Globalization, as it is expressed by business, espoused by economic theorists, and enunciated in the popular press, is fundamentally about social and cultural change: change to the strength of our national identities, habits of consumption, modes of communication, patterns of investing, access to information, management of institutions, delivery of health care, and even the waging of war. Bound within the notion of globalization is an assumption that a rapidly changing world requires systemic educational change. Curricula changes are envisioned that will allow high school graduates to better make their way in a globalized knowledge economy that is anchored within a digitized and interconnected world. Recent Canadian curriculum documents (Atlantic Provinces Educational Foundation, 1996; Governments of Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Yukon Territory, 1998) are insisting that citizens experience learning opportunities that will equip them with the appropriate skills, knowledge, and attributes to compete in global environments. These documents take their lead from the publication in the US of A Nation at Risk (1983), in which the guiding philosophy was that the success of international commerce and the nation=s future prosperity are dramatically linked to particular skills sets found in, and required by, transnational corporations. A cornerstone of the educational mandate is the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) directly into core subject areas.

It is postulated that an increase in the demand for knowledge workers is building a critical mass strong enough to begin destabilizing the staid Canadian educational status quo. It can also be postulated that globalization, with its heavy reliance on the Internet and ICT, is influential enough to cause increasing numbers of school teachers and administrators to take a second look at the underlying tenets of public schooling and begin experimenting with alternative teaching methodologies and curriculum arrangements that center on the embedding of ICT and the Internet directly within praxis. But specifically, what are the meta changes to Canadian public educational policy that globalization, with its interdependence on ICT, requires and how might teachers respond to growing pressures to alter what brought them into teaching in the first place?

This article evaluates and ultimately questions globalization as a warranted reason for bringing about systemic changes in classroom practices. It examines the philosophical soundness of educational reform based on an economic construction of human interconnectedness and arrives at a more considered understanding of required change. Critical theory is used to flesh out some of the underpinnings of globalization and to problematize the use of a globalized world-view as offering sufficient reasons for undertaking sweeping educational change. It also relies on Joesph Gusfield's (1981) framework for addressing the delineation of public problems to arrive at a more historical understanding of globalization that expands beyond the narrow lines set out by special interest groups. Globalization is viewed as an artefact with embedded strengths but also weaknesses. With the Roman Empire in mind and an understanding that globalization is not necessarily a new phenomena, it is used here as a concept that sees the increase in the speed of communications, the shrinking of distances, the reliance on international finance, the urbanization of peoples, the homogenising of consumptive desires and the weakening of independent national states as elements within the concept.

Globalization's Critical Mass

To think theoretically about appropriate curriculum change based on the influence of globalization requires an examination of what is fundamental and what is not in schooling. Transnational corporations have an insatiable need for flexible knowledge workers, workers who come armed with the new basics: an understanding of team work, an ability to communicate through a variety of new media, an ability to use digital technologies to solve a variety of complex industrial problems, and a command of multiple literacies. All transnational corporations with global information and communication networks are re-engineering their networked structures, research and development procedures, delivery routines, and manufacturing and services systems. The Web has dramatically changed corporate organization and communications structures. Indeed, Intel's Andy Grove has driven this point home when he bluntly stated in a June 1999 interview on CNBC's Morning Call that "all businesses will be Internet businesses' or they won't have a business."

Information and communication technologies and their accompanying applications are now invaluable tools to most university, civic, and business endeavours. From nanotechnology to biotechnology, from robotics to computer-aided designs, from the use of synthesizers in music production to animated film-making, and from census databases to voting tabulations, information and communication technologies are essential for the completion of both routine and complex calculations, predictions, procedures, and diagnoses.

