Schooling Internationally

Globalisation, Internationalisation and the Future for International Schools

Richard Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136852022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

The number of schools that call themselves international is growing exponentially. In addition many other schools are exploring the concept of international-mindedness and what that might mean in the contemporary world of globalisation. This book sets out to provide a critical perspective on current issues facing 'international schooling', particularly the conflict between 'internationalising' and 'globalising' tendencies and to explore these as they affect teaching and learning, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment as well as to explore the contribution international schools might make to the achievement of global citizenship. It is the first book to critically analyse the ambiguities, tensions and conflicts that face those involved with and researching, international schools and their role in global networking. Issues addressed include:

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• the political economy of international schools (Hugh Lauder and Ceri Brown)

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• their relations to global and local cultures, global markets and civil society (Richard Bates)

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• the role of international schools in global networking (Michael Wylie)

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• the micropolitics of such schools (Richard Caffyn)

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• the growth complexity and challenges facing the International Baccalaureate (Tristan Bunnell)

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• the future demands for and of teachers in international schools (Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson)

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• the nature of teaching and learning in international schools (Helen Fail)

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• the problematic idea of an international curriculum (Jim Cambridge)

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• issues facing international assessment (Richard Bates)

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• the challenge of education for global citizenship (Harriet Marshall).

This provocative book will be essential reading for those teaching in, leading and governing international schools in countries around the world, as well as those who contemplating entering the rapidly expanding world of international schooling.

1
Introduction

Richard Bates

Global education: global industry

The number of identifiable international schools seems to be growing at a very rapid rate, now standing at over 5,000, with the most rapid growth occurring in Asia (especially China), Europe and Africa (Brummitt 2007, 2009). As Macdonald (2006) and Bunnell (2007) suggest, there is now an ‘international school industry’. That there should be such an industry should be no surprise in view of two factors. First, as a result of globalisation, the growth of the middle class in many developing countries has reached the point where it is now sufficient to support the expansion of such an industry from an elite to a more general status. As the World Bank reports:

Globalization is likely to bring benefits to many. By 2030, 1.2 billion people in developing countries – 15 per cent of world population – will belong to the ‘global middle class’, up from 4000 million today. This group will … enjoy access to international travel, purchase automobiles and other advanced consumer durables, attain international levels of education and play a major role in shaping policies and institutions in their own countries and the world economy.

(World Bank 2007, emphasis added)

Second, there is growing recognition that education at all levels is now a global service industry worth billions of dollars. In 2007–8 USA overseas revenue from international education was US$15.54 billion; UK revenue was US$ 6.34 billion; Australian revenue was US$6.9 billion and Canadian revenue US$6.5 billion (Maslen 2009). While much of this revenue concerns tertiary level study an increasing percentage of it applies to pre-tertiary study. Clearly, as Carrie Lips suggested (somewhat tendentiously) to the CATO Institute as far back as 2000, ‘Increasingly entrepreneurs recognise that the public’s dissatisfaction with one-size-fits all schools is more than just fodder for political debates. It is a tremendous business opportunity’ (Lips 2000).

So the context for the development of international schools is provided by a significant growth in middle class demand for education and a recognition, especially by English speaking countries, of the value of the international market for education services and the prospects for its privatisation and commercialisation (see also Dale and Robertson 2002; Robertson 2003; Tamatea 2005; Lauder 2007; Bhanji 2008).

But the context for the expansion of international schooling is not simply numerical. It is also ideological, for this growth in numbers has coincided with the globalisation of neo-liberal ideologies committed to the reorganisation of societies and social relations. In particular, as Robertson argues, neo-liberalism has three main aims:

(1) the redistribution of wealth upward to the ruling elites through new structures of governance, (2) the transformation of education systems so that the production of workers for the economy is the primary mandate and (3) the breaking down of education as a public sector monopoly, opening it up for strategic investment by for-profit firms.

(Robertson 2008: 12)

If such objectives seem a world away from the hopes of Kurt Hahn and his colleagues it seems important to ask just how international schools are located structurally and ideologically in this pattern of globalisation.

Both Sylvester (2005) and Wylie (2008) have attempted to locate international schools within matrices that indicate the diversity of international schools and their educational provision. The dimensions of Sylvester’s matrix range from Politically Sensitive to Politically Neutral on one axis and from Education for International Understanding to Education for World Citizenship on the other. Wylie’s, somewhat more complex, matrix includes Colonialism through Post-colonialism, Global Economy, Global Ideology and Global Civil Society on one axis and school Message Systems (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment) and Mechanisms of Learning and Control (Teachers and ICT) on the other. Both point to the very considerable diversity of purpose and provision in international schools and the difficulty of making generalisations about such diversity.

