Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
The Knowledge of Educational Reform as an Effect of Globalization: A Case in Taiwan
By
Chin-Ju Mao(Associate Professor, NationalChungChengUniversity, Center for Teacher Education and Graduate Institute of Curriculum Studies)
168 University Rd., Ming Hsiung, Chia-Yi, Taiwan 621
Jason Chang (Professor, NationalTaiwanNormalUniversity, Department of Education)
ABSTRACT
This paper emphasizes the role of knowledge as the focal point of globalization processes. Using educational reform knowledge as an example, this paper focuses on Taiwan’s educational reform movement since the 1990s until now.We discuss the flows, networks, assemblages, connections, and reconnections of educational reform knowledge under negotiation between the global and the local. We discuss how neo-liberalism as a global educational reform discourse circulates in the local context of Taiwan in which deregulation and decentralization were selected and reformulated due to local political logic.
We argue that the global and the local are intricately joined together and produce what we call a transmogrified practice of educational reform. As a form of knowledge, neo-liberal education reform policy ideas were introduced from Western countries (such as the USA and Britain) in the global and reinserted into the local context of schooling. They have foreign qualities masked by local qualities, and vice versa. The knowledge of educational reform is transformed in order to meet particular national and local interests and identities. In particular, our analysis indicates how local struggles to reinterpret the meaning of education reform policy and reformulate ways of practicing it faces an enduring local struggle – the widening of social divisions.
Key Words: Globalization, Localization, Educational Reform, Neo-liberalism
The Knowledge of Educational Reform as an Effect of Globalization: A Case in Taiwan
Introduction
In most nations, educational reform is considered to be a strategic intervention method. It can solidify a sense of national identity, enhance the viability of economic activities and systems within world markets, and link macro issues of social regulation with educational issuessuch as curriculum and instruction, all of which is tied to the micro-constitution of future citizens. Educationreform efforts deal with problem-solving, efficiency,and howparticular ideas and reform methods frame educational policy and the restructuring of education. The circulation of educational reform knowledge is an interesting phenomenon that signifies a globalization process and its effect on local lives. Knowledge about reform is usually viewed as an epiphenomenona to the materiality of the world, and not as a productive object or “social fact” constituting the world in which we live (Popkewitz, 2004). However, this paper argues that knowledge about reform is an invisible yet powerful tool for re-directing social life via reform policies.
In the era of globalization, schools are facing many issues, ranging from the knowledge economy to productive workers, from nation-state citizenship to global citizenship, and from local identity to cosmopolitan identity. Educational reform addresses economic, political and cultural issues. Previous research indicates that the neo-liberal version of globalization is reflected in the framework of educational reform (Arnove 2003; Burbules and Torres 2000). In this framework, market mechanisms such asdecentralization, deregulation and privatization are introduced to regulate education. Taiwan is not an exception to this trend, but its borrowing of neo-liberal educational reformideas has different meanings in different historical times. It has been imported by local elites and experts, but was reformulated and translated in the process of appropriation and practice in schools. This paper argues that Taiwanexhibits a ‘hybrid’ neo-liberal educational reform in which the globalized discourse of neo-liberal educational reform appears as a local discourse, saturated with local interests and political ideologies. Taiwanese educational reform in the last sixteen years has oscillated between globalization and localization. A neo-liberal sense of educational reform has been exported from the global framewrokand internalized with domestic cultures and politics, appearing as a local discourse. Exploringthis weaving together of different discourses about educational reform in Taiwan helps to demonstrate that educational reform knowledge is like a global idea circulating at the local level. This ideais connected with local interests and shaped by political struggles. In this way, it stimulates new ways of thinking about local responses to the educational reform movement in the global context. It also points out the invisibleand often unnoticed effect of the circulation of global knowledge as it reshapesthe local adoption of reform policy.
In this paper, we first discuss how globalization affects education and results in re-regulating schools. Second, we propose hybridization as an analytical concept in the dialectical process between globalization and localization. In this exchange,the knowledge in global circulation plays an important rolein identity construction. Third, we analyze how neo-liberal educational reform ideas, illustrating particular and distinctive patterns of reform knowledge in global circulation, were transformed and reinserted into local discourses of national imaginary and international competition. We conclude by pointing out the theoretical implications of comparative studies in the global era and consequences of local adaptation to neo-liberaleducational reform.
What Is Happening to Us: Globalization as an Effect
Globalization as an influential force has been reshaping the world. Bauman (1998) indicated that globalization is not about what we wish or hope to do. Rather, it is about what is happening to us all, because there are unintended and unanticipated consequences of globalization. This section demonstrates how globalization as an effect reshapes our ways of life, especially in terms of economy, politics, and culture, and how this relates to educational reform and practice.
