Globalization

Culture and Education in the New Millennium
Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Desirée Baolian Qin-Hilliard

Introduction

Globalization defines our era. It is "what happens when the movement of people, goods, or ideas among countries and regions accelerates" (Coatsworth, this volume). In recent years, globalization has come into focus, generating considerable interest and controversy in the social sciences, humanities, and policy circles and among the informed public at large (see, for example, Appadurai 1996; Bauman 1998; Baylis and Smith 1997; Bhagwati 2002; Castles and Davidson 2000; Giddens 2000; Hardt and Negri 2000, Inda and Rosaldo 2001; Jameson and Miyoshi 1999; King 1997; Lechner and Boli 1999; O’Meara, Mehlinger, and Krain 2000; Sassen 1998; Singer 2002; Tomlinson 1999). From terrorism to the environment, HIV-AIDS to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), free trade to protectionism, population growth to poverty and social justice, globalization seems deeply implicated in nearly all of the major issues of the new millennium.

While globalization has created a great deal of debate in economic, policy, and grassroots circles, many implications and applications of the phenomenon remain virtual terra incognita. Education is at the center of this uncharted continent. We have barely started to consider how these accelerating transnational dynamics are affecting education, particularly precollegiate education. Instead, educational systems worldwide continue mimicking and often mechanically copying from each other and borrowing curricula (from trivial facts about history in middle school to trigonometry in high school), teaching methods ("chalk and talk"), and assessment tests (short answer and regurgitation). These practices would have been familiar to our forebears going to school two generations ago (Suárez-Orozco and Gardner 2003). Yet youth in school today, whether in Bali, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Boston, or Buenos Aires, will encounter a vastly different world from that of our grandparents.

Throughout most human prehistory and history, the vectors that organized and gave meaning to human lives and human imaginaries were structured primarily by local geography and topology, local kinship and social organization, local worldviews and religions. Even a few hundred years ago, a minute in human evolutionary time, the lives of our ancestors were largely shaped by local economies, local social relations, and local knowledge. Prior to the transoceanic explorations and conquests, villagers were likely to be born, raised, and schooled (however shortly), to work, marry, reproduce, and be buried in the same locale. They were largely oblivious to changes taking place even a few hundred miles away. Then "the village was practically the beginning and end of his or her world: visitors were rare, few travelers passed by, and excursions from the village would, in all likelihood, have only been to the nearest market town. . . . Contact with the outside world would have been the exception rather than the rule" (Held 2000).

Today the world is another place. While human lives continue to be lived in local realities, these realities are increasingly being challenged and integrated into larger global networks of relationships. The forces of globalization are taxing youth, families, and education systems worldwide. All social systems are predicated on the need to impart values, morals, skills, and competencies to the next generation (see Gardner, this volume). The main thesis of this book is that the lives and experiences of youth growing up today will be linked to economic realities, social processes, technological and media innovations, and cultural flows that traverse national boundaries with ever greater momentum. These global transformations, we believe, will require youth to develop new skills that are far ahead of what most educational systems can now deliver. New and broader global visions are needed to prepare children and youth to be informed, engaged, and critical citizens in the new millennium. This book has been developed around the idea that education will need both rethinking and restructuring if schooling is to best prepare the children and youth of the world to engage globalization’s new challenges, opportunities, and costs.

Education’s challenge will be to shape the cognitive skills, interpersonal sensibilities, and cultural sophistication of children and youth whose lives will be both engaged in local contexts1 and responsive to larger transnational processes. We claim that two domains in particular will present the greatest challenges to schooling worldwide: the domain of difference and the domain of complexity.

The Domain of Difference

One of the paradoxes of globalization is that difference is becoming increasingly normative. Globalization and massive migrations are changing the ways we experience national identities and cultural belonging (see C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume). At the beginning of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois announced that "the color line" would define the social agenda for the United States. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that line is complicated by the increasingly fluid political and cultural borders that once separated both nation-states and the people within them. These external and internal borders are increasingly becoming noisy and conflictive areas where cultural communication and miscommunication play out in schools, communities, and places of work and worship.

Globalization decisively unmakes the coherence that the modernist project of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-state promised to deliver—the neat fit between territory, language, and identity (see Suárez-Orozco and Sommer 2002). Consider the following depiction of one of France’s largest cities:
To enter the Rue Du Bon Pasteur in the heart of this Mediterranean port is to leave France. Or rather, it is to leave a France still fixed in the imagination of many, a land where French is spoken and traditions of a secular society are enforced. The Rue du Bon Pasteur—the Street of the Good Shepherd—is a haven owned, operated, and populated by Arab Muslims. Arabic is spoken here. All the women cover their hair with scarves. Men in robes and sandals sit together in cafes where they reach out to Arabia via satellite television. The kiosk on the corner sells a score of newspapers and magazines flown in daily from the Arab world.

The Attaqwa mosque in the middle of the street calls so many worshippers to prayer every Friday that dozens of them are forced to lay out their prayer rugs on the street. That street reflects the political and social reality facing France. Demography has transformed the country, whose population is about 7 percent Arab and Muslim, the highest percentage in Western Europe. (Sciolino 2003)

As Clifford Geertz has poetically noted, "all modern nations— even Norway, even Japan —contradict themselves: They contain multitudes" (Shweder, Minow, and Markus 2002, back cover). These "multitudes" challenge the structure and practices of the nation state (see Shweder, Minor, and Markus 2002) but may invigorate democracy’s best promise when difference engenders serious engagement and debate.