This business reality has been picked up and used as a guiding paradigm in recent regional Canadian curriculum reform documents (Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation, 1998 and the Western Canadian Protocol for Collaboration in Basic Education, 1998). A central motif of these documents is that old educational practices are no longer sufficient for students to participate fully in post-industrial society (see Lankshear 1998; Barrell, 2000; Castells (2000). These documents acknowledge that businesses no long require great numbers of workers trained in assembly line, factory style models of education. Typical of this discourse is the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum Guide: Grades English 10-12, (1997) which states:

Pervasive ongoing changes in society-- for example, rapidly expanding use of technology-- require a corresponding shift in the learning opportunities for students to develop relevant knowledge, skills, strategies, processes, and attitudes that will enable them to function well as individuals, citizens, workers, and learners. To function productively and participate fully in our increasingly sophisticated technological, information-based society, citizens will need broad literacy abilities, and they will need to use these abilities flexibly. (p. 1)

Canadian curriculum documents note that economic and social change now require increasing numbers of people to engage in what Peter Drucker (1969) called in the1950's and 60's knowledge work. The documents reflect society=s need for what Richard Reich (1992) identified in The Work of Nations as knowledge manipulation workers (p. 171). This demand is based on an understanding that corporations have downloaded greater production and service responsibilities to their frontline workforce while placing a greater emphasis on teamwork and group collaboration to solve complex problems within physically interconnected or networked environments. It also acknowledges the access frontline workers now have to global information and resources.

Widespread worker flexibility is already a mainstay of many institutions where teams of teams are assembled to solve particular client problems or to devise new products and services. Once solutions are found or particular products designed, the institutions dissolve the conglomeration of workers only to reassemble them into new teams of different players ready to take on projects that demand different skill sets and worker attributes. Whatever the civic bureaucracies, corporate structures, or business enterprises, one common requirement of skilled workers stands out: an ability to cooperate in interdisciplinary teams, using various information and communications technologies to solve complex problems.

Guiding this work is a just-in-time mentality where solutions and products are brought immediately to market. In these environments there is an understanding that solutions to problems come from the fluidity of blending information from multiple sources and experiences. The problem-solving knowledge that moves about and within the teams' process is a value-added by-product in and of itself. The ability to juggle information and cascade multiple solutions through corporate or civic structures becomes a key attribute of new players or workers. These environments do not rely on people working individually around discrete, crystallized, discipline knowledge where memorization and routine problem-solving skills play a large role. It has become common practice within Canadian policy directives to say that the majority of schools, as they are currently constituted, are not efficient suppliers of workers capable of meeting the skill sets needed by knowledge workers in globally networked environments because, in general, schools are not mimicking these working structures and environments.

Barrell (2002) has explained that public schools have been efficient suppliers of routine workers. However, there is a glut of routine workers who more and more are being pushed into temporary or part-time, contractual, non-union jobs with limited pensions and benefits. Examples of this work are the lower ranks of the military, retail sales, childcare, healthcare (aides and orderlies), fast food services, or janitorial work. Adding to the plight of routine workers is the fact that globalization allows any and all routine office work, data entry, component assembly, and 1-800 call-centre work to be drained from particular high salary regions and exported to countries with the lowest overheads or with the ability to give corporate tax breaks and incentives. Conceptualising globalization within a framework that sees the aim of schooling as an investment in particular skill acquisitions, policymakers begin to feel the nation's very economic survival is at stake and that educators had better start doing a more credible job of supplying workers capable of matching the technological skills and attributes required by the nation's corporations.

Adopting globalization as a guiding paradigm has required a heavy investment in technology. Caught by a construction of globalization that links a new world economic order, the digital age, the information age, mass media and notions of world interconnectivity, Canadian communities have responded by rushing to find additional funding for school technologies. Parents have sought out various ways to raise more and more money for new equipment and software. Superintendents and principals push for the forging of partnerships with local businesses in order to gain access to various technologies. Lost in the rush, solutions become technologized and simple notions of access subsume the fundamental reasons for intellectual engagement with technological applications in the first place.

The very critical point here is that a chosen course of action becomes fixed within the problem itself. For example, computer literacy has become analogized to basic literacy and visions of future success for students (Larcey, 2000). Thus connectivity, software upgrades, computing skills, and issues of access to ICT becomes paramount in the minds of policymakers and educational communities. By shifting the focus of attention away from the underlying structures that may have caused a literacy problem or a digital divide in society in the first place, a technological solution is promulgated. By focussing attention on a "technological fix" (Light, 2001, p. 711) as the solution to issues of literacy, the underlying purposes for engaging with ICT or the social issues surrounding literacy or the disciplines get lost.

