The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations

Alan S. Canestrari, Bruce A. Marlowe, Alan S. Canestrari, Bruce A. Marlowe

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118931820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Promotes a model of critique for teachers, scholars, and policy makers to challenge established educational practice in a global context.

The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations features international scholars uniquely qualified to examine issues specific to their regions of the world. The Handbook provides readers with an alternative to the traditional texts in the foundations of education by taking aim at the status quo, and by offering frameworks from which teachers and scholars of education can critically evaluate schools and schooling. Throughout, the essays are grounded in a broad historical context and the authors use an international lens to examine current controversies in order to provoke the kinds of discussion crucial for developing a critical stance.

The Handbook is presented in six parts, each beginning with an Introduction to the subject. The sections featured are: Part I. Challenging Foundational Histories and Narratives of Achievement; Part II. Challenging Notions of Normalcy and Dominion; Part III. Challenging the Profession; Part IV. Challenging the Curriculum; Part V. Challenging the Idea of Schooling; and Part VI. Challenging Injustice, Inequity, and Enmity.

The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations offers unique insight into subjects such as:

• Educational reform in India, Pakistan, and China
• The global implications of equity-driven education
• Teacher education and inclusionary practices
• The Global Educational Reform Movement (G.E.R.M.)
• Education and the arts
• Maria Montessori and Loris Malaguzzi
• Legal education in authoritarian Syria

The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations is an important book for current and aspiring educators, scholars, and policy makers.

Part I
Challenging the Foundations Narrative

Has education taken an evolutionary wrong turn? Will the historical, philosophical, and sociological foundations of education that have developed over the centuries continue to provide educators with a sustainable developmental path towards praxis now and in the future? Might there be alternative pathways upon which praxis and reform be built? Should educators challenge the status quo and move purposefully, critically in another direction?

We offer the following readings as a catalyst for discourse about the provocative questions above and others that may be framed, limited only by one’s willingness to discuss, debate and defy conventional dogma.

In “A Story of Hegemony: The Globalization of Western Education,” Canestrari and Foster trace the foundations of education in the West from its ancient Greek and Roman roots to the current wave of global educational reform. Along the way, the authors illuminate the threads of the past that still can be found in the fabric of education today. The editorial essay springs from the perspectives of critical pedagogy that the authors have embraced.

In the second chapter, Kane asks the reader to consider the experience of so‐called “popular education” in Latin America, an approach to teaching and learning based on participatory community development, rather than top‐down directives from state bureaucracies. In the context of his examination of the 40‐year history of this Latin American movement, Kane examines how popular education movements are related to larger social movements and reflects on the potential of these approaches outside this region of the world.

In their discussion of educational reform in Southeast Asia, Hamza and Wadhwa begin with the history of British occupation and the ways in which the residue of English notions of colonial schooling permeate regional conceptions of teaching and learning. And, they use this history as a point of departure to examine how the meaning of access to education has evolved to include the inclusion of girls, ethnic minorities, and children on reservations. Throughout, their concern is with the fundamental issues that are driving the most recent wave of educational reform: the right to an education; the difference between learning and schooling; the purposes of education.

In “Rethinking African Educational Development,” Elsa Wiehe writes about her own experiences within the context of a girls’ scholarship program that was implemented in over 40 African countries. Wiehe investigates the way in which African educational development has been historically portrayed. She notes that in her discussions with the girls, they often describe their experiences using the same narrative employed by the organizations that provide educational opportunities for them.

Figure I.1 Reproduced with permission of Elsa Wiehe.

1
A Story of Hegemony: The Globalization of Western Education

Alan S. Canestrari and Margaret M. Foster

Introduction

Recently, Tumeko, a bright, young, beginning South African teacher was chosen to present at a “youth movement” conference in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As she lamented the re‐emerging xenophobic violence and misunderstanding in Alexandra, her home township outside of Johannesburg, she called upon young people everywhere to re‐direct their energies and voices for peace, understanding, and tolerance. She urged her generation to lead their nations into a future of economic prosperity, political stability, and social justice through participatory governance and development. In post apartheid South Africa, this is no easy task. Tumeko’s generation, like others around the world, remains marginalized, still struggling for adequate basic public education and equality. Tumeko, targeted to attend the LEAP Math and Science School, is one of the high potential students to be selected. Publicly funded, and privately managed, every LEAP performance‐based contract school is partnered with a more privileged school and one other township school. As is often the case, schools like LEAP are also supported by grants from charitable foundations whose mission is to help transform the lives of poor children through a variety of global health and educational initiatives. LEAP, and many programs like it, draws support from a variety of sources in South Africa. It partners with Teach for Africa, Bridge International Academies, and the South African Extraordinary Schools Coalition (SAESC) among others. The SAESC was first formed in 2010 and initially funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, one of the organizations that is investing billions of dollars to help transform the lives of children living in poverty. Tumeko is one of the fortunate who have been granted this opportunity (LEAP, 2015).

