Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135172770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education cannot be understood today without recognizing that nearly all educational policies and practices are strongly influenced by an increasingly integrated international economy. Reforms in one country have significant effects in others, just as immigration and population tides from one area to another have tremendous impacts on what counts as official knowledge and responsive and effective education. But what are the realities of these global crises that so many people are experiencing and how do their effects on education resonate throughout the world?

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education looks into the ways we understand globalization and education by getting specific about what committed educators can do to counter the relations of dominance and subordination around the world. From some of the world's leading critical educators and activists, this timely new collection provides thorough and detailed analyses of four specific centers of global crisis: the United States, Japan, Israel/Palestine, and Mexico. Each chapter engages in a powerful and critical analysis of what exactly is occurring in these regions and counters with an equally compelling critical portrayal of the educational work being done to interrupt global dominance and subordination. Without settling for vague ideas or romantic slogans of hope, Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education offers real, concrete examples and strategies that will contribute to ongoing movements and counter-hegemonic struggles already active in education today.

CHAPTER 1
Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education

MICHAEL W. APPLE

Globalizing Logics

If one were to name an issue that has come to be found near the top of the list of crucial topics within the critical education literature, it would be globalization. It is a word with extraordinary currency. This is the case not only because of trendiness. Exactly the opposite is the case. It has become ever more clear that education cannot be understood without recognizing that nearly all educational policies and practices are strongly influenced by an increasingly integrated international economy that is subject to severe crises, that reforms and crises in one country have significant effects in others, that the immigration and population flows from one nation or area to another have tremendous impacts on what counts as official knowledge and what counts as a responsive and effective education, and the list could continue for quite a while (see Burbules & Torres, 2009; Dale & Robertson, 2009; Peters, 2005; Rhoads & Torres, 2006). Indeed, as I show in Educating the “Right” Way (Apple, 2006) and The State and the Politics of Knowledge (Apple et al., 2003), all of these social and ideological dynamics and many more are now fundamentally restructuring what education does, how it is controlled, and who benefits from it throughout the world.

While localities and national systems inflect the processes of globalization differently and struggles are generated, convergences and homogenization of educational forms and modalities, driven by what de Santos (2003) calls “monocultural logics,” are very clearly evident within and between settings. These logics are very visible in current education policies which privilege choice, competition, performance management and individual responsibility and risk management, and in a series of attacks on the cultural gains made by dispossessed groups (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2010). Neoliberal, neoconservative and managerial impulses can be found throughout the world, cutting across both geographical boundaries and even economic systems. This points to the important “spatial” aspects of globalization. Policies are “borrowed” and “travel” across borders in such a way that these neoliberal, neoconservative, and managerial impulses are extended throughout the world, and alternative or oppositional forms and practices are marginalized or attacked (Gulson & Symes, 2007, p. 9).

The insight that stands behind some of the focus on globalization in general can perhaps best be summarized in the words of a character in a novel about the effects of the British Empire (Rushdie, 1981). If I may be permitted to paraphrase what he says, “The problem with the English is that they don’t understand that their history constantly occurs outside their borders.” We could easily substitute words such as “Americans” and others for “English.”

There is a growing literature on globalization and education. This is undoubtedly important and a significant portion of this literature has provided us with powerful understandings of the realities and histories of empire and postcolonialism(s), the interconnected flows of capital, populations, knowledge, and differential power, and the ways in which thinking about the local requires that we simultaneously think about the global.¹ But as I will argue in the next section of this chapter, a good deal of it does not go far enough into the realities of the global crises that so many people are experiencing or it assumes that the crises and their effects on education are the same throughout the world. Indeed, the concept of globalization itself needs to be historicized and seen as partly hegemonic itself, since at times its use fails to ground itself in “the asymmetries of power between nations and colonial and neocolonial histories, which see differential national effects of neoliberal globalization” (Lingard, 2007, p. 239).

This is not only analytically and empirically problematic, but it may also cause us to miss the possible roles that critical education and mobilizations around it can play in mediating and challenging the differential benefits that the crises are producing in many different locations. Any discussion of these issues needs to be grounded in the complex realities of various nations and regions and of the realities of the social, cultural, and educational movements and institutions of these nations and regions. Doing less than that means that we all too often simply throw slogans at problems rather than facing the hard realities of what needs to be done—and what is being done now.

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education seeks to intervene into the ways we understand all this by getting more specific. And it seeks to intervene into the just as serious issue of what committed educators and other cultural activists can do to counter the relations of dominance and subordination that are currently having such tragic effects in so many countries.

Four specific areas have been selected: the United States, Japan, Israel/Palestine, and Mexico. Each has become a center of global crisis and each has shown the effects of neoconservative and neoliberal transformations and how identifiable people are being oppressed and marginalized. But as I noted earlier, the book is not content to simply critically analyze the crises and their effects in education, although that is indeed important. We also want to focus specifically on the ways in which critical and democratic educational and social movements and activists have sought to fight back.

Let me now say more about the areas and the reasons behind their choice.

1. The first case to be examined is the United States and the ways in which global economic and ideological forces have both led to fundamental changes in our definitions of important knowledge, literacy practices, and values in education and have provided spaces where serious counter-hegemonic educational work can be and is being done.

2. The second is Japan and the current reconstruction of educational policies and practices so that they support conservative nationalist impulses and favor the expressed needs of capital to impose neoliberal versions of marketization and weaker public power. Much of this set of neoliberal and neoconservative “reforms” has actually been borrowed from the United States and England. Yet these reforms have also opened up spaces for the rebirth of critically democratic movements around education.

