Contesting the Global Development of Sustainable and Inclusive Education

Education Reform and the Challenges of Neoliberal Globalization

Antonio Teodoro

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000064292
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Didattica comparata

Documenting the outcomes from three decades of transnational research conducted under the leadership of António Teodoro, this volume offers a robust scaffolding of the social and political context in which global education is being challenged by the contradictions of neoliberalism, globalization, deregulation, governance, and democracy.

Contesting the Global Development of Sustainable and Inclusive Education presents outcomes from transnational studies conducted in response to global policies advocating the development of sustainable and inclusive education for all. Chapters map the impacts of globalization on education policy and consider how international organizations are shaping national education reforms. Focusing on questions of social justice, the volume asks how the neoliberal strategies enacted by national governments are affecting the work of teachers as well as curriculum, teacher training, and assessment. Finally, the text asks whether there are alternatives to financially-driven, competition-based reforms that might better position education as an action project for social justice.

This volume will be of interest to postgraduate students, scholars, researchers and policymakers in the fields of global education, comparative education, and education policy.

1 Education in Times of Change

Critical Problems and Research Agendas

Schooling systems are not the only spaces or tool providers for education or knowledge production. Since the foundation of the modern mass education systems, originated in Europe at the turn of the 19th century, schools have become more of a space aimed at social integration as well as training for work (Durkheim, 1922). Within a relatively short time, education changed from a rather obscure area in family life to a central topic in political debates at national, regional, and global levels.

The massification of education systems has brought a change in the school’s format. Schooling every youth also means including every youth in difficulty, either social or cognitive, those that are conflictive or even aggressive, and those with a background in marginalized cultures. It implies bringing into the school all the social problems that are therefore transformed into school problems (Esteve, 1994). The debates around the idea of lifelong education, from the 1970s onwards (Faure et al., 1972), and the generalization of lifelong learning as a central and guiding principle in the formulation of European education policies, has contributed to increase the access of every age group to education and professional development, which therefore ceased to be an occupation specific to childhood and youth.

School for all has been a social achievement of modern democratic societies and the predominant tool for the construct of such an imagined identity as that of the national citizen (Meyer and Ramirez, 2000). By opening its doors to new school attendants—not only at the mandatory primary school level, as it used to be in the past, but also at the secondary school level and, gradually but swiftly, at higher education levels—the school evolved into a qualitatively distinct reality that policy makers, teachers, students and their families, as well as public opinion in general, have some difficulty in understanding and dealing with it.

It is no overstatement to say that the idea of a school for all is going through a double crisis: one of regulation, because, in most cases, it does not fulfil its role of social integration or professional development with the new demands of a knowledge economy in mind (Cappelli, 1999; Collin and Young, 2000; Peiperl, Arthur, Goffee, and Morris, 2000), and one of emancipation, because it does not generate social mobility, as expected by different social layers for whom school attendance, mainly at higher education level, used to prove the best way to climb the social ladder or, otherwise, to reproduce the status previously reached (Brown, 2003; Duru-Bellat, 2006).

The school crisis has been described by the right wing as school failure, insufficient professional adequacy, and low socialization competence (Ravitch, 2000) whereas for the left wing it has been caused by “indifference to difference” (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). The acknowledgment of this crisis inspired Ball’s phrase “magical solutions” (Ball, 1998), which came to inspire every educational reform carried out in various places of the world system and, in particular, in the EU member states. Pushed by strong global agents, of which OECD is the most important (Henry, Lindgard, Rizvi, and Taylor, 2001; Martens and Jakobi, 2010), educational reforms have become the focus of reforming speeches and have given rise, from 1990s onward, to three key words, namely, competitivity, accountability, and performativity (Mons, 2007), which have been playing the role of a politically attractive governance tool able to replace the traditional significance of education as a social right and a public good (Ball, 2003).

The Critical Problems

Nowadays a strong awareness is beginning to arise, both in governmental international organizations, especially the OECD,¹ and among many educators and policy makers in individual states, that traditional ways of teaching and evaluating produce knowledge and skills for a rapidly declining type of society. This may result from a set of critical problems, as follows, which we have identified.