National cultures and social boundaries are being radically transformed and redrawn in the face of expanding global capitalist markets and increasingly fast-paced transformational movements of people, communities, ideas, and media images. Gibson-Graham (1996, p.121) pointed out that globalization is like “a set of processes by which the world is rapidly being integrated into one economic space via increased international trade, the internationalization of production and financial markets, the internationalization of a commodity culture promoted by an increasingly networked global telecommunications system” (quoted from Stromquist & Monkman, 2000, P.4). Beginning as a global economy, this economic space is also connected to cultural and political influences. All these factors shape education in policy-making or practice.
A general description of globalization characteristics that closely affect education can be summarized in the following dimensions – economic, political, and cultural. Inthe economy, there are new pressures on the roles of worker and consumer in society. Competitiveness is a major principle in the globalized market, and knowledge has become one key component in the attainment of competitiveness. With the rise of multiple technologies and globalization dynamics, permanent structures of knowledge and meaning have crumbled. In contrast, science and technology receive much respect because the knowledge of technology and science has assumed a powerful role in production, making its possession essential for nations to pursue economic growth and competitiveness. The concept of the knowledge economy or “knowledge management systems”proposed by international agencies (such as The World Bank and OECD) comes at a time when knowledge is increasingly embedded in technical capital (Curry, 1997). In the face of an increased speed of knowledge circulation, schools have to reconsider what students should learn in light of changing job markets. It has been argued that students should learn new technical, social and mental skills to adapt to changing job demands, to coexist with others, and to be cope with the fluctuations of human life (Ministry of Education, 2001). That is to say, in the future, educational aims will be concerned with adaptability and flexibility.
In politics, nation-state sovereignty is being challenged while international investment across national borders promotes the flow of economic capital, the mobility of people (including investors as well as migrant laborers), and the opportunity of cultural encounters. The sovereignty of nation-states is being constrained by their need to balance transnational capital needs, international political pressures, and domestic political and social demands (Bauman, 1998). Due to the free movement of capital and finances, the “economy” is progressively exempt from political control. As Bauman described: “Whatever has been left of politics is expected to be dealt with by the state…, but whatever is concerned with the economic life the state is not allowed to touch.” (Bauman 1998, p.66). Thus, the sovereignty of the state is being shattered by demanding world markets.
Correspondingly, the concept of ‘citizenship’ is in ambivalence. This is becauseit is derived from the concept of nation-state sovereignty and is commonly characterized by precise roles, rights, obligations and status within the nation-state. Traditionally, educational systemshave been highly national in character and were organized by a state-administered order. On one hand, education is an ideological apparatus to sustain a state’s legitimacy and identity. By appropriating cultural resources, school curriculum officially teaches cultural knowledge and forms a sense of social cohesion and national identity (Apple, 1996). On the other hand, under conditions of globalized economy and media information, schools are expected to prepare students for a changing reality, and curricula should be organized to include heterogeneous cultural sources such as popular youth culture and media literacy (Grossberg 1986; Giroux & McLaren, 1994; McCarthy, et al 2003). A curriculum is designed to help students “construct their own knowledge” and work together in groups on complex tasks. Students are expected to be active and creative, transforming into productive and flexible citizens. Between social solidarity and individual flexibility, the aims of curriculum are caught in a swaying global-local tension that is fundamentally cultural.
Under the effect of globalization, global circulation of ideas and information, commodities, and media culture has contributed to the emergence of what some refer to as a global culture, or an increase in cultural homogeneity. At the same time, global flows of diverse cultures have increased opportunities for cultural encounters and the production of new hybrid cultural forms. It is these developments that lie at the heart of the postmodern condition – the historic juncture in which universalist ideals conflict with particularist visions, unity is challenged by diversity, and imagined national communities are crosscut by the politics of culture and calls to recognize collective forms of identity and difference (Hall, 1996; Appadurai, 1996; Harvey ,1989; Lyotard, 1984).
In the era of globalization, education is a contested terrain where the politics of culture is being fought. Educational institutions are deeply implicated in the postmodern debates and dilemmas concerning the politics of knowledge, culture, and identity. Stuart Hall argued that the increasing pace of globalization tends to undermine cultural identity, which is detached from specific times, places, histories, and traditions, and appears to be‘free-floating’” (Hall, 1992, p.303). This free-floating feeling can become so unbearable that people try to re-identify themselves with particular reference either to native and national cultures or to global consumer cultures[1].
However, many scholars reject this “either-or” dichotomy. They believe that in the cultural dimension, local particularity interacts with global homogeneity in a more complicated, not straightforward, way. This phenomenon is captured in such terms as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1992), ‘vernacular globalization’ (Appadurai, 1996), and hybridization (Bhabha, 1994). These all illustrate that cultural globalization is associated with the new dynamics of re-localization.