Writing about a technological solution redefining a problem, Light (2001) states that access to technology has not guaranteed much in the past. There is "the shaky causal inference that closing one gap would close another" (p. 715). It is still not clear that the existence of ICT in schools advances student performance. The social and cultural dynamics of the class, the personalities of teachers, differences in academic subjects, and the organization of the school, all combine to make it difficult to expect or find a uniform effect (Fischer, 1992; Cuban, 1986). This is not to say we should avoid the use of technology in schools. Indeed, the thoughtful use of technology and the intelligent integration of ICT can greatly enhance student learning (see Clifford & Friesen, 2001; Papert, 1993).

Investing heavily in the concept of globalization as a governing paradigm might be all well and good if globalization were a stable concept and accompanying technological tools had some permanency. Opportunities to learn today"s ICT skills do not necessarily correlate to success in using future technologies. Technology has a way of advancing that can render equipment and previously gained skills and knowledge irrelevant (IBM key punching machines, Telex machines, eight track tapes and players, five and half inch floppies, zip drives, Logo, spirit duplicators). Light (2001), as an historian of technology, comments, "the digital divide discourse, banks on the assumption that computers, the Internet, and other emerging technologies will persist in a form and with content relevant to educators" broad goals. Historical studies of technological change indicate this is not a safe assumption" (p. 719).

Often there is no slow evolutionary or linear build up of skills with new technologies. New applications appear and can very quickly render some worker skills and abilities relatively obsolete. For educators this lends support for insisting on placing greater emphasis on classroom inquiries and the actions of students and teachers rather than investing too much in particular kinds of technology. It also means positioning various new technologies as interchangeable tools whose functionality will be displaced over time.

A rule of modern globalization is that basic computer skills are available in most cultures and societies. Insights into how the knowledge economy functions has allowed many third world countries to leapfrog over particular national educational deficits and train people in the specific computer skills transnational companies require. Contracting for data entry, for instance, is a highly competitive business. Because of overhead costs, third world counties have a distinct cost advantage over first world nations in gaining such contracts. The time to learn new applications in the knowledge economy is often very short; skill acquisition can now be measured in terms of hours and weeks not months or years. When Canadian jobs that have the attributes of being routine, concrete, and sequential can be easily exported to cheaper labor markets and/or done by computers themselves, economic privilege based simply on the circumstances of location is lost. Since a minor amount of infrastructure is required to tap into the Internet, the geography of cyberspace breaks down the advantage of location. When cyberspace brakes down national boundaries and borders then the particulars of the digital engagements we have Canadian students engage in become paramount. They need to be unique, and I believe, imbedded within the natural requirements of the living, evolving, adaptings disciplines.

New Working Environments Pressure Educational Reform

Staying with the economic mission/strand of public education, it can be said that in the past both rich and poor have agreed that school has been the gateway through which the young must pass to fully participate in the benefits of society. There has been a general consensus around this point and history shows that various groups have fought long and hard for equal access to the opportunities afforded by compulsory education. Also in the past, high school graduates have had an opportunity to access universities or to take up good-paying, union jobs with high levels of security and pension benefits. However, there is now growing apprehension from both the New Right and the working poor that schools, as they are currently constituted, are not able to provide the skills and attributes necessary to guarantee their children access to dignified work and a reasonable standard of living in the digital age. One result of this apprehension has been the rise of testing practices and parental involvement in schooling through vouchers and privatized education.

In the past, secondary school diplomas have, among other things, signified that the bearer could complete a set curriculum, arrive on time, sit for long periods, move about independently within a highly structured environment, pass standardized tests, and do what was required to satisfy the rules and regulations of a large institution (an image of schooling some parents hold dear). However, these are not necessarily the attributes needed of workers in a vibrant economy. Public education is now pressured by the dominance of a competitive national economic imperative to become more in tune with the need of transnational corporations for highly competent knowledge workers. Widespread dissatisfactions with the skills high school graduates have acquired has caused a number of companies to move directly into secondary schools and set up shop in a belief they can train the workers they need (Waks, 2000). In the United States corporate influence has at times moved beyond trying to influence the nature and structure of classroom intercourse to direct control.