What should Tumeko and others make of this? How have she and others become intertwined in the global goals of the LEAP Math and Science Schools, the Dell Foundation, and larger global forces? To what extent do all benefit from the relationship? Might this relationship, and others like it, shed light on the historical impact and aims of Western education? Do the aims offer transcendence and transformation for people and society? Or, are they purposes shaped by oligarchical responses to shifting social, political, and economic developments of the time? Finally, have the aims of Western education always been defined and controlled by dominant forces for the purposes of social, political, economic, and or moral control?

To answer these and related questions, we must investigate the emergence and current domination of neoliberal free‐market ideology and the process of globalization, what Chomsky pointed to as the “defining social, political economic paradigm” of our time (Chomsky, 1999, p. 7). We define globalization as an intentional plan for global interconnectedness. It has evolved as a strategy to control cultural, political, and economic outcomes around the world. Still unfamiliar to most, the term neoliberalism, remains mostly unknown to many of the very merchants that market it. Make no mistake, the power brokers who promote their neoliberal principles hope to develop what is already an evolving grip on the world economy. The executors support its underlying imperatives to reduce the size of government, expand global markets, lower taxes on the wealthy, increase profit, attack collective bargaining, reduce regulations, dismantle social welfare programs, and privatize what we have historically referred to as public education.

The latter twentieth century witnessed increasing alarm, as did Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), that the creation of wealth and the resulting profit is the essence of democracy. A government that pursues anti‐market policies is antidemocratic. In many ways, capitalism has become synonymous with democracy, an idea that evidently has been embraced by political parties in the United States and elsewhere. It is spread by powerful global forces and facilitated by technology and education in order to effect cultural, political, and economic outcomes around the world. For certain, the blurred line between capitalism and democracy has undermined participatory democracy: This is not new, nor has it ever been neutral.

For centuries, the powerful have attempted to exert spheres of influence over the less powerful. The foundational elements of neoliberalism and globalization are similar to the forms of domination of the past. It is marked by a broadening of the laissez‐faire economics and an extension of the colonization and imperialistic models of the past but with a more, subtle, nuanced, but is no less a dangerous physical and ideological model of domination. The teachers, students, and members of communities around the world, including Tumeko’s, are influenced by this educational feature of neoliberalism and globalization to set aside their customs, beliefs, and experiences in order to accept the best way to live, to learn, to teach, and to prosper. Education is offered, as it always has been, as an amelioration, as an instrument of social and economic justice but, it is, of course, defined and operationalized by powerful forces and institutions. It is Western education that has become one of the vehicles that spread this ideology internationally. So, how has Western education, as an instrument of domination, always been one of the tools of empire building? How has it been used as a means of socialization and acculturation of the dominated to take their intended roles for the purposes of cultural reproduction and the common good of the state or empire and preservation of the status quo?

A “great arc of potentialities” exists for the West, as in all cultures, to develop its own unique “personality writ large” that will be transmitted by various instruments of acculturation (Benedict 1959, p. 46). The unfolding history of the West provides us with some clues to the roots of education that have evolved and still underpin contemporary educational goals, policies, and practices. For the West, education has always been an instrument of social change but, in its varied forms, it has also promoted social control and cultural reproduction; a hegemony defined by powerful people, organizations, and institutions. Our intention in this chapter is to illuminate, through the lens of historical moments, the aims of Western education by linking these historical moments with contemporary educational events in order to demonstrate their relevance and connections to modern day education. These threads, woven through the fabric of the very foundations of education provide points that frame the discourse of ideological hegemony, compliance, accountability, national interests, and economic imperatives which have deep historical roots; characteristics of the past that remain relevant to the modern day underpinnings of education.

Ancient Threads

Tracing its foundations to Greek and Roman origins, provides the opportunity to discover some of the structur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Challenging the Foundations Narrative
• Part II: Challenging Notions of Normalcy and Dominion
• Part III: Challenging the Profession
• Part IV: Challenging the Curriculum
• Part V: Challenging the Idea of Schooling
• Part VI: Challenging Injustice, Inequity, and Enmity
• Part VII: PISA Appendices
• Index
• End User License Agreement