1. Schooling model exhaustion: School is the social institution that has mostly contributed to make writing a general ability because early on it became a global phenomenon that expanded isomorphically in the modern world (Fuller and Rubinson, 1992). Furthermore, the gradual expansion of school to all social and cultural layers and groups has led to the consolidation of school management and pedagogical organization models that included a growing number of students. For that purpose, a particular grammar of schooling was developed (Tyack and Tobin, 1994) that aimed to respond to the challenge of teaching many students as if they were one entity altogether, which became a fundamental strategy of linguistic and cultural homogenization. This model not only became the predominant organization model but was also considered as if it were the only one possible and even imaginable (Nóvoa, 1998). The first critical problem therefore lies in the exhaustion of this model, which does not respond to social diversity or to individual expectations. High dropout rates in most countries and the great difficulties shown in making secondary school universal prove the urgency in finding new educational and training models that may respond to deep societal changes happening in this new century.
2. School inflation or opportunity trap? A second critical problem may be found in the paradox between the continuous appeal for the expanding length of compulsory schooling and the gradual incapacity of the production systems to provide jobs for qualified youth. High youth unemployment rates do reflect the difficulties faced by young people in finding jobs. The youth unemployment rate in the EU was around twice as high as the rate for the total population throughout the last decade.² Although some authors explain the situation as depending on educational policies, which they call “school inflation” (Baker, 2009; Duru-Bellat, 2006), others prefer to underline the sociological consequences for young people with lower socioeconomic backgrounds who were promised the possibility of climbing the social ladder through education and, eventually, despite all their own and their family’s efforts, are faced with unemployment or, at least, precarious and unqualified employment, earning low wages. Authors such as Brown (2003) call this tension between education and employment, with the subsequent status conflict the “opportunity trap” (Brown, 2003).
3. Identities, language, culture, and citizenship: In the 19th and 20th centuries, education was one of the central elements for the construction of national identity (and citizenship). To take an example, the founding documents of the EU, as it is today, assert that education should be understood as a particular field in the states’ autonomy. In the last two decades, this understanding has been changing due to pressures of European competitiveness in the world scene and has resulted in a “Europeanization” of education and professional development policies. However, global political visions that often focus more on common features cannot overlook particular configurations of regions and communities. Bilingualism and plurilingualism are traditional in most societies, despite the national political framework and the strengthening of the national identity and representation throughout the last centuries. Furthermore, European and North American demography has been changing at a fast pace due to intense mobility through their territories as well as immigration from outside their borders. Nowadays, native, local, regional, and national languages are heard in the family, street, church, community, media, and school, and therefore the school system (and society) needs to provide a setting in which linguistic and cultural diversity bring more wealth to the curriculum and school interaction. Not only is it the school’s responsibility to account for cultural recognition, but it is also to take into consideration the varieties implied by different situations of mestizage and poliglotism. In addition to every other challenge that the educational system is currently facing, that of responding to epistemological, cultural, and linguistic diversity is crucial for inner social stability and its communication as well as for the relationship of its institutions and citizens with the rest of the world. Contemporary and future citizenship has to address social, political, cultural, and economic challenges like social cohesion, human rights, democracy, integration of immigrants, unity, and diversity in culture and entrepreneurship. Veugelers conceptualizes these challenges with the phrase “cultural democratic citizenship”(Veugelers, 2011a).
4. Early school learning—reading, writing and arithmetic: What are we doing to our children (more particularly to those with a background in working classes and in nonschooled cultures) who come to school full of curiosity and soon feel bored and alienated from the school curriculum? They may eventually come to hate reading (failing both in their mother tongue and in a second or foreign languages) and have the worst results in mathematics. Adding to it is the gap between school content, materialized in the explicit curriculum (subjects and their syllabi), and its relationship with information accessed and shared by the young people in the media. ICTs play a crucial role in putting the youngsters on the right track, both turning technology into a helpful learning tool and also making its use more pedagogic when using it in their spare time (Barbarin and Wasik, 2009).
5. Learning theories and practices: Relevant learning theories were developed during the first half of the 20th century, when knowledge about how the brain works was still limited. The neurosciences have undergone considerable developments since the last decades of the 20th and all through to the 21st century. However, there have not been enough studies crossing these results with school learning and teaching strategies. Due to exclusionary practices in schooling, scientifically supported by a reductive understanding of biological factors, life sciences axioms, in general, have been avoided in educational theorizing since the mid-20th century. Since then education theories, policies, and practices have been inspired mainly by the social developments following the Civil Rights Movements and supported by the flourishing of sociology of education tenets. Time is, therefore, now ripe for other contributions in education that may help researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, and practitioners address the challenges introduced in education systems in Europe by the 21st century. Another important issue is related with the idea of knowledge transfer, because educational theories are usually focused on knowledge transfer, but we can now state that knowledge is uncertain (Capra, 1985). In this sense, this new theory allows us to reconsider the educational process and the process of knowledge transfer under the light of a new educational paradigm.