Managing difference is becoming one of the greatest challenges to multicultural countries. From France to Sweden, Brazil to Bolivia, Indonesia to Malaysia, the work of managing difference calls forth a new educational agenda. Children growing up in these and other settings are more likely than in any previous generation in human history to face a life of working and networking, loving and living with others from different national, linguistic, religious, and racial backgrounds. They are challenged to engage and work through competing and contrasting models, such as kinship, gender, language (monolingual and multilingual), and the complicated relationships between race, ethnicity, and inequality, in new ways. It is by interrupting "thinking as usual"—the taken-for-granted understandings and worldviews that shape cognitive and metacognitive styles and practices—that managing difference can do the most for youth growing up today.

Take, for example, the widely shared Western idea that individuals ought to autonomously and freely enter marriage agreements predicated on individual agency and love. A Swedish youngster might find it odd, maybe even bizarre, that for her Kurdish classmate, the idea of "love marriage" would be culturally incomprehensible. Working through the cultural models and social practices that structure the idea of love marriage— a historically new and, until very recently, ethnographically rare practice—and the idea of "arranged marriage" —the preferred marriage practice found in most ethnographic and historical records—can open up more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of human nature and culture, history and kinship, social organization and values. If the child learns nothing else, she should know that there is nothing natural about love marriage!

Negotiating differences requires energy—the kind of energy that can be recycled and harnessed to bolster a cornerstone of human intelligence: the ability to consider multiple perspectives (Piaget 1936; Gardner 1999; Vygotsky 1978). Taking multiple perspectives, reversing mental routines, and articulating multiple hypotheses from a common set of facts and working through the logical and rational vectors that would best explain those preexisting facts are crucial features of human intelligence.2 When distinct cultural models and social practices are deployed to address a common set of problems, youth gain the cognitive and metacognitive advantages inherent in examining and working on a problem from many angles. Freely, fully, and respectfully arguing within a framework of difference is likely to better equip youth to deal with the complexities of the day.

The Domain of Complexity

Globalization engenders complexity. Throughout the world it is generating more intricate demographic profiles (see C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume), economic realities (see Bloom, this volume; Coatsworth, this volume), political processes, technology and media (see Jenkins, this volume; Battro, this volume), cultural facts and artifacts (see Watson, this volume; Jenkins, this volume), and identities (see Maira, this volume; C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume). Many countries are indeed undergoing intense demographic transformations. Sweden, a country of nine million people today, has a million immigrants, roughly half of them from the Muslim world (for other examples, see C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume). Economies likewise must adapt to the new, complex forces brought about by global capital. Local politics, too, are stretched in new ways—for example, when "absentee citizens" in the diaspora exercise political power in the communities they left behind.
Globalization’s increasing complexity necessitates a new paradigm for learning and teaching. The mastery and mechanical regurgitation of rules and facts should give way to a paradigm in which cognitive flexibility and agility win the day. The skills needed for analyzing and mobilizing to solve problems from multiple perspectives will require individuals who are cognitively flexible, culturally sophisticated, and able to work collaboratively in groups made up of diverse individuals. In his contribution to this volume Howard Gardner claims that the complexity behind many of globalization’s "big problems" requires deep disciplinary grounding as well as the ability to achieve multidisciplinary understandings, collaborations, and solutions. "Trends in our increasingly globalized society," writes Gardner (this volume), "have brought interdisciplinary concerns to the fore. Issues like poverty reduction, anti-terrorism, privacy, prevention of disease, energy conservation, ecological balance—and the list could be expanded at will—all require input from and syntheses of various forms of disciplinary knowledge and methods.

Educational institutions seek, in their ways, to respond to the demand for this kind of skill; and the more adventurous students are attracted to studies that call for a blend of disciplinary expertises." Multitasking, learning how to learn, learning from failures, lifelong learning, and the ability to master and move across domains now have a premium.

An education for globalization should therefore nurture the higher-order cognitive and interpersonal skills required for problem finding, problem solving, articulating arguments, and deploying verifiable facts or artifacts to substantiate claims. These skills should be required of children and youth who will, as adults, fully engage the larger world and master its greatest challenges, transforming it for the betterment of humanity—regardless of national origin or cultural upbringing. This we term the convergence hypothesis: globalization is de-territorializing the skills and competencies it rewards, thereby generating powerful centripetal forces on what students the world over need to know.

In this book we examine how globalization is shaping the lives of the children of the world in and out of schools. Our aim is to stimulate new thinking, research, and policy work in a domain that remains largely ignored by scholars of education. Millions of children and youth are growing up in a world where global processes are placing new demands on educational systems that are traditionally averse to change (see Gardner, this volume).
There is virtually no scholarship on globalization and precollegiate education.4 While there is some research on policy, administration, and curriculum that address globalization and primary and secondary education worldwide (see for example Burbules and Torres 2000; Quashigah and Wilson 2001; Stromquist and Monkman 2000), generally these works fail to foreground how globalization is impacting the experiences of youth in and out of schools. Likewise, there is a small but growing literature on youth and globalization (see, for example, Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995; Bennett 2000; Jenkins 1992, 1998; Larson 2002; Maira and Soep, forthcoming). Alas, most of these works also fail to emphasize the role of education and schools in the lives of youth.

A number of researchers have begun to systematically examine how globalization is changing the lives of youth in Latin America and the Caribbean (Welti 2002), in Arab countries (Booth 2002), in sub-Saharan Africa (Nsamenang 2002), and in Southeast Asia (Stevenson and Zusho 2002). More and more young people in these areas have access to global information; they copy the styles of U.S. teenagers (who themselves, as Jenkins [this volume] informs us, borrow from youth elsewhere), sing English-language songs, have more leisure opportunities for dating, and are more likely to be playing similar computer games.

