| GLOBAL VILLAGE OR GLOBAL CITY? THE (URBAN) COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION AND EDUCATION
Phillip McCann Memorial University of Newfoundland This paper argues that the global communications revolution of the last twenty years has been mainly confined to the wealthy, urbanised and educated countries of the world, to the detriment of the development of education, culture and progress in the largely rural Third World. Advances in communications technology have, almost by definition, been confined to urban areas with developed infrastructures and a skilled and educated workforce. The global economy to which improved communications in all fields has given rise is largely concentrated in the densely-populated, highly-urbanised OECD countries, from which corporate wealth and power exercises hegemony, particularly in the educational and cultural spheres. Neo-liberalism, the ideology of globalisation, has fashioned a concept of education to suit the needs of Western industrial nations. Education is seen at the engine of the economy, propelling the curriculum in the direction of the utilitarian and the vocational, with an emphasis on science, mathematics, computer and business studies, and the promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit. Economic competition has led to a move away from input or process standards towards performance and outcome standards, with frequent testing and the listing of scores in tables, as measures of international comparison. Concomitantly, an urban-based "Western" consumer culture, embracing pop music, Hollywood films, fast-food chains, branded soft-drinks, "airport" novels, "infotainment", etc., is spreading to all parts of the world, threatening indigenous educational-cultural values in the largely rural Third World and developing countries. Globalisation, and the neo-liberal educational program and urban cultural values it espouses, would appear to offer little in the way of remedying the educational problems of these regions, which need, in the first place, a massive improvement in material resources - schools, equipment and faculties and textbooks, as well as other social service infrastructures. Globalisation has given rise to economic and social inequalities, particularly between North and South and seems unlikely, even in the medium team, to be able to correct them. While poverty, disease and unemployment remain, schooling will be hampered, and the penetration of "Coca Cola culture" will be eased. To the extent that globalisation has its roots in the cities of urbanised countries, and has enriched the First World at the expense of the Third, can the city, from a world perspective, unequivocally be said to be a light and a beacon? On 4 February 1997 President Clinton made his State of the Union speech, outlining a 10-point program; this included "a national crusade for education standards... representing what all of our students must know to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st century"; the creation of charter schools; a literacy crusade; skill training and the connection of every classroom and library to the internet. (1) In July 1997 the newly-elected Labour government in Britain presented its educational manifesto Excellence in Schools; this promised investment in human capital in order to compete in the global economy; a "crusade for higher standards", to be measured by school performance tables; and improved information and communications technology. (2) Before the Canadian general election of November 1997, the Liberal Party issued its famous Red Book, Securing Our Future Together. Bearing in mind that education is not a federal jurisdiction, this document contained a surprising number of educational proposals. "The future belongs to societies... who invest in the knowledge, education and innovation of their people", the program declared. This investment would "equip Canadians to compete in a changing world", a policy priority if Canada was not to fall behind other countries. "Partnerships" with industry and business would lead to improvement in secondary education and research and literacy programs would receive extra funding. Investment in infrastructure, including a nationwide internet grid, was forecast for the year 2000. (3)
The roots of neo-liberalism go back to the 1930s, when a group of economists, inspired by the Austrian aristocrat Friedrich von Hayek, came together in Paris in 1938 to re-invent liberalism. (4) Hayek's manifesto, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, asserted that socialism and collectivism were inimical to freedom, which could only be achieved through the market. (5) Though economically libertarian, the neo-liberals (as they were correctly called) were politically conservative and their views harmonised with those of the proponents of globalization as it developed from the 1970s. Today the neo-liberal agenda dictates that market forces are the best guarantee of freedom and prosperity, that the frontiers of the state should be rolled back, and that government support for a wide range of social services should be reduced. This program entwines with and sustains the aims of the proponents of global free enterprise -- the maximisation of trade, financial speculation and profit, and the accompanying strategies of deregulation, privatisation, streamlining and relocation of production, the recomposition of the labour force, and so on, policies which have led to the growth of the service