The purpose of this volume is not to add further to these attempts to organise our understanding of the diversity of international schools and international schooling, but rather to critically address the major issues that shape the contexts and practices of international schools, especially those that arise from tensions between global cultures and local cultures and between the demands of global markets and calls for global citizenship. In particular, we examine the implications for schools in terms of curricula, pedagogies and assessment regimes, and for teachers in terms of their work and careers.

Global cultures and local cultures

Contemporary discussions of globalisation pay considerable attention to issues of culture. On the one hand, theorists such as Fukuyama suggest that the world is converging on a single (Western liberal-democratic-capitalist) culture that presages ‘the end of history’.

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mans’ ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

(Fukuyama 1992: 13).

On the other hand, theorists such as Huntington claim that we are entering a period in which historically divergent cultures will lead to an intensification of conflict and a ‘clash of civilizations’.

[T]he post-Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations.

(Huntington 2002: 27)

So where does this leave us? It would seem that Fukuyama’s claim has already been invalidated by the very history whose end he celebrated. Huntington’s thesis has come under major attack (Sen 2006), although there is a general consensus that there are irreducible and unresolvable differences in values and commitments between cultures. Moreover, there is growing criticism of the idea that a global cultural/moral/political consensus can be achieved through the imposition of particular Utopian visions by military or economic means (Gray 2008).

Recognition of this reality is put forcefully by Gray in his analysis of the history of millenarian movements driven by apocalyptic religion and militarised politics. In order to escape the appalling consequences of such regimes, Gray suggests that we need to recognise that

There is no prospect of a morally homogeneous society, still less a homogenized world. In the future, as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies and secular tyrannies, city-states and many mixed regimes. No one type of government or economy will be accepted everywhere, nor will any single version of civilization be embraced by all of humanity.

(Gray 2008: 294–5)

Moreover, he argues, the existence of a variety of religious commitments needs to be recognised and the attempt to resolve religious differences through the attempt to impose secular solutions abandoned.

It is time the diversity of religions was accepted and the attempt to build a secular monolith abandoned. Accepting that we have moved into a post-secular era does not mean religions can be freed of the restraints that are necessary for civilized coexistence. A central task of government is to work out and enforce a framework whereby they can live together. A framework of this kind cannot be the same for every society, or fixed forever. It embodies a type of tolerance whose goal is not truth but peace.

(Gray 2008: 295)

Whatever position one takes with regard to Gray’s analysis of religion, his advocacy of attempts to reach a modus vivendi across religious differences and his acknowledgement that attempts to impose solutions based upon claims to unique insights into the truth of particular apocalyptic and utopian beliefs have led to extraordinary, increasing and unacceptable violence are surely insights worth pursuing.

But religious differences are not the only source of cultural difference in the modern world. Differences of nationality, ethnicity, gender and class, for instance, constitute ‘publics’ that all have claim to equality of treatment, or as Fraser (2003) puts it, claims to justice involving redistribution, recognition and representation. This does not mean, however, that cultural norms of particular groups are to be allowed free reign, for, as Olssen argues

cultural minorities whose practices are based on deeply illiberal oppressive relations based on gender, or sex, or any other basis of difference, cannot be tolerated and neither can group practices that fail to respect the fundamentally important principles of democratic politics, such as respect for the other, a willingness to negotiate, tolerance, or the institutional basis of deliberation or the rule of law.

(Olssen 2004: 187)

Moreover, as Sen (2006) points out, individuals always have multiple identities that often span cultural as well as other forms of affiliation and membership.¹ In this sense we are all cosmopolitan and we all cross various boundaries.

The attempt to establish a global culture must, therefore, be based on the search for principles underpinning the idea of cosmopolitanism that are neither coercive nor relativist and that search for accommodations between incommensurable ‘truths’ (see also Pieterse 2006; Bates 2008).

This is a particular issue for those organisations that are working to promote curriculum and assessment practices across cultures, for cultural diversity provides the context within which the search for an educationally appropriate notion of global culture is conducted and as a multitude of ‘publics’ emerge and lay claim to particular visions of culture and those educatio...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global networking and the world of international education
• 3 The political economy of international schools and social class formation
• 4 International schools and micropolitics
• 5 Teachers for the international school of the future
• 6 Teaching and learning in international schools
• 7 International curriculum
• 8 Assessment and international schools
• 9 The International Baccalaureate
• 10 Education for global citizenship
• Name index
• Subject index