Critical Considerations about the Globalization of Education Systems

What is it about?

In this article, we have a dialogue about the globalization of education systems with three outstanding scholars in the field of curriculum history: Jesús Romero, Inés Dussel and Thomas S. Popkewitz. This article was published in an special issue called 'Knowledge, power and globalization'. The article focuses on an increasingly prominent topic in the era of globalization and total capitalism, namely the progressive globalization of the ubiquitous school reason born at the dawn of Western modernity.

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Why is it important?

The logic of schooling is often presented as a given, natural and incontrovertible truth, overlooking that it has a complex history and development. Beyond appearances, the current isomorphism of national education systems is due to the influence of a powerful international techno-bureaucracy dedicated to design, advice and assess educational policies. Despite this, however, irreducible local differences and resistances remain. The historical and comparative research of educational systems has favored the appearance of a synoptic and interactive view between the global and the local scale. In the field of historiography, the so-called Global History has been a tentative and paradoxical response to the need to understand the world as an integrated whole. In the field of school and curriculum, the study of national education systems embedded in a framework of international relations has become an object of study increasingly cultivated as a consequence of educational policies that are progressively more elaborated and governed by transnational organizations. However, we believe that the prevailing discourse about a universal history as a progressive unitary process and as a deployment of the West is incompatible with critical thinking. In fact, it is a legacy of the discredited diffusionist paradigm, which is still hegemonic among current educational administrations and which perpetuates a Euro-American view of universal history.