sector, with its poorly-paid casual labour and lack of job security. "For some, globalization is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy," writes Zygmunt Bauman somewhat poetically, "for others globalization is the cause of our unhappiness." But, he adds more realistically, "globalization is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process." (6) Although some historians have traced the roots of globalization to the growth of world empires and the dominance of English as a world language, (7) globalization as we know it, as the historian Eric Hobsbawn has maintained, originates in the elimination of technical obstacles to expansion, which has allowed the economy to reach its present world-wide spread. The turning point, Hobsbawn argues, was the advent of modern air transport which abolished agricultural seasonality; the subsequent vast expansion of communications associated with satellites, fibre optics and the computer, galvanised the growth of transnational production, trade and finance. (8) Today transnational corporations control 25% of global output and the annual sales of the top 100 companies total $4 trillion. (9) The United Nations Human Development Report 2000 has this to say about transnational companies: Global corporations...have the potential to do great damage -- by destroying livelihoods through environmental practices that lay forests bare, deplete fishing stocks, dump hazardous materials and pollute rivers and lakes that were once a source of water and fish. They can also disempower poor people and rob them of their dignity through hazardous and inhumane working conditions. And their influences can inevitably go further -- in supporting repressive regimes... (10) Bauman points out that globalization, rather than unifying the world, tends to polarise it, (11) and undoubtedly the most salient feature of today's world is the growth of economic inequality. Wealth accumulates in the richer nations (and to the rich within those countries) and drains away from the poorer Third world. 20% of the world's population (read the 29 OECD countries) consume 86% of the world's goods. (12) The significant point is that inequality has increased most rapidly in the last twenty-five years, the heyday of globalization. In 1973 the difference between the richest and poorest countries was 44-1; by 1992 it had risen to 72-1. (13) The United Nations Human Development Report 2000, UNESCO's World Education Report 2000, and the World Bank Atlas 2000 give a heartrending picture of poverty, disease, illiteracy and labour besetting children in the Third World, where income, GNP and exports have all declined in the last three decades. This is not to mention the depredations wrought by the "structural adjustment programs" and debt collection policies of the IMF and the World Bank. (14) If the policies of neo-liberal governments and organisations have resulted in the destruction of the life chances and educational opportunities for millions of children in the Third World, the effects of neo-liberal educational policies in the First World countries have had a more subtle but nonetheless deleterious effect on the quality and aims of education. Neo-liberalism has long had an educational component. In 1961 Theodore Schultz advanced his theory of human capital, which posited a direct link between investment in the education of young people and increased productivity of the economy. (15) A year later Milton Friedman argued against the reforms of "big government", for a greater play of market forces in education, and for the extension of parental choice and the quasi-private voucher system in schooling. (16) A case study of developments in the United States in subsequent years will elucidate the socio-economic background of the neo-liberal education agenda. In the mid '70s, coincident with the reassertion of the power of capital under United States hegemony and the ending of the past-war Keynesian consensus, the politico-economic tide increasingly flowed in neo-liberal channels. In 1974 and 1976 respectively the prototype neo-liberals Hayek and Friedman received the Nobel Prize for economics. In 1979 their disciple Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain, followed a year later by the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. The centre of economic gravity in the United States was moving from the politically liberal rust-belt to the politically conservative Sunbelt, with its space-age and cold war plants serving the military, aerospace and the computer industries. Futurologists such as John Naisbitt, Alvin Toffler and Newt Gingrich were announcing the advent of the knowledge economy and the Information Age, with implications for culture and education. (17) The educational strand in neo-liberalism came to full prominence in the United States in 1983, with the publication of A Nation At Risk, issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and endorsed by President Reagan. The essential message of the report was simple: the education system was being undermined by "a rising tide of mediocrity", which was putting the nation in jeopardy. Radical reforms were necessary if the United States were to maintain, and improve on, its "competitive edge" in world markets. (18) It is hardly surprising that the corporate executives, government bureaucrats and assorted academics who compiled A Nation At Risk (and other similar reports) bowed to the prevailing zeitgeist and produced a document