For example, driven by a global need for IT workers, Cisco Systems sponsors system engineering certificate programs in over a thousand secondary schools in the United States. States Waks (2000),

"The four semesters, 280 'network' academies are in all fifty states and many countries overseas. ...In cooperation with the World Bank and such transnationals as Time-Warner and Kellogg, Cisco provides the entire curriculum and teacher training to participating schools, and sells them the internet [sic] routers and other necessary equipment at a nominal cost" (p. 12 and 22).

Instructional space for art, music, industrial arts, or other publicly funded curricula can be pushed aside to make room for these stand-alone, corporate programs. Adding to the mix of corporate in-house training is the practice of some recruiters to lure tech-savvy kids directly into industry before they graduate from high school thus diminishing the worth of a public, high school diploma in the eyes of many students. The fact that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others do not have university degrees, somewhat erodes the credentialing powers of public schools and universities. What a high school diploma means in terms of a credential has been weakened over the past decades. This has led trans-global companies to continue to set up their own, so called, universities for the training of future and present employees and not to necessarily accept university degrees and high school certificates "as proxies for the ability to handle complexity or diversity" (Waks, 2000. p. 22).

Graduation certificates issued by companies such as Microsoft, attesting to a person=s training in particular computer applications, carry substantial clout within industry. Again, such corporate training is a direct challenge to public education's credentialing powers, curriculum, and teaching methodologies. But public education in a democratic society is not all about training workers. The issue before public education is to appropriately adjust to a changing world without giving into unexamined corporate skill demands. Caution is required when displacing or out-sourcing the responsibility of educating the nation's students to business partnerships, self-directed learning centres, and on-the-job or in-the-school corporate training centres. However the incursion of the corporate sector into educational spaces does challenge educators to dynamically rethinking the way schooling can be improved. For example it is foolish to bring powerful new technologies into school and try to strap them onto out-moded 19th century pedagogical practices.

Critical Questions for Public Education

• How will access to new technologies overcome poor schools?
• Who benefits from closed-ended technological engagements?
• What is lost or gained by moving into virtual spaces for large portions of the school day?
• Will there be long term residual effects by engaging with particular emerging technologies?
• What are the specific engagements with technology that benefit the student's own intellectual,
  imaginative, and critical capabilities?

Light (2001) reminds us that "historically, powerful political and commercial interests have shaped the ultimate forms and uses of technology" (p. 726) in public schools. Teachers and policymakers need to be mindful of these facts as corporate pressures for engaging technology build. If an economic imperative demands the learning of particular skill sets then we need to be cautious of their real and lasting value to our students.

Before having Canadian students migrate on mass into digital environments and virtual worlds it is important to ask what is being given up, what particular values are being lost, what advantage to human performance is gained? Teachers are struggling to move the use of new technologies toward the creative and imaginative application of these powerful new tools (Cameron & Barrell, 2001;
Uptis, 2001). Here again the pedagogical value is invested in and with the student's thoughtful engagements and not in a shifting medium or application.

The New Right (in Canada see for example the promotional video tape of Foundations for the Future, 2002; in the United States, The Schools We Need), in mustering popular sentiment, fear, and anxiety about the quality and relevance of public education, promotes the view that things have already gone too far in public education and that students need more structure and prescription. They believe the sooner schools return to the basics (read: the schools they experienced) the sooner things in education will improve. Often the rhetoric is situated around returning schools to a past where discipline is first and foremost about outside control, knowledge is something someone else has, textbooks transmit facts and information to learners, individual differences can be remediated out of existence, and students wear uniforms in gender separated classrooms. The New Right pressures schools to foster traditional values, standards, principles, assumptions, testing practices, and methods of instruction in the face of rapid and systemic economic and social change. It
seems their educational clock is set for the traditions of the past; it is certainly not set in time with current Canadian curriculum documents or with the civic or corporate need for flexible knowledge workers who can work in interdisciplinary teams, think "outside the box" and integrate technologies and various digital applications into their learning.

