Globalizing Education for Work

Comparative Perspectives on Gender and the New Economy

Richard D. Lakes, Patricia A. Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135611040
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

This book explores how changes in the new world economy are affecting the education of male and female workers. Authors from Australia, Africa, Brazil, Europe, North America, and South Korea use methodologies--such as literature reviews, case studies, legislative analysis, evaluations of model delivery systems, and demographic profiles--to examine the current efforts of a number of nations around the world to transform vocational education and training (VET) programs into gender equitable institutions where female students are able to obtain skills necessary for successful and economically viable lives.

The cross-national perspectives in this volume illuminate the meaning of VET equity theory and practice in the new economy. Gender equity in education is constructed differently from place to place depending on a variety of factors, including economic development and cultural traditions. Starting from this understanding that gender and culture are multifaceted, historically situated, and constructed around dominant economic and institutional structures, class identities, and social positions, as well as discursive practices, the book addresses central questions, such as:
*What roles do schools play in the global economy?
*Is there a parallel between an increasingly globalized economy and a viable universal concept of education for work?
*What is the effect of a nation's financial condition, political system, and global economic posture on its training policies?
*Are educational equity issues heightened or submerged in the new economy?

The comparative perspective helps readers to more clearly analyze both tensions that arise as capitalist changes in the new economy are contested, resisted, or accommodated--and the impact upon education. In the Afterword, the editors identify overarching themes emerging from the volume and illuminate various comparative perspectives on gender and the new economy.

Globalizing Education for Work: Comparative Perspectives on Gender and the New Economy brings together important information and analysis for researchers, students, and teachers in education, women's studies, and sociology; for vocational education and training professionals; and for policymakers and policy analysts in governmental and nongovernmental organizations. It is well suited as a text for a range of graduate courses in the fields of comparative and international education, politics of education, vocational educational policy, gender and education, and sociology of education.

1
Globalizing Education for Work: An Introduction

Richard D.Lakes and Patricia A.Carter
Georgia State University

The impact of globalization on women presents policy analysts with a new set of problems pertaining to equity and education. Vocational education and training (VET) once offered young people and adults (notably males) a set of craft and production skills readily useful for local commerce and regional industry that is becoming increasingly irrelevant today. The changes are evidenced by rapid capitalization in developing countries, First World deindustrialization, reduction in union memberships, decline in regulatory mechanisms for worker health and safety, and an accompanying shift to lower-paying service employment (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996). Grupta (2001) explained:

Globalization is to the world what marriage used to be for women: inevitable and transformative. And like marriage, globalization and the concurrent spread of new technologies affect women differently than men—particularly in the developing world, (p. 95)

Many would argue that the recent economic transformation is not necessarily good for women.

This volume takes a critical look at the relationship between globalization and women as it relates to education for work. We use cross-national perspectives to illuminate the meaning of VET equity theory and practice in the global economy, and explore the current use of VET as a means of achieving gender equitable work opportunity. We recognize that gender equity in education and government policy is constructed differently from place to place, dependent upon a variety of factors including economic development within nation-states and geographic regions.

Thus we have chosen to present specific case studies of countries with economies ranging from Ethiopia (chap. 6), an impoverished country that has not yet been positioned to benefit from globalization, to South Korea (chap. 5), which achieved unprecedented growth in the 1980s and 1990s due to its tie to the global export market. Brazil (chap. 4) provides a stark contrast to South Korea. Unable to repay debts incurred in an effort to modernize its economy so it could compete in the global marketplace Brazil sinks further and further into a dismal financial malaise.

While older European countries like Germany (chap. 10) and Norway (chap. 7) share a common social democratic perspective they face significantly different economic problems. Once the uncontested economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany’s annexation of the former soviet German Democratic Republic, places the unified country in the position of reevaluating its wide but increasingly expensive social welfare network. Norway, one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of gross domestic product, benefits from a relatively stable economy buffered by the continuing world demand for its oil, agricultural and fishing production. Although Australia (chap. 9) and Canada (chap, 8) retain similarly strong economic positions they remained tied to the whims of the United States, which continues to hold the advantage as the principal player in the world economy.

WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTION TO NATIONAL ECONOMIES

In the search for cheap labor worldwide, investing in women oifers high economic gains offset by low investments in human capital. Accordingly, the “UN and other global estimates show women providing two-thirds of the hours of work, earning one-tenth of the world’s income, and possessing less than one-hundredth of the world’s wealth” (Cockcroft, 1998, p. 42). Cockcroft called women “super-exploitable,” particularly in free-trade zones such as maquiladoras on the Mexican border (but elsewhere as well), who deliver low-skills, often subcontracted piecework in the garment trades, without benefit of social security, unionization, health and retirement plans, and the like. The modern version of sweatshop labor, Cockcroft (1998) claimed, repeats two very important patriarchal and capitalistic assumptions. Women’s unpaid household labor is a justification for employers to pay all workers less, and women are viewed as a reserve army of labor who can be hired and fired at will. Of course women and children of color are doubly disadvantaged in the politics of globalization. For instance, Afro-Brazilian women who have the highest levels of illiteracy at about 50% rarely obtain entry-level jobs or further education (Da Silva, 1998).

Not only do women work 25% longer hours to earn far less than men, they obtain a reduced amount of schooling too. According to the United Nations Development Program, female literacy rates in 1990 were three-quarters that of males in the developing world (McCleay, 1991). While girls are enrolling in greater numbers in primary schools—nearly 70% worldwide in 1995 (Mitchell, 1998), some 90 million girls are not receiving basic instruction. The largest pockets of illiteracy exist among adult women; in Southwest Asia more than three-quarters of women ages 20 to 24 have no education at all. In Africa, most women do not obtain secondary education and adult illiteracy is over 60% among women (“Perspectives,” 1995).