which, acknowledging the imperatives of the information age, declared that "knowledge, learning, information and skilled intelligence are the new raw material of international commerce", and on this basis laid the groundwork of new policies and practices for education, somewhat different from the liberal-humanist curriculum and the loose connection of schools with the world of work of traditional education. The Report's recommendations can be summarised as follows: that education should be aligned to the imperatives of the market economy; that deficiencies in schools rather than structural defects in the national economy were the root cause of the nation's weakness; that business and corporations had a right to help determine educational policy; that the curriculum should emphasise scientific, technical and vocational subjects, including a large input of computer studies, and that more rigorous standards be enforced, and tested regularly. (19) As Oscar Wilde observed: "On matters of importance, style, not sincerity, is the important thing", and there is no doubt that the use of apocalyptic language and the dramatic organisation of the argument -- not to mention the harmony of its recommendations with information age ideals -- contributed to the report's impact and acceptance, not only in the United States but also elsewhere, particularly in Canada. Since 1983, American politicians and educationists have continued to maintain that school standards have deteriorated. Richard Rothstein, in an amusing book entitled The Way We Were, was able to show, however, that allegations about low standards in schools have been made in every decade of the twentieth century. (20) The (largely erroneous) belief that standards were declining was, in fact, the motivation behind the fairly recent introduction of "high stakes" testing. When Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979 she used a similar argument: the educational legacy of the 1960s -- general permissiveness, the lowering of standards, child-centred teaching -- was ruining the nation's education. A thorough reorganisation of the whole system was necessary. Throughout the 1980s and '90s a series of policy initiatives were put into operation: the financial and organisational powers of local educational authorities were to be weakened and schools removed from their control; more authority was to be given to parents; a rival state sector inaugurated -- ostensibly to increase choice and competition; the curriculum (formerly largely the prerogative of individual schools) to be prescribed by government, and strict assessment of individual school performance made mandatory. A wide-ranging Education Act in 1988 introduced Local Management of Schools and Open Enrolment, which effectively handed over most of the control of schools from local authorities to parents. Under John Major, Grant Maintained Schools -- self-governing state schools -- (a.k.a. charter schools) were established, "league tables" of school performance set up, and a powerful Office of Standards and Testing in Education founded. (21) These reforms affected the state sector. Nothing was done to modify England's unique two-tier system of education, embodied in the existence of over 200 major schools belonging to the independent private sector outside state control, which supplies a disproportionate number of students to the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Nor did the Conservative governments, or their Labour successor, improve social conditions which adversely affect educational performance and opportunity. 34% percent of children in Britain live in poverty, up from 10% in 1979, a condition which is affecting their performance at school. (22) A lower proportion of pupils of blue-collar parents entered higher education in 1999 than in 1996. (23) Tony Blair's Labour Party has retained virtually all the educational reforms of the Thatcher-Major era, and in the first three years of power spent less on education than the latter. (24) Its own reforms, some of them good in principle, have been applied unimaginatively and in top-down fashion -- for example, enforcement of a national curriculum, literacy and numeracy hours, compulsory citizenship classes, and extended standardised testing; on the results of the tests league tables of school performance are compiled (with closure for "failing" schools). The government, in true neo-liberal fashion, continues to use the slogan "standards, not structures" (i.e., socio-economic conditions) as the focus for educational reform. Two sympathetic but critical observers of the Labour Party's performance have summed up their concerns about its educational policy: 'The biggest worry with Labour's current approach to education has little to do with the workability of its drive on standards or with money; it is the single-minded instrumentalism that underlies its thinking. The idea that education... is a way of helping people to discover and enjoy the infinite riches of human culture, develop their intellectual capacities and their creativity and find personal fulfilment -- has been all but forgotten in Labour's enthusiasm for investing in human capital in the age of knowledge.' (25) In Canada, unlike the USA and Britain, there is no federal education office or ministry; each province jealously guards its educational prerogatives, and any survey of Canadian education must deal with such overall policies as can be discerned. A national debate on the future of