Reformers face varying problems. Community pressure across this country is for schools not to be advocates of broad curriculum change. Schools are not pressured to be leaders in the incorporation of new pedagogical theories, creators of interdisciplinary course work, leaders in educational change, or integrators of new ICT into the various disciplines. It is noted that schools
have had a remarkable ability to maintain their overall organization and structure for decades. And while conservatives like E.D. Hirsch (1987; 1996) insist that schools are dominated by progressivism as pioneered by such institutions as Teachers College, Buras (1999) points out that numerous researchers find "schools overall remain traditional institutions that offer teacher-centred, whole class, textbook-focussed instruction" (p. 72). The pressure on schools is often not to be advocates of innovation or to incorporate the newest pedagogies; rather the pressure is to stand by tried and true forms of schooling (the basics) and to reinforce traditional standards, principles,
and assumptions. Indeed, one reading of the recently increased emphasis on accountability, testing, and the publishing of classroom test results in local and provincial newspapers all act as a restraint on those teachers and administrators who might wish to venture off the well worn instructional path.

Still, institutional change does occur and existing organizations, no matter how large, can become destabilized and allow for new organizational structures and practices to emerge (Meyer & Rowan, 1999). The collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of modern China, and the fall of Baghdad act as reminders of these facts. Institutional theorists must be able to account for such change and the
forces that bring it about. Globalization does challenge the notion of schools being the single purveyors of knowledge and information and lockstep education procedures and linear views of various curricula.

The technologies that sustain globalization are profound and will continue to advance even if Moore's Law (Brand, 2001) were to dramatically slow in the coming decades. An ever expanding nformation and communication technological base that spreads information and knowledge through photonic carriers to companies, communities, societies, global environments, and individuals is powerful enough to destabilize the staid, internal, institutional traditions of Canadian public schooling. Furthermore, the availability of primary sources and original materials on the Net challenges the notion that schools are the sole repositories of knowledge. Eight of the world's principle research libraries are now linked through the International Scholarly Communications network of over 600 libraries (http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=f50 ), abundant statistical data are available through such organizations as Statistics Canada (http://www.statcan.ca), networked communications opportunities and the ability to carry on real-time interdisciplinary collaborative work through Internet and Intranet connections are collectively powerful enough to force and support radical changes to existing institutional practices. Textbooks, with their overpowering influence to control curriculum content, are beginning to be supplanted by information electronically gathered by teachers and students. Teachers now have the chance to challenge textbooks and pre-packaged curricula items with their editorially filtered codified information. Teachers can begin to challenge how knowledge gets constructed in classrooms. For instance textbooks often avoid centring the knowledge of the oppressed groups in society (Potter & Rosser, 1992; Apple & Christian-Smith, 1998)) and release into the world textual representations of mainstream thinking. "Findings clearly show the extent to which content focuses on dominant groups while the experiences of women, labour, and other such groups receive marginal status" (Buras 1999, p. 75). Cultural struggle often succumbs to the need for curriculum coherence thus avoiding the controversy of questioning the parameters of dominant knowledge constructions. ICT, if nothing else, allows for the positing of different sets of questions. It allows the movement outside the confines of the textbook to try and find materials that are more inclusive of varying points of view. ICT allows other voices to be found and brought into play. It allows for the opportunity to do things differently, to show things are more complex. And in return, ICT allows the publishing of student research to the world and the entering into dialogues in authentic ways. The challenge for public education is to use the power of new technologies in creative and dynamic ways to support democratic principles and personal growth. The challenge is to demonstrate that public education is not about training students to work with technology to satisfy immediate corporate needs nor is it about supporting an out-moded transmission pedagogy. The challenge is to find ways of using technology with students to expand their power to think and build knowledge and information.

When the North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL) in the United States did a survey about traditional models of technology effectiveness, the respondents made three major points: a)" effectiveness is not a function of the technology, but rather of the learning environment and the capability to do things one could not do otherwise;" b) "technology in support of outmoded educational systems is counterproductive;" and c) "[the reliance on] standardized tests is ludicrous.... Technology works in a school not because test scores increase, but because technology empowers new solutions" (http://www.ncrel.org/). These findings challenge traditional practice. They overtly challenge traditional paper and pencil testing practices.