In many of these places, rural households shrink as a result of youth migrating to urban areas in search of work and other opportunities.5 Gender roles are also transformed. While many observers see globalization as positive, promoting economic development and intercultural exchanges, there are also corrosive developments, such as globalization’s threats to century-long traditions, religious identities, authority structures, values, and worldviews (see Arnett 2002; Brown, Larson, and Saraswathi 2002; Stevenson and Zusho 2002). It is increasingly obvious that in many corners of the world the winds of anti-globalization are blowing strong (Naidoo 2003; also see Watson, this volume).6

In the remainder of this introduction, we review some of the dominant themes in the scholarship on globalization and propose a tentative definition of the term. Then we examine the basic topics that unfold in the following chapters. We claim that four domains are at the heart of the new global impulses affecting youth and education worldwide: the globalization of economy and capital; the globalization of media, information, and communication technologies; large-scale immigration; and the globalization of cultural production and consumption.

Together these currents are reshaping the experiences of youth in and out of schools the world over. As a number of chapters in this book suggest, youth are active players in the making of new globalizing spaces in culture, economy, and society. The following chapters are devoted to exploring the complex psychological, educational, sociocultural, and historical implications of globalization for the future of today’s children and youth.

Interdisciplinary Reflections on Globalization

Globalization is at the heart of any understanding of broad processes of social change taking place in disparate locales around the world. After September 11, 2001, some observers announced the end of globalization (Rugman 2001; Gray 2002). While globalization, especially when narrowly defined as free markets and free capital flows, has generated doubts (Sen 2000), it may be premature to dismiss its relevance for judicious social science, education, and policy work. First, it remains the case that the major predicaments of the future will not likely be contained within the boundaries and paradigms of the twentieth-century nation-state. The case of SARS forcefully illustrates this dynamic. Within a few months of its original appearance (probably in Guangdong Province in coastal China some time toward the end of 2002), it became a worldwide health threat with serious economic, social, and political consequences not only in Guangdong but also in Beijing and in places as far away as Canada and Chinese diasporas throughout the world.7

Second, despite the economic slowdown and new international travel barriers after September 11, the general momentum toward increasing global integration in economic, communications, and security matters will likely continue into the future.8 As the Foreign Policy Association has recently suggested, after September 11 "being there" is likely to be replaced by continued and growing communication and exchanges via means such as international telecommunications and the Internet. The association also notes that "the new global emphasis on fighting terrorism on military, diplomatic, and economic fronts could serve to increase levels of international political engagement over the coming years. Nor can forward momentum in the global economy be ruled out. Even as nations are struggling to pull themselves out of recession, they are continuing to strengthen the mechanisms for global integration" (Foreign Policy Association 2002).

Third, in a number of significant cases, nation-states continue to regroup in fundamental ways on supranational lines. For example, the European Union (EU) has grown from an original six-country entity in the early 1950s (including Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Netherlands) to the formal creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) in 1958. By the 1970s, it had added Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Greece, Spain, and Portugal became members in the 1980s, and Austria, Finland, and Sweden in the 1990s. By the year 2004, ten new members are to be added, including Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia (see European Union 2002). Finally, the potential for globalization remains quite high (see Coatsworth, this volume).

But before scholars of education can begin to mine the analytic potential of this new work, it is necessary to attend to basic definitional and theoretical matters. The term globalization in its current usage is quite broad and lacks well-defined boundaries. Some simply equate globalization with free markets.9 Others use the term interchangeably with such concepts as transnationalism or postnationality. Still others use the term as a proxy for imperialism or neocolonialism. In the popular mind, globalization is often a proxy for Americanization. Others use globalization to examine themes that in earlier scholarship came under the rubric of "development" or "world systems" theory.

Each scholarly discipline seems to privilege its own set of concerns. Anthropologists, for example, tend to approach globalization in relation to their inherent interest in culture (see Watson, this volume). Globalization tends to detach social practices and cultural formations from localized territories. One hundred years ago European and Euro-American anthropologists took long journeys to remote locations to study exotic social institutions and cultural beliefs. Today globalization delivers the "exotic" to the anthropologist’s own backyard. Turkish cultural formations are, in plain sight, as ubiquitous in parts of Frankfurt as they are in Istanbul. Likewise, Mexican culture is now alive and well in New York—where by the year 2000 roughly half a million Mexican citizens resided, with well over 300,000 in New York City alone (Smith 2002).

But globalization also delivers what is "mundane" in the anthropologists’ backyard to remote and out of the way places.10 This is sometimes referred to as the "Coca-colonization" or "MacDonaldization" of the developing world (indeed as James Watson indicates in his chapter, MacDonald’s has emerged as the very incarnation of globalization in part because "on an average day the company serves nearly fifty million customers in over thirty thousand restaurants located in 118 countries. In the mid-1990s a new MacDonald’s opened somewhere in the world every eight hours"). A cursory look through the programs of the American Anthropological Association meetings of the past few years suggests just how globalization has become a central concern for anthropologists. Indeed, over the past decade anthropologists have developed a taste for such topics as transnationalism (see Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Mahler 1995), cultural hybrids and dualities (Canclini 1995/1989; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Zentella 2002), mass media (Michaels, 2002; Yang, 2002; Larkin, 2002), immigration (see M. Suárez-Orozco 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000; C. Suárez-Orozco and M. Suárez-Orozco 2001; and M. Suárez-Orozco and Páez 2002), and persisting cultural conflicts (Shweder 2000; Wikan 2000)—all brought about by globalization.11

