development,
instructional innovation, institutional
reorganization

14. The educatinal issues of ”New Times”
• Competing discourses about the role of
education in ”development”
• Globalized marketplace of educational
partners
• Belendings of Indigenous/Chinese/Khmer
cultures: Thai cultures are hybrids; products of
years of cultural change and exchange

16. Thailand never colonized
• Do not ’other’ us:
• The ”subaltern” is a western intellectual
construct and is not an identity Asian cultures
identify with
• Are not victims without agency

17. Wanted: Performance indicators, quality
assurance, school-based management=
technocratic, neliberal educational agenda
begun with reviewing and distributing key
Western work on globalization. This is how the
’West’ is theorizing ’you’, and then moving
toward the critique of those positions,
reworking those texts with students’ local
analyses of the actual discourses, practices,
and effects of globalization on Thai life.” p.295

18. Conclusion

19. Thailand’s Education Policy
• In lieu of the 1997 Constitution and the 1999 Education Act,
the Government is determined to launch educational reforms
with the aim of developing Thailand into a knowledge-based
society, which is a pre-requisite for becoming a knowledge-
based economy. The reforms will provide the Thai public with
equal access to life-long education and training, enabling
them to acquire knowledge and capital to generate income
and to eventually pull the country out of the economic and
social crisis. Towards this end, the Government will abide by
the principle that "Education Builds the Nation, Empowers the
Individual and Generates Employment"