6. The production of knowledge and school curriculum: Educational systems are critical, although not exclusive, loci of knowledge production. Since the construction of modern systems of mass education, the school has become not only a relevant space for social integration and training for the world of work (Fuller and Rubinson, 1992) but also the most powerful resource in the construction of a common and shared body of knowledge in a given society, despite the increasing relevance of other resources. Knowledge, as conveyed and constructed in and by schools, is a matter of curriculum, on the one hand, and of professional educational knowledge, on the other. Schools are suffering the effects of a mismatch between the present (social, economic, and cultural) diversity of students and the predominant ways of delivering the curriculum, which remain essentially the same that were used when the student population was much smaller and much more homogeneous (Barroso, 1999). The sixth critical problem lies in the idea that school education does not meet the needs and expectations of its time, and moreover, this has been recurrent and widespread (Tedesco, 2000). This process coincides with the announced intention of building a knowledge society (UNESCO, 2005), which implies a re-meaning of knowledge that despite being absent from the debates about this new society and its educational implications (Young, 2008), has become the main engine of economy and a new (and decisive) production factor (OECD, 1996; and its critic: Jessop, 2000). While this re-meaning of knowledge and, as a consequence, a new mode of producing scientific knowledge are taking place, curriculum knowledge organization, even when playing a role in innovative schools, remains limited within each discipline and, furthermore, homogenous, hierarchical, static, and accountable to peers only, that is, with problems set and solved inside one specific community (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott, and Trow, 1994).
7. Streaming and tracking: Every school system is inevitably expected to accomplish four general functions in the social system: training, selection, allocation, and expectation regulation (Hopper, 1974). Schooling was described by Durkheim as a main mechanism to create social cohesion, always ranking students and putting them in different tracks and preparing them for different occupational and social positions. After the primary education phase, secondary schooling (especially upper secondary) is responsible for their selection and allocation to particular social positions. In some countries, this process is heavily structured (France and Germany), whereas in others selection seems to be more open and, therefore, more subtle (United States and Norway). In some systems selection takes place relatively soon (Germany), whereas in others that stage is postponed (United States and England). However, secondary school choice is (always?) a beginning of a separate social trajectory (Lamb, Marcussen, Teese, Sandberg, and Polesel, 2011). Differentiation is an inevitable function of schoolwork. In all systems one can verify that there is stratification of school paths. General (academic) education is always validated higher than vocational education. The former is always perceived as something better, more prestigious, and leading to higher returns from education. In some cases, like Poland, this perception has led to the almost total eradication of vocational education. On the contrary, in Germany, the vocational track has traditionally been a main segment of secondary schooling (Holsinger and Cowell, 2000). What is important here is that changes in modes of school selection, that is, diploma inflation, can lead to deep reconstruction of occupational and social structures. As Baker shows for the United States, educational expansion that led to the creation of a “schooled society” brought about changes in working life as the market adopted high-educated graduates (Baker, 2009). In less-developed countries (post-Soviet countries in Europe), education plays an important role in the process of convergence to a late modernity pattern and stimulates changes in occupational structure and stratification.
8. Postponed education selection: Education is interrelated with social structure in a complex way. On the one hand, it is a “sorting machine” grouping individuals in different social positions (Kerckhoff, 1995). On the other hand, through changes in mechanisms of educational selection, structural change occurs. Educational expansion at secondary and tertiary levels brings about the impression of “postponed selection.” It suggests that the labor market, not education itself, is the main “sorting machinery.” Ulrich Beck calls education a “ticket to nowhere” as there is no predefined or guaranteed reward afterward. However, the same authors show “feudalization of education,” and we have identified findings to show persistence of social inequalities in lower segments of education (Beck, 1992; Hadjar and Becker, 2010). In fact, the level of integration in the educational system—no matter assessments results—affects the stratification effect of school. In sum, the earlier the educational selection, the higher the social inequalities in education (Dupriez and Dumay, 2006). Stratification of educational tracks adds to the social nature of educational selection. The sphere of secondary education is a platform of segregation based on socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, and other factors. In other words, different educational tracks often reflect separate social trajectories of students originating in specific social backgrounds. Furthermore, the prevailing relationship framework between school and work is expressed by the high dropout rates (averaging 14.9% at EU27 but particularly higher in Portugal and Spain: 35.4 and 31.9%, respectively), defined as the percent of the population age 18–24 with, at most, a lower secondary degree and not in further education or training (Gutièrrez-Domènech, 2011). In addition, the social differentiation underlying the risk of dropping out from school should be taken into account. One of the unintended consequences of educational expansion is persistent inequality in education (Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993), which requires ongoing diagnosis of determinants (also systemic) and mechanisms of the process.
9. Performance and inclusion: School policies have been swinging between performance and inclusion goals. The former provides a new middle-class pressure (Power and Whitty, 2008) toward differentiation, enabling their children to access programming work (Castells, 1996). The latter is requested by democratic pressure that demands that school include all children and young p...