Students and public school teachers are aware that schooling can be made more relevant in their lives through the wise use of new digital applications and tools. With the digital tools and resources now available to teachers and students, schools can be made more vibrant and exciting places to be. After all, education is not about the technology but where the technology can take students and how it can help them "break apart the old, fragmented, school-bound versions of knowledge that will no longer do" (Jardine, 2002, p. 3).

Concluding Comments

To interrogate globalization is to ask what teachers and learners are committing their resources to and what they are being asked to make education into as lived conceptions and practices. To question the technologizing of the curriculum is to ask what the literate person is being asked to become and to support. It is also to ask what a person is being asked to ignore, displace, or marginalize. Globalization imposes a vision on peoples. A debate needs to take place around the scripts this phenomenon asks individual students and teachers to play out. There is a way of being in the world that will require schools to radically change and blend new technologies and communications devices into practice in emancipatory and democratic ways. Globalization is forcing changes in the values and purposes of education. It requires mobilizing educators around new patterns of instruction and new modes of operation. Given that globalization is forcing changes to be made to both curriculum and instruction, what will faculties of education be asked to rally around, to understand, and be committed to in the coming decade? What roles can faculties of education play?

Globalization, and its accompanying interwoven reliance on ICTs, advanced communications and access to information, will soon force education faculties to enter into a debate about a myriad of curricula issues. Given what is known about knowledge manipulation work and multiple ways of learning, a debate is needed about whether nineteenth-century subject divisions are still beneficial, whether the sorting of students by grades is still viable, whether assembly-line notions of instruction are still paying off, and whether current testing and grading patterns are worth continuing. Education faculties will be challenged to reconsider what fields of university study constitute suitable preparation for teaching in new environments. Any change to the preparation of teachers often rubs against the educational grain and is resisted by political intransigence. Indeed, educational history, my own observations in schools across Canadian and the United States, and the work of researchers such as Shaver, Davis, and Helburn (1978), Meyer and Rowan (1978), Goodlad (1984), and Cuban (1993), demonstrate that established patterns of schooling have a way of enduring in the face of broad external social and economic circumstances. Unfortunately, the same can be said about many Canadian faculties of education. Traditionally, Canadian faculties of education are rather conservative places with deep political ties to provincial departments of education and strict teacher certification rules and regulations. The Ontario College of Teachers would be a prime example of modern government connectedness and bureaucracy. Generally, teacher education degree requirements are met by courses clustered around "the psychology of learning, classroom management, educational standards [and] assessment, ..." methods courses, and a practicum experience that, more often than not, places pre-service teachers in the hands of teachers pressured to maintain the status quo (Buras, 1999, p. 73). However Canadian faculties of education are beginning to change (Russell, McPherson, & Martin, 2001).

Public elementary and secondary schools will gradually change and respond to the impact of globalization. Accidents in geography are no longer going to sustain our economic and social health; schools will adjust. The challenge for current faculties of education is to somehow welcome pre-service teachers, who by and large have been educated in traditional classrooms, and return them to schools armed with broad ICT skills and a desire to take up the challenge of inquiry based, constructivist, or alternative teaching practices that allow schooling to be done much better. To be sure, delay will see an increase in vocal parental dissatisfaction, the extension of school vouchers systems, an increase in private and alternative school tax relief programs, and increases in corporate involvement in schooling. Each can dramatically affect and undermine the quality of public schools by challenging the level of public funding they receive.

By closely interrogating globalization we begin to see warranted reasons for extensive educational change in both the intentions and structures of schooling. Minor tinkering with the curriculum will not do much to help transform practice. Nor will the incorporation of technology into old pedagogical routines give us the classroom environments that foster robust inquiry. Artificial discipline divisions, the continued isolation of teachers, deeply embedded images of teaching, conservative community expectations of schooling, and old assessment instruments need to be confronted in the coming decade. We need a major rethink of what really counts as success in school. We also need a more complete understanding of the power of globally linked financial markets and transnational corporations, the corporate isolation of parts of the third world, the corporate consumption of the environment, and the disappearance of the national state. Public educational reform is difficult but we have little choice given the economic, cultural, and social changing that are rapidly taking place around us.

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