Economists, in contrast, study globalization because of their interest in trade, financial markets, and transnational capital flows (see Bhagwati 2002; Burtless, Lawrence, Litan, and Shapiro 1998; Feldstein 2002; Stiglitz 2002; and Rodrik 1997). Arguments over the economic causes and consequences of globalization are lengthy and sometimes polarizing. A plurality of economists see globalization— especially free trade— as the path to development and growth (Bhagwati 2002; Feldstein 2002; Burtless et al. 1998).
Harvard president Lawrence Summers, an economist and former U.S. secretary of the treasury, argued in the 2003 Godkin Lecture that "the rate at which countries grow is substantially determined by their ability to integrate with the global economy, their capacity to maintain sustainable government finances, and their ability to put in place an institutional environment in which contracts can be enforced and property right can be established" (see Abrams 2003).
Many other leading economists seem to agree. Burtless, Lawrence, Litan, and Shapiro (1998) argue that increased "economic interlinkages" around the world have generated wealth and "helped promote capitalism and democracy" in such varied places as Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

These scholars claim that globalization demonstrates "the virtues of trade and markets" while helping alleviate poverty and create new opportunities for economic growth and well-being. The insertion of China into the global economy has been hailed as a paradigm of the virtues of globalization in promoting both economic growth and human welfare: "In 1960, the average Chinese expected to live only 36 years. By 1999, the life expectancy has risen to 70 years, not far below the level of the United States. Literacy has risen from less than 50 percent to more than 80 percent" (Rodrik 2002, p. 30).
Economists who celebrate the merits of globalization generally reject proposed "globaphobic" policies because they would interrupt the expansion of free markets and create unnecessary detours en route to development (Burtless et al. 1998). For some economists, lack of globalization, not globalization itself, is the cause of poverty and misery in the developing world.12

A small but influential group of economists, however, has been vocal in questioning the economic consequences of globalization (see, for example, Stiglitz 2002; Sen 2001; Rodrik 2002). These criticisms have tended to focus on (1) globalization’s failure to generate economic growth in large sectors of the world, (2) its role in increased economic inequality within and across nations (see Bloom, this volume; Coatsworth, this volume), and (3) its role in the increasingly desperate fate of growing numbers of poor and disenfranchised people throughout the world: by 2002 "1.2 billion people around the world live[d] on less than $1 a day[, and] 2.8 billion people [more than 45 percent of the world’s population] live[d] on less than $2 a day" (Stiglitz 2002, p. 25).

These economists have also pointed out the unsavory fact that under globalization the fate of billions of people increasingly rests in the hands of the arbiters of global capitalism, especially the International Monetary Fund and financial interests in Wall Street, London, Geneva, and other global cities. These power brokers dictate the economic and social agendas of faraway countries with little accountability, huge asymmetries in decision-making powers, and a lack of concern for local institutional frameworks, needs, and priorities (Stiglitz 2002). Yet in the game of globalization, local factors may indeed be more important than ever before. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik (2002) has argued that free markets are not enough: "Economies that have performed well over the long term owe their success not to geography or trade, but to institutions that have generated market-oriented incentives, protected property rights, and enabled stability" (p. 29). Regardless of their beliefs about the economic consequences of globalization or their recipes for making globalization "work," nearly all respected economists agree that global "poverty is now the defining issue" (Rodrik 2002, p. 29). As the work of David Bloom (this volume) suggests, no serious debate on the economics of globalization and poverty can neglect the role of education in promoting development and well-being (see also Bloom and Cohen 2002).

Political scientists, for their part, have turned their attention to how globalization is challenging the workings of the state (Strange 1996; Waltz 1999; Berger and Dore 1996). Much of this scholarship focuses on the political consequences of global economic integration. Some have hypothesized that growing economic interdependence is inevitably generating certain similarities in the technologies, habits of work, and lifestyles that come to be privileged under globalization (Boyer 1996). These similarities would in turn seem to exert pressures on nation-states to "preserve distinctive social, political, and economic organizations" (Boyer 1996, p. 29). Some observers even "predict that the nation state will soon be obsolete and the government’s room for maneuver will be limited" (p. 29).

Yet other political scientists question the mechanistic assumption that growing economic interdependence leads to convergence in the political realm (Waltz 1999; Weiss, 1998).14 While some political scientists see economic integration as the very essence of globalization, others have come to see growing inequality as its most profound legacy, which should reaffirm the centrality of politics over economics. As "the distribution of capabilities across states has become extremely lopsided, . . . the inequalities of international politics enhance the political role of one country. Politics, as usual, prevails over economics" (Waltz 1999, p. 11).

Globalization challenges the nation-state in other ways. Transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly vocal and effective in shaping political debates and choices around a host of issues (Mol 2001; Warkentin 2001; Nye and Donahue 2000). International institutional systems such as human, civil, and cultural rights regimes reach beyond the confines of individual nation-states (Nye 2001; Coleman and Porter 1999). For example, an Argentine torturer accused of committing crimes in his own country can be arrested in Mexico and tried for crimes against humanity in Spain, as happened in February 2001 (see Robben 2004).