education, inspired by the American reform movement, began in the late 1980s and early '90s. During the premiership of Brian Mulroney, a flurry of reports appeared on the future of education, issued by corporate organisations and government-sponsored scientific associations. A selection of titles will indicate their orientation: Focus 2000; Reaching for Tomorrow; Inventing Our Future; A Knowledge-Based Economy: The New National Dream. Their contents echoed the now-familiar neo-liberal arguments and recommendations of the American crisis and reform literature, often in similar language but in a less oracular manner. The increasing linkage of education with the world of work was evident in the emphasis on the creation of a workforce of mobile labour, equipped with what the Conference Board of Canada calls "employability skills" -- generic skills, portable qualifications and technological literacy, and flexibility adapted to life-long learning. The organisation of more centrally developed curriculum frameworks, especially in science, followed. The deficit crisis of the early '90s gave occasion to the federal and provincial governments to initiate a series of cutbacks in educational funding whose effects are with us yet. Two educationists in the World Year Book of Education 2000 sum up recent trends in Canadian education:
A closer look at education reform in two provinces where the political right has gained power will bear this out. Klein's "renovation" of Alberta education has been part of his restructuring of economic and public life, which involved lower corporate taxes ("the Alberta advantage"), deregulation, balancing the budget by cuts in public services (including education) privatisation, etc. He claimed that Albertans were not getting value for money in education and that outcomes could be improved only by opening up the service to the market and allowing greater parental choice and self-responsibility. The cutting edge of educational reform was the Charter School. A publicly-funded, independent, free, open-to-all institution, it is formed by a charter or contract between the Ministry of Education and a group of parents, citizens and educators outside the control of local authorities; in other words a charter school is a state-financed private school. The school would have some discretionary power over innovation, but would not have to hire unionised teachers. It would have to justify its existence by results, largely based on scores in standardised tests of information-based learning. These performance-based skills were to produce the "intellectual capital" which would form "an economic engine designed to increase Alberta's competitiveness, wealth and quality of life". (27) As in Alberta, so in Ontario, with Premier Harris's "commons sense revolution". Bill 160, The Education Quality Improvement Act of 1997, was preceded by a $1 billion cut in public funding, the elimination of rent control, the reduction of local democracy, the reduction or elimination of school board powers, curricula reforms and the promotion of standardised testing. The Bill and the Act essentially gave the government unprecedented power over almost all aspects of public education including average class size, reduction in teachers' preparation time, length of school day, etc. A per-pupil funding formula (similar to Britain's Open Enrolment policy) and the promise of greater parental choice in schooling, essentially turns families into consumers of education and seekers of the "best school". The reform basically aims to centralise power and decentralise accountability. (28) * * * * To move from the particular to the general, there are at least half-a-dozen areas of education, all interlinked to, and affected by, globalisation and neo-liberalism, in which the best of the liberal-humanist pedagogical tradition is under threat. The modification of the curriculum, the undermining of local control and the move towards privatisation, and the increasing accommodation of schooling to the world of work and economic productivity have, I think, received sufficient attention. Three others -- standardised testing, the infiltration of business, advertising and the consumer ethic into schools, and the increasing use of computer technology in education deserve a closer look. Standardised testing is increasingly being used in all three countries, particularly the U.S.A. It is a by-product of the drive for international economic competition, where national achievement can be measured in numbers. In essence, standardised testing intensifies the worst features of traditional education -- the fragmentation of knowledge into subjects, learning by memorisation, dependence on textbooks, the search for the right answer, and the measurement of achievement by examination. In the step-by-step mastery of discrete fragments of knowledge, testing betrays its origins in the outmoded behaviourist theories of Watson, Pavlov, Skinner et al. It rests on several dubious assumptions: that the basis of education is the learning of facts; that only the observable is real, and only the real can be tested, measured and quantified. In extreme cases classroom activity is reduced to "teaching to the test", with pupils as passive recipients of units of knowledge. "High-stakes testing", in which, according to the logic of the market, poor performers are penalised or dismissed, seems to me to strike at the heart of valid education -- the cultivation of the imagination, critical