Education’s Oyster

Posted on | March 9, 2007 | 1 Comment

I have quoted these wonderful words by Richard Feynman before:

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

My work with Cisco over the past few weeks has caused me to think in concrete terms about the broad developmental role of education in the world today. Feynman words above were about the use of science and technology, but if we steal his words and place them in the context of the global economy, then I believe that education is the key that can open the gates to economic justice across the world.

In this context, the context of this rapidly flattening (but still very bumpy!) world, the gates of heaven lead to economic prosperity and security for the emerging nations, while the gates of hell lead to the misery of sustained poverty. The same key opens both gates: use the key wrongly and a nation will lose out in the global struggle for equity, social justice and well-being; use the key well and that same nation can begin to look to the future with justifiable optimism.

Education is now a global phenomenon. In one sense, of course, education has always been a universal feature of human intercourse – as I have said before, every society, every culture, every civilization in history has sought to pass on the knowledge, skills and ideology deemed necessary for the survival and continued reproduction of their particular way of life. But in a radically different sense, the phenomenon is new, and education, as a result, is increasingly being recognized across the world as the instrument that, above all others, can push a developing nation decisively towards the goal of sustainable economic progress.

A number of transformational themes seem to be emerging out of the broad discourse around education’s role in development, and it is intriguing to hear the same issues and the same aspirations arise in countries in regions as diverse as Africa, the Middle East and South America. Themes coming up again and again include: collaborative learning, the criticality of direct engagement (with teachers, students, families, politicians), leadership and vision, partnership across the public and private sectors, equity, a re-empowerment of the teaching force, and the need to shift the locus of control to the individual learner (born out of a wider focus on the citizen). Alongside these high level themes, basic issues around economic and financial sustainability, sound project management and the importance of objective evaluation appear in various guises. It is these themes, and the growing, apparent, commonality of the issues they reflect, that leads me to conclude that the globalization of education is different in kind from any previous form of universality. Friedman’s flat world is, not surprisingly, flattening education too.

And not only the so-called emerging nations are looking to education for their salvation. The long-standing and powerful first- and second-generation capitalist economies of the world have become battlegrounds for a struggle between the old, factory-fodder, mass-production systems of education and the upstart thinking that is increasingly questioning the model of education in which standardized curricula are delivered by those expert conduits of knowledge known as teachers. Countries in Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australasia and others are faced with the prospect of a flattening world in which arriviste nations are already grasping the straws in the wind and are looking to the peculiar adjunct of education and technology to jump-start their economic potential through the growth of flexible, technologically-savvy and knowledge-hungry populations of young people. The aging countries of the West are top-heavy with people in their 40s, 50s and beyond (people such as me, for instance!) – the emerging nations, on the other hand, are full of impatient youngsters who know that life can offer more than their parents were ever able to enjoy. They have (or will soon have) the skills and the attitudes necessary to prise the economic torch from the hands of their ponderous neighbours. Some are already doing so. Anyone doubting the truth of the flattening world should look closely at the causes of the recent jitters in international markets!

Education is an essential component of development, and the ultimate goal of development, as Amartya Sen, Nobel-Prize-winning economist, has argued, is not merely economic prosperity but freedom itself.

If all of this is true, then a massive burden is being placed on education, one that requires everyone with an interest in education, or for that matter in the wider political-economy of development, to be absolutely clear about how education systems across the globe can be modelled and shaped to deliver maximum advantage to billions of people living in, or on the edge of, poverty. The best people to do this are teachers, learners and education leaders themselves, but governments can do a lot to smooth (and to finance) the process.

And, at the same time, those from the older economies who want to see their education systems similarly transformed for the 21st century should be looking with a mixture of fascination and kinship at the burgeoning developments in the emerging nations. The global nation is education’s oyster!

Technorati Tags: globalization, development, education, transformation, flat world, amartya sen, friedman, business week

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