Likewise war, famously defined as "the continuation of politics by other means," has since September 11 become thoroughly globalized. Both terrorism and the war on terrorism are global phenomena shifting from Kenya and Tanzania to New York and Washington and on to Bali, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. Indeed, the attacks of September 11 seem to have ushered in a new globalized experiment in warfare, requiring transnational coordination and in the process creating unlikely partnerships. Al Qaeda itself is a paradigm of globalization—a network lacking any firm national or territorial base. It seems to be constituted of a set of loosely and rapidly changing interconnected financial, weapons-procuring, ideological, and religious networks, heavily reliant for its operations on globalization’s new information, communication, and transportation technologies.15 Al Qaeda’s attacks generated a global response, bringing together such disparate nations as China, Russia, and the Untied States in a common cause. But in character with globalization’s fluidity and speed of change, these alliances are fragile and constantly evolving, as the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrated when the European allies of the United States and the United Kingdom decided to take a different path in pursuing the UN objectives to disarm Iraq.

Another way globalization is reshaping the politics of the state is a result of large-scale immigration. Peoples in the diaspora—Mexicans in Los Angeles, Turks in Germany, or Algerians in France—have emerged as actors across national boundaries, shaping economic processes and the political agenda in both their countries of birth and their countries of choice. The power that diasporic communities exercise in their countries of origin has grown exponentially over the last few decades. Much of this flows from the fact that economic remittances from people in the diaspora have emerged as a critical source of foreign exchange for a growing list of countries, such as El Salvador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Tunisia. As a consequence, politics have new global dimensions. For example, Dominican politicos are fully cognizant that election campaigns in their country need to be waged in New York—where Dominicans are now the largest immigrant group—as well as in Santo Domingo.16 Congressman Tip O’Neill’s adage "All politics is local" is now somewhat anachronistic. Dual citizenship agreements—enabling one to maintain citizenship rights in more than one nation-state—are complicating and making more interesting the politics of belonging (see Castles and Davidson 2000).
While each discipline has generated its own idiosyncratic use of the term globalization, certain characteristics seem to converge. Most scholars who study globalization today would agree that it is best characterized as a set of processes that tend to de-territorialize important economic, social, and cultural practices from their traditional boundaries in nation-states. It involves a kind of "post-geography" (Bauman 1998).17 In summary, for the purpose of this book, we approach globalization as the processes of change structured by four interrelated formations: (1) postnational forms of production and distribution of goods and services—fueled by growing levels of international trade, foreign direct investment, and capital flows; (2) information, communication, and media technologies that facilitate exchanges and instantaneously connect people across vast geographies and place a premium on knowledge-intensive work; (3) growing levels of worldwide migration; and (4) the resultant cultural transformations and exchanges that challenge traditional values and norms in both sending and receiving countries. These changes require new adaptations if youth are to interact in a civil and productive manner with those whose backgrounds may be extremely different from their own.

Globalization is generating changes of a magnitude comparable to the emergence of agriculture ten thousand years ago or the industrial revolution two hundred years ago. It will demand fundamental rethinking of the aims and processes of education.

Education for Globalization

In this book we examine the implications of the historical, cultural, technological, and demographic changes brought about by globalization for the experiences of children and youth in and out of schools. We start with a historical perspective. Without a historical narrative it is difficult to distinguish what might be new and a break from previous cycles of globalization from what mimics and repeats previous processes. What, if anything, is new about globalization?18 A number of prominent scholars have claimed that globalization is best conceptualized as part of a long process of change—arguably centuries in the making (see for example, Hardt and Negri 2000; Jameson and Miyoshi 1999; Mignolo 1998; Sen 2000). They remind us that certain features of globalization today are not necessarily new. Neither large-scale immigration nor international capital flows are unprecedented.

In the chapter "Globalization, Growth, and Welfare in History," Harvard historian John Coatsworth examines the implications of globalization for human welfare, productivity, and equity from a historical and regional perspective.
Coatsworth identifies four distinct cycles of globalization in the Western hemisphere: (1) the opening of transoceanic conquest, communication, and trade from 1492 to 1565; (2) the kidnapping and forced migration of Africans and the subsequent establishment of slave plantations in the new world from 1650 to 1790; (3) the export-led growth in the Belle Epoque between 1880 and 1930; (4) and a new globalization cycle beginning in the mid-1980s.

Coatsworth argues that the current cycle of globalization, in regard to demographic and economic processes, is in fact quite weak as compared to previous cycles. For example, current migration flows are proportionally smaller than in previous periods: the foreign-born population of the Americas (including such varied countries as the United States, Argentina, and Brazil) a century ago was proportionally larger than at the turn of the millennium (Moya 1998). Furthermore, the current wave of globalization has been wanting in terms of economic growth in most Latin American countries.
Over the last decade, growth has been elusive and inequality a constant and growing concern. Coatsworth’s analysis suggests that globalization tends to exact short-term costs (paid in the currency of decreasing health and well-being and increasing inequality) while generating long-term growth especially in economic productivity. Coatsworth’s arguments are sobering and highly relevant to today’s debates about globalization.

He also offers a provocative suggestion: in terms of both the economics and demographics of globalization, the current cycle has not reached the potential predicted from previous trends. If anything, in many regions of the world, globalization is more of a promise than a fait accompli. Finally, Coatsworth notes that education has a much more prominent role to play than in previous cycles of global change. Educators must develop an agenda to facilitate the incorporation of growing numbers of immigrant children worldwide and develop curricular and pedagogical programs to impart the cross-cultural skills children will need to thrive in their historical moment and emerge as agents of change to combat growing worldwide inequalities.