thinking, reading and writing as a means of human communication, the exploration of liberal arts and science, and the general enrichment of the personality. Questions remain -- does every pupil need a standard skill? Should any child be labelled "substandard"? In the United States it is students from the minorities who are most likely to receive this label. (29) During the 1990s business in its many forms has taken an imprecedented interest in education. From the World Bank's 1995 document Priorities and Strategies for Education to Business Week's slogan of the following year "Education is Business's Business," (30) to the Asia-Pacific Economic Council's call for "maximum business intervention" in schools, (31) corporate interests have targeted institutions of learning. This takes two forms: school-business "partnerships," in which cash strapped schools receive free or cheap computer hardware and software, participate in school-to-work programs, "match" themselves with business firms, allow business input into curriculum, and similar ventures. (32) In 1996, the European Commission directed that all 300,000 schools, 4 million teachers and 67 million pupils in the European Community be placed in partnerships with TNCs within the decade. (33) In Canada there are as many as 20,000 such links, with some 90% of schools involved. (34) The Council of Ministers of Education supports such initiatives. (35) In Britain 90% of secondary schools have associations with business. (36) Some businesses expect students trained in their hardware in school to enter their organisation after graduation. The other aspect of business influence ins schools is direct advertising of products, and this extends right down to kindergarten level. In the United States this is a large industry -- Lifetime Learning Systems has 2 million teachers using corporate-sponsored education programs; Modern Talking Pictures has links with several mega-corporations; Youth News Network issues news broadcasts to thousands of schools with a mandatory two minutes of commercial advertising. In Canada, Toronto has hosted a conference entitled "Kid Power: Creative Kid-Targeted Marketing Strategies," aimed at children 2-12 years. Kids World Magazine, with corporate advertising, circulates in 1,600 large English-language elementary schools, 40% of the target school population. Junior Jays Magazine has a similar readership. (37) I could elaborate, but the subject is almost infinite. And I haven't yet mentioned such obscenities as Burger King Academies and McDonald's input into the curriculum of American schools. The object of all this is purely commercial. Kids have deep pockets -- an estimated $20 billion spending power in Canada alone (38) -- and the strategy is not only to tap this market, but to instil "brand loyalty" for life, and secure allegiance to a free-market world. And finally the computer, which is really the heartbeat of the Information Age. But what is information? Its original meaning was a factual statement to an inquiry, whether in a tourist office or a library. Since 1950, however, when Claude Shannon published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," the meaning of the word has been revolutionised and it now connotes anything that can be coded for transmission (from great thoughts to gibberish) through a channel that connects a source with a receiver. (39) Once this is accepted, there seem to be two aspects of the use of the computer in education which deserve scrutiny. First, as some analysts have pointed out, the very speed and apparent mechanical certainty of computers; the ability to translate whatever enters the computer into binary numbers, to homogenise all that enters the coding system, obscures a distinction between ideas and information, i.e., between the idea or design of a program and the data, although both are commonly subsumed under the rubric of information. Theodore Roszak, in The Cult of Information, argues that every piece of software contains ideas, assumptions and attitudes which govern the data, and require evaluation as to their philosophical content. Thus when a student sits in front of a computer, moving the cursor to access data, he or she is not only looking at a screen, but also entering into a relationship with the mind of the person who constructed the program. The software thus contains the conceptual matrix within which students think, and which, to a greatest or lesser degree, organises his or her thought processes. (40) Second, prolonged exposure to computer programs which, by the very nature of the computer itself, proceed by step by step progression and formal logical sequences, may lead students and teachers to believe that the mind's operations also follow their pattern, i.e., that thinking is a matter of data processing, and the more rapid the operations the greater the learning. (41) But as Whitehead and others have pointed out, thinking and learning do not always proceed in a series of logical steps, but by leaps, intuition, combination and re-combination of ideas, the sudden formation of a gestalt. The mind thinks with ideas, not information. The most important task of educators is to contrive learning situations in which young minds can come together to create, evaluate, adapt and use ideas. The computer may have its place in education, but it cannot replicate the workings of the human mind, and its continual use may do harm to the very thought processes it is the duty of educators to cultivate.
|