3. The third example is Israel/Palestine with its status as a fault line of international conflicts and the struggles both over economic, political, and cultural autonomy and over a process of schooling that represents the possibility of diverse communities participating in addressing a just and shared solution to the social, cultural, and national conflicts in that region.

4. The fourth example is Mexico and the continuing attempts by social movements, especially by women’s communities, to build community-based popular education at a local level that would counter the growing encroachment of neoliberal policies at all levels of society throughout Latin America. The growth of such popular education movements has been striking. They provide significant insights into what can be done.

These examples have been chosen for specific reasons. Many books on globalization and its influences on education are surveys of the general nature of the effects. Or they attempt to deal with a very large number of places, thereby risking making overly general statements about what is happening in each of these places and making all too general statements about what is possible to achieve to interrupt dominant power relations inside and outside of education. Many of these have been and are valuable books, but they do not push us far enough in terms of how these crises actually play out on the ground. And, even more importantly, they often do not go into enough detail on contradictory dynamics that may be emerging, on what can be done, and on what is actually now being done in education to act back against dominant neoliberal and neoconservative policies and practices. The reader, hence, is left with romantic hope perhaps, but with few concrete examples and strategies that may make a lasting difference.

I do not want to overstate these points, however. There are powerful examples that specify more critical moments and processes, of course, with the work of both Luis Armando Gandin on the justly well-known reforms in Porto Alegre, Brazil (see, e.g., Apple et al., 2003; Gandin, 2006) and Mario Novelli’s discussion of the ways in which trade union activism led to critical learning and new identities in Columbia (Novelli, 2007) being among the more important. But the general point still remains.

These are not inconsequential issues, for they speak to unstated imperial assumptions that need to be challenged. One of the serious problems of learning from the experiences that have been tried outside of ones’ home, so to speak, is that the all too usual brief treatments require authors to use considerable space providing relevant background information before getting to the core of the analyses. Constraints such as these and others often leave us with less than sufficient space to critically analyze both the situation and how it might be interrupted. This forces many critical authors to omit some of the key contextual information or, worse, to compromise on the depth and quality of our analyses. By allowing each analysis included in this volume more space than normally given in conventional books (and even in critically oriented journals), the volume challenges an unspoken mechanism in English-language publishing in critical education, one that at times has served to exclude the kinds of nuanced and careful treatments of educational struggles in other parts of the world. In this pattern, instead of acting to interrupt dominance, the crucial process of learning about those places where “our history occurred, and still occurs, outside our borders” is then itself interrupted (see Takayama, 2009). This is more than a little unfortunate.

Taking these challenges seriously is the task of Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education. Each of the four examples engages in a powerful and detailed critical analysis of what is happening in these varied areas and provides an equally compelling critical portrayal of the educational work that is being and can be done to interrupt dominance in a time of neoliberal and neoconservative hegemony.

The analysis of the United States provides an example of an increasingly diverse society, one where major economic changes and the realities of multiculturalism, “race,” “diaspora,” and immigration play crucial roles, as does the fact that even with such policies as “No Child Left Behind,” there is relatively weak central governmental control over education. Economic transformations, the creation of both paid and casualized and often racialized labor markets that are increasingly unequal, demands for new worker identities and skills—and all of this in a time of severe economic crisis—are having profound effects. The emerging structures of dominance and the role of movements around and inside education in partly interrupting these realities can give us crucial elements of how we might think about similar movements in other sites throughout the world—always remembering, of course, that we need to be very cautious of seeing the movements and struggles in other sites through taken-for-granted “parochial eyes” that center the Northern and Western gaze (Appadurai, 1996; Lingard, 2007).

Japan provides a different kind of example. Economic crisis, growing neoconservative and ultra-nationalist tendencies, strong central governmental control over education, and a somewhat more homogeneous society not only mean that dominance will be embodied in different ways (see, e.g., Nozaki, 2008). All of this also makes for a different set of movements and possibilities of counter-hegemonic challenges in education, possibilities that can provide important lessons on what can be done in those places where there is strong state control over education. But here, we do not wish to be romantic. As many of these chapters will show, the fact that there are possibilities does not at all guarantee that these possibilities can be acted upon; nor does it guarantee that they will last. Lasting transformations are not automatic. They require the formation of organized movements both nationally and internationally to support them against what will undoubtedly be concerted and equally organized attacks on demands for person rights in all of our institutions, including educational institutions.

In Israel/Palestine, the fault lines are very visible—and even more visible given the recent invasion of Gaza by Israeli armed forces. A history of severe tensions, occupation, expulsion, economic crises, being at the center of international disputes as well as national ones, and an educational system that is not only differentially based on one’s ethnic, religious, and national identity but is also justifiably seen as a symbol of domination by many people—all of this creates even more difficult conditions for critically democratic educational work. But there are partial interruptions at the level of policy and practice there as well. If it is possible to build more critic...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education
• CHAPTER 2 New Literacies and New Rebellions in the Global Age
• CHAPTER 3 From the Rightist “Coup” to the New Beginning of Progressive Politics in Japanese Education1
• CHAPTER 4 Israel/Palestine, Unequal Power, and Movements for Democratic Education*
• CHAPTER 5 Popular Education Confronts Neoliberalism in the Public Sphere
• CHAPTER 6 Afterword on Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education
• Author Biographies
• Index