Globalization without social justice hurts and threatens us all.
Whether one sees globalization as a promise yet to be realized or as a new international reality, surely economics are at the forefront of important changes worldwide. As Anthony Giddens noted in his BBC Reith Lectures, "the level of world trade today is much higher than it ever was before, and involves a much wider range of goods and services" (Giddens 2000, p. 27).19
Poverty and inequality are the elephants in the globalization room (Naidoo 2003).

While some regions of the world such as East Asia have "managed globalization" quite well (Yan 2002) and in so doing have achieved unprecedented economic growth and well-being, in other regions of the world the forces of globalization seem to have conspired to intensify patterns of inequality and human suffering (see Bauman 1998; Dussel 2000; Mittelman 2000; Nader 1993).20

What are the implications of these global economic dynamics for education? In his chapter, "Globalization and Education: An Economic Perspective," Harvard economist David Bloom argues that because of globalization, education is more important than ever before in history. He deploys a vast array of up-to-date data on the state of global education in much of the developing world. Bloom’s materials prompt both optimism and caution.

He claims that growing worldwide inequality, indexed by increasing gaps in income and well-being, generally mimics a continuing and growing global gap in education.
While primary education enrollments have improved worldwide, consistency and quality of educational experiences remain "patchy." Furthermore, secondary education in developing countries remains quite weak.21 Bloom argues that increasing efforts to improve basic education (both in quantity and quality) in developing countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, will surely help narrow income gaps with developed countries.

Education, he claims, is "clearly a strong trigger for positive development spirals." He cites estimates that in the developing world, each additional year of basic education corresponds to a rise of over 10 percent in the individual’s earning power. Bloom concludes his chapter by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities brought about by globalization. These include a more competitive world economy, the increasing importance of cross-national communication, and the rapid speed of change. Bloom points out that globalization also brings about opportunities for education, particularly in the ways that new technologies can be put to work to improve both the quantity and quality of education worldwide—a theme further developed by Antonio Battro in his contribution to this volume.

The current cycle of globalization is in part the product of new global media, information, and communication technologies that instantaneously connect people, organizations, and systems across vast distances. While in 1980 there were only two million computers worldwide, in 1995 the number totaled more than 150 million, 90 percent being personal computers (Lopez, Smith, and Pagnucco 1995, p. 35). In 2000 eighty million new users logged on to the Internet for the first time (Foreign Policy Association 2002).

The cost of telephone calls has plummeted, owing to satellite communication technology. For example, the price of a three-minute phone call from New York to London dropped from about $250 in 1930 to about $30 in 1970, and to less than 20 cents by the year 2000. In addition to creating and circulating images, information, and data, these technologies have the promise of freeing people from the constraints of space and time. These new technologies of globalization are rapidly and irrevocably changing the nature of learning, work, thought, entertainment, and the interpersonal patterning of social relations (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon 2001; Turkle 1997; Watson, this volume).22

The technologies of globalization present unique opportunities and challenges for education. In the chapter "Globalization, Digital Skills, and the Brain," Antonio Battro—the eminent Argentinean physician, psychologist, and brain scientist and one of the founders of the new field of mind, brain, and education—examines the extraordinary enabling potential that the digital world offers those with disabilities and children growing up in out-of-the-way places.

Battro argues that the genius of computer technologies is their "friendliness." They open up new opportunities for education particularly among those who have traditionally been shut out, thus more fully developing their cognitive, emotional, and social potential. Battro claims that the ability to make a simple change in the state of a system, what he calls "the click option," is a universal skill that has both evolutionary and developmental origins.

He refers to computer use among a hunting and gathering Bushman group in the Kalahari Desert. Battro claims that a universal "digital skill" develops quite early in life and that such "universal digital skills" have important implications for education, particularly in their potential revolutionary effect for special education and for children living in remote areas. For example, a brain-computer interface permits a patient who suffers from locked-in syndrome (i.e., is cognitively intact but seriously impaired in motor abilities) to communicate with others through the computer. In this case the computer is used as "a functional prosthesis or extension of the brain." Other examples track the enabling qualities of computers among deaf children in remote locations of Latin America. Computers allow hearing-disabled youth to become radio amateurs, something impossible in the past. Battro concludes that it is important for educators to fully mine the enabling potential afforded by the digital world.23

Another issue raised by globalization is the impact of these new technologies on local cultures around the world. The new technologies of globalization generate images, powerful and seductive, of the good life and the good things that make the good life and circulate them worldwide, creating new globalized structures of desire, modernist longings, and with them, feelings of relative deprivation. Youth from China to Argentina flock to see the same movies, visit the same Internet sites, and often come to desire the same "cool" brand-name clothes, music, and lifestyles. One of the dominant discourses in the study of globalization is the "cultural homogeneity" hypothesis.
It predicts that global processes of change enabled by new information and media technologies will inevitably lead to a more homogeneous world culture. Will the next generation of youth become global citizens eating MacDonald’s hamburgers, drinking Starbucks coffee, and using a globalized English to communicate with each other online? If that is the case, then the diversity in the cultures and experiences of youth may disappear. Two leading scholars of globalization and culture, Henry Jenkins and James Watson, complicate these ominous predictions by highlighting the critical role of local meaning-making systems in interrupting and reshaping global media and cultural exchanges, nearly always recasting them in autochthonous terms.