INCENTIVES OF EDUCATION

The costs of education and the loss of potential income collude to take girls out of education in a much larger proportion to boys. Often girls are removed from school to care for younger siblings or are put to work to provide another source of family income. Patriarchal traditions that insist that wives become a part of their husbands’ families upon marriage, further diminish incentives for parents to finance a daughter’s education (Hill & King, 1993). Since wealth in developing countries emanates from children, specifically male children, high fertility is seen as economically rational, Thus, new global priorities for schooling can be seen to conflict with the immediate good of the family unit as it “reduces children’s economic contributions, increases their costs, lengthens their dependence, and speeds up cultural and value change” (Hadden & London, 1996, p. 33).

One emerging indicator of cultural and value change is that educated women tend to have fewer children. A study by Population Action International (Conly, 1998) found that higher fertility rates (more than five children per mother) are present in countries with the lowest female education rates: Afghanistan, 6.9; Chad, 6; Guinea, 6.1; Mali, 7.3; and Yemen, 7.5. In these countries, 76 million fewer girls than boys are enrolled in primary and secondary schools. Chad ranks the lowest with only 1 in 30 girls attending school. The average adult woman has obtained less than 1 month of education. Another example is Laos, where women are so poorly educated that only 9% complete elementary school (Lao Embassy, 2000). Along with reduced fertility, education is associated “with increased economic productivity, better family health and nutrition, lower maternal and child death rates” (Mitchell, 1998, p. 154).

Some scholars are optimistic about the promise of globalized standards of education for women, A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) report found that in 30 of 47 countries surveyed, the percentage of women with little or no formal education was significantly reduced by about one-half in a single generation (Mitchell, 1998). Countries such as Tanzania, Jordan, and Kenya exhibit a high proportion of females ages 20 to 24 with primary schooling. The assumption is that more education will inevitably lead to better lives for women in a global economy offering jobs requiring at least basic literacy skills. While sweated labor and subsistence wages abound in developing countries, new jobs offer different-better options than before (Kelly & Wolf, 2001). For example, in Indonesia anecdotal evidence suggests women’s moderate earnings allow consumption patterns previously unattainable, and labor conditions much preferable to slogging in the village rice fields. In Nicaragua, globalization is bringing Third-World women into contact with more resources and international feminist perspectives through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) located in wealthier countries (Kelly & Wolf, 2001). In fact, the global economy may present females with new resources to challenge patriarchal relations, create innovative expressions of community building and empowerment, and build novel forms of resistance and contestation (Basu, 1995; Ghorayshi & Belanger, 1996; Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991; Smith, 2000). Whatever forms of resistance female workers may take, most scholars agree that education and economic independence must be at the heart of new roles for women in the global marketplace. In this volume we examine various delivery systems being used in VET in an effort to establish a fair chance for women in the global workplace.

VET AND GENDER EQUITY

VET can most easily be defined as training for jobs. Yet the delivery system is highly diverse throughout the globe due to a variety of factors including economic development, cultural traditions, industrialization strategies, and relationships between the state and economic enterprise (Caillods, 1994). For amplification, the World Bank (WB) offers a 9-point taxonomy of delivery systems (Carnoy, 1994, p. 223): traditional apprenticeships which involve fundamental skill acquisition; regulated apprenticeships requiring on-the-job training with experienced workers; enterprise training delivered through in-house training centers; sectoral training institutions where public training for a sub-sector of the economy is taught; project-related training involving specialized in-service training; vocational secondary schools, either public or private, which prepares adolescents for work; comprehensive schools that provide separate academic and vocational tracks within the same building; diversified secondary school in which all students take vocational courses in a general curriculum; and vocational schools in which general education is taught along with VET for commercial, industrial, or agricultural occupations.

With transnational capitalist expansion into East Asia, for instance, VET is central to improving market competitiveness as well as strengthening workforce skills, labor mobility, and adaptability to changes in global economics (Caillods, 1994). Industrialized Pacific rim countries, such as South Korea, have shifted emphasis over the last 30 years from primary education to secondary vocational schools and, more recently, to postsecondary technical and applied science or engineering colleges. Japanese education and training, too, is distinguished by centralized state control of curricula with “a strong emphasis upon the development of group cohesion and conformism”—characterized by Green (1999, p. 64), as “a specific form of articulation between formal school systems and labour markets that is not found elsewhere...

Table of contents

• Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1 Globalizing Education for Work: An Introduction
• 2 Education and Work as Human Rights for Women: A Feminist Analysis
• 3 Working-Class Masculinities and Schooling: New Considerations for Vocational Education
• 4 Defying the Grip of Globalization: Brazilian Women’s Employment and Education for Work
• 5 Preparation for (In)equality: Women in South Korean Vocational Education
• 6 Poverty and Powerlessness in Ethiopia: Shaping Gender Equity Through Technical, Vocational Education, and Training
• 7 Changing Work, Changing Households: New Challenges to Masculinity and Femininity in Norwegian Vocational Education
• 8 Gender and the New Economy—Enterprise Discourses in Canada: Implications for Workplace Learning and Education
• 9 Where Are the Women in Vocational Education and Training?: An Assessment of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Australia
• 10 Disincentives to Employment: Family and Educational Policies in Unified Germany
• 11 Gender Equity in Vocational Education in the United States: The Unfinished Agenda
• Afterword
• Author Index
• Subject Index