In "Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence," MIT communications scholar Henry Jenkins examines how the technologies of globalization are used to appropriate, decontextualize, recontextualize, and transform cultural images, facts, and artifacts and the resultant "new modes of creativity and expression" in disparate settings. He characterizes the current rapid exchanges of images, facts, and artifacts across national and cultural borders as a form of "media convergence." Jenkins notes that media convergence tends to be multidirectional, reflecting the circulation of products from West to East, as well as a continuous concomitant cultural flow from East to West.24

There are of course flows of cultural products across other axes, such as within Asian countries. Jenkins argues that the meanings of cultural images and products exchanged typically undergo metamorphoses that are both "unpredictable and contradictory." For example, a teenager in the Philippines used Photoshop to create a series of images of Sesame Street’s Bert interacting with Osama bin Laden and posted them on his home page. These images were later used by anti-American Pakistani demonstrators who (unaware of the Bert image in the background) waved signs of bin Laden as CNN videotaped them. These phenomena, Jenkins concludes, offer a theoretical challenge to the widely popular "cultural imperialism" and the "cultural homogeneity" hypotheses.

In his chapter, "Globalization in Asia: Anthropological Perspectives," Harvard social anthropologist James Watson develops a study of globalization in Asian societies and especially its repercussions for cultural practices and changing youth experiences. Watson illustrates the rapid social and cultural transformations occurring in Asia today with examples from a variety of domains such as food, sports, television, movies, Internet technology, clothing, and other aspects of globalization that are subtly changing youth’s daily lives.

Watson disagrees with the widely shared notion that globalization is destroying cultural diversity by homogenizing cultural practices the world over. He concludes that local vectors always transform global products rendering them meaningful in terms of local sensibilities, social practices, and cultural models. For example, the film Titanic was the most popular movie in China in 1997 because the majority of moviegoers identified the tragedy of the film with their personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Watson argues that to capture cultural changes, it is important to distinguish between form and content. He concludes that "the sameness hypothesis is sustainable only if one ignores the internal meanings that people assign to cultural innovations."

Another novel feature of globalization is new patterns of large-scale immigration (see Basch et al. 1994; Castles and Davidson 2000; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; C. Suárez-Orozco 2000; C. Suárez-Orozco and M. Suárez-Orozco 2001; M. Suárez-Orozco and Páez 2002; M. Suárez-Orozco, C. Suárez-Orozco, and Qin-Hilliard 2001, vols. 1, 2 and 3).25 Immigration generates new identities.26 It is also a powerful metaphor for many of the processes that globalization seems to generate, such as feelings of cultural disorientation, anxiety, and confusion about rapidly changing roles, cultural scripts, and social practices; "identity threats"; and multiple identities (Arnett 2002). In some ways, to paraphrase Julia Kristeva (1991), globalization makes us all into dislocated "immigrants," just as it makes us all feel a bit like "strangers to ourselves."

Two chapters deal with the issue of identity in the era of globalization, with a specific focus on the transformation brought about by large-scale immigration.
In the chapter "Formulating Identity in a Globalized World," Harvard cultural psychologist Carola Suárez-Orozco examines the impact of globalization and immigration on the vicissitudes of identity formation among youth. C. Suárez-Orozco contends that one of the challenges facing immigrant children in their adaptation to a new society is identity formation.
Immigrant children face a complex task.
They have to negotiate matters of identity while juggling multiple, often competing and clashing cultural codes. These include cultural models of the family and home, cultural models of the new country, and the larger globalized youth culture. Large-scale immigration is often unsettling and generates backlash among native citizens.

Immigrant children often have to face what C. Suárez-Orozco terms "negative social mirroring" from members of the new country who may come to feel ambivalent, anxious, and xenophobic toward the new arrivals. Such social mirroring can have a negative impact on immigrant youth identity development. C. Suarez-Orozco argues that there is need to reframe the Eriksonian model of identity formation and development in light of new global forces and realities.

Erickson (1968) proposed a stage-specific model of identity formation that involved giving up certain earlier "identifications" to achieve the autonomy, coherence, and independence that "identity" confers. C. Suárez-Orozco argues that in a global world, identity is no longer best conceived as an achievement that involves overcoming or giving up certain cultural identifications. Instead, youth who are players in a global stage must cultivate the multiple identities that are required to function in diverse, often incommensurable cultural realities. Rather than theorizing identity as oriented toward "either" the home culture "or" the host culture, many immigrant youth today are articulating and performing complex multiple identifications that involve bringing together disparate cultural streams.
Increasingly immigrants refuse to give up their cultural sensibilities and particularities in favor of complete identification with the host culture. These psychosocial dynamics interrupt the predictions of the classic theory of immigrant assimilation—as a unilinear process of change with inevitable diminished ethnic identifications (M. Suárez-Orozco 2000). Hence C. Suárez-Orozco’s critique of the stage model of identity formation has implications for both psychological and sociocultural theories of immigrant assimilation.

In her chapter, "Imperial Feelings: Youth Culture, Citizenship, and Globalization," cultural theorist Sunaina Maira explores the connections and disconnections between theories of globalization and the study of youth culture. Maira argues that there has been a strong "epistemological barricade" between these two areas of study, partially due to the traditional conceptions of youth as "inadequately formed adults."

Following Appadurai’s lead, Maira articulates the concept of "youthscape" as a framework for an interdisciplinary approach to research on youth and globalization (see also Maira and Soep, forthcoming). For Maira "youthscape" is "a site for local youth practices" that is "embedded within national and global forces." In her chapter she draws on recent field-based research with South Asian Muslim youth and their experiences with race and citizenship in the aftermath of September 11. Maira’s analysis unfolds in the context of an effort to examine the youths’ understandings and practices of "cultural citizenship," an aspect of the concept of youthscape she is attempting to develop.

Maira discusses in detail two distinct types of cultural citizenship emerging from this site: "flexible citizenship," a national citizenship that youth construct through both transnational popular culture (from their countries of origin) and an emerging identity shaped by their work environments in the United States. For these youth, citizenship is "flexible, shifting, and contextual." The second type is what Maira terms "dissenting citizenship." These Muslim immigrant youth find themselves articulating a critique of U.S. race and ethnic relations in the aftermath of September 11, often raising their voices in the public sphere at a time when the Southeast Asian immigrant leadership chooses silence.

Dissenting citizenship is "based on a critique and affirmation of human rights" even though it means that they must "stand apart" from other citizens in their new home. Maira’s contribution is a detailed example of immigrant youth living in transnational youthscapes, articulating and performing the kinds of multiple identities postulated by Carola Suárez-Orozco as an increasingly common reality in the era of globalization.

Globalization means that the lives of children growing up today will be shaped in no small measure by global processes in economy, society and culture. Educational systems tied to the formation of nation-state citizens and consumers bonded to local systems to the neglect of larger global forces are likely to become obsolete, while those that proactively engage globalization’s new challenges are more likely to thrive. In the final chapter of this volume, Harvard psychologist and education scholar Howard Gardner examines how education changes over time. Historically education has changed because of shifts in values (such as from religious to secular), scientific findings altering our understanding of the human mind (such as the development of psychometrics), or broader historical and social forces, such as globalization.

Gardner argues that an important challenge posed by globalization for education is the tension between the glacial pace of institutional change in ministries of education and schools and the rapid social, economic, and cultural transformations taking place around them. Gardner suggests that precollegiate education will need to encompass the following skills, abilities, and understandings: (1) understanding the global system; (2) the ability to think analytically and creatively within disciplines; (3) the ability to tackle problems and issues that do not respect disciplinary boundaries; (4) knowledge of other cultures and traditions, which should both be an end in itself and a means to interacting civilly and productively with individuals from different cultural backgrounds—both within one’s own society and across the planet; (5) knowledge of and respect for one’s own cultural traditions; (6) fostering of hybrid or blended identities; and (7) fostering of tolerance and appreciation across racial, linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries.

This book is unlike anything written to date on the topic of globalization, culture, and education. First, it is based on commissioned, heretofore unpublished essays by scholars representing a wide array of social science and education scholarship, originally presented at a weeklong Harvard University workshop on education for globalization held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The commissioned papers were developed around strict guidelines determined by our interest in sampling an array of disciplinary considerations (including anthropology, economics, education, history, media and communications, and psychology—both cultural and developmental) and regional concerns (including the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Asia).

We invited senior scholars working in these domains to present at the workshop. We also wanted to examine how education has changed over the centuries. Because we sensed that a great deal of the current scholarship, policy, and popular debate on globalization lacks any historical depth, we invited a senior scholar in the field of history to develop an essay on the historical background of the current cycle of globalization. The original drafts of the papers were circulated to all presenters and participants ahead of time. The Harvard workshop was structured so as to encourage the invited scholars to make brief presentations on their previously circulated papers, with substantial time then devoted to commentary and conversation led by appointed discussants.

27 In addition to the invited scholars, the panels included a select group of seasoned teachers and administrators from the Ross School in New York. The Ross School is an example of just what is possible when the challenges of globalization are taken seriously in a precollegiate setting. The presence and perspective of the teachers was critical in grounding abstract conceptual and empirical discussions in real-life concerns facing teachers in classrooms. Also present was a small group of Harvard doctoral students, as well as a group of policy experts from Europe to offer a point of view on globalization that varies significantly from the American conception.

Harvard doctoral students and note takers were responsible for transcribing the themes emerging from the discussions after each presentation. On the basis of these transcripts, we provided detailed and extensive editorial feedback and suggestions to each author for revising his or her original paper for inclusion in this book. The chapters included surely benefited from this lengthy process by displaying better integration and coherence across domains and between chapters. The authors present original materials and identify new theoretical and empirical opportunities suggesting new areas in need of further scholarly work.
Taken together, the various contributions can also be read as a plea for new collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the complex relationship between globalization and education. It is our intention that the book will help generate new ideas, new empirical data, and new conceptual work that will inform scholarly debate, public policy, and the general citizenry about changes and choices we face in schools, neighborhoods, communities, and countries around the world.

Globalization will continue to be a powerful vector of worldwide change. We need better understanding of how education will be transformed by globalization and how it, in turn, can shape and manage the course or courses of globalization. We need a major research agenda to examine how education most broadly defined can best prepare children to engage in a global world. We need better theoretical understandings of globalization’s multiple faces—economic, demographic, social, and cultural. We need more dialogue between scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. This volume is a contribution to that vision.
Notes
1. By "local context," we mean local values, worldviews, and realms of the sacred.
2.As in the classic Agatha Christy mysteries, a set of seemingly unrelated facts can be woven into multiple possible scenarios accounting for some preexisting (mysterious) condition.

3.Whereas fifty years ago the typical successful professional spent most of his or her career within a single specialized domain and in many cases in a single corporation, today individuals are more likely to pursue multiple career pathways.

4.There is, however, a small corpus of work on globalization and collegiate education. Some of this scholarship focuses on the ways globalization is challenging the historic role of higher education. Shapiro (2002), for example, claims that globalization will reshape universities in the twenty-first century. He suggests that globalization will undo the "historical monopoly [of universities] over the provision, accreditation, and certification of higher education" (p. 12). Others examine how market forces and the new information, communication, and media technologies will inevitably generate a new agenda and new priorities in higher ed
ucation in an international context (see for example, Currie and Newsom 1998.