Globalization should not be interpreted as a simplifying process of cultural homogenization, but rather an articulation between the global and the local (Hall, 1996, p.407). The practice of schooling and educational policy making falls under the same global-local-in-between context. Education are deeply shaped by global forces and continuously internalized within local realities.
Hybridization: A dialectical process between globalization/localization
The mix between globalization and localization is a key point in understanding what is happening to us in the era of globalization. Giddens (1990) stated conclusively:
Globalization can …be defined as the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space (Giddens, 1990, p.64).
As mentioned above, localization is a part of globalization. Localization is a reflexivecommunity reconstruction in the face of dehumanizing implications such as the rationalizing and commodifying logic of globalization. Therefore, globalization should not be viewed as a unified, global phenomenon. Rather, the dynamics and interactions occuring in both global and local dimensions are focal points of how globalizing forces reshape human life in general and educational practices in particular.
In this section, we propose hybridization (hybridity) as an analytical concept which is theoretically relevant to discussions of how educational reform shifts between the global and the local and how it is re-formulated and translated by the local.
Hybridity and Hybridization: Analytical Concepts
The idea of hybridization or hybridity is underscored by recent post-colonial scholarship (Young, 1995; Spivak, 1992; Bhabha, 1994). It has redefined the relation between colonizers and the colonized, and the belief that colonial politics embody fluid and pragmatic relations within a field of multiple power relations. It highlights an overlay of difficult discourses that join the global and the local through multipleand multidirectional complex political and cultural patterns. The concept of hybridity makes it possible to think of educational reforms as plural assumptions, different interests, and complicated procedures in which the practices of reform are undertaken. Hybridization provides a way to consider the interrelation of globalization and localization processes as constituted through fluid, multiple, and historically contingent patterns. There are many theoretical implications toapplying hybridity and hybridization concepts to the analysis of the playing field between the global and the local. This is especially true in the arena of education.
The following are some examples of discourses regarding educational reform in Taiwan. These illustrate how the concepts of hybridity and hybridization can be employed in the analysis of educational reform amid global-local tensions.
Neo-liberalism as a circulation of global discourse on educational reform in the local
Internationally and nationally, neo-liberal ideologies are the most powerful elements within current discourses of reform in public policy. The neo-liberal version of globalization, particularly as implemented and ideologically defended by bilateral, multinational, and international organizations, is reflected in the framework of educational reform. This framework privileges particular policies for evaluation, financing, assessment, standards, teacher training, curriculum, instruction, and testing (Arnove, 2003). Market mechanisms of decentralization, deregulation and privatization are introduced to regulate education. Business sector management and efficiency models have been appropriated as a framework for educational decision-making. Students are seen as human capital, and education needs to equip students with the requisite skills and dispositions to compete efficiently and effectively in an intensively competitive world economy. Internationally, many governments promote notions of open markets, free trade, reduction of the public sector, decreased state intervention in the economy, and the deregulations of markets (Morrow & Torres, 2003). Neo-liberalism has become a set of global ideas about reform circulating in many locals.
If we think of neo-liberalreform as an example of global reform discourses circulating in many locals, it implies that global ideas of neo-liberal reform will not travel from the central nations of the world system to the peripheral and less powerful countries without contestation and transformation. Globalization is internalized within a national debate so that the international circulation of reform idea appears as a local discourse. For example, the Taiwanese government is one of traditionally centralized states. By employing the ideas and framework of neoliberalism, it devolves its power to local governance and market regulation of education. This is done in response to its domestic tendency of democratization and the government budget deficit. In the 1990s, educational reform discourses inTaiwan focused on deregulation and decentralization, and were in accordance with the social aspirations of democracy and the cultural urge of indigenization. Because of deregulation and decentralization, curriculum reform was made possible, and this directed the political imagination toward discourses of democracy and Taiwan-centricism. These issueshave been nationallydebated since 1987. The process of hybridization made neo-liberaleducational reforms appearto be part of international circulation of reform ideas,and projected particular national interests and political ideologies. From 1987 to the 1990s, the deregulation discourse was strongly intertwined with the idea of decentralization because it wasin accord with the social tendency of democratization that involved a range of initiatives to increase local autonomy and transfer the strength of civil society from state control to local control. The demand for political democratization overrode the need of economic reform in the 1990s, when global and Asian economic recession had yet not come. Educational reform discourse during the early 1990s was less coupled with the talk of marketization. Even though marketization language was used, it was especially pointed to decentralize the textbook publication mechanism. The interpretation of marketization for deregulating textbook publication was framed in talk of challenging the ideological state apparatus. It was argued that through maketization, school textbooks could be exempted from political ideological indoctrination by the state(see Chen 2003). In educational reform discourses in the 1990s, this was originally a political concept rather than an economic concept. In the early 1990s, the educational reform policy took measures involving deregulation, decentralization and indigenization. There were multiple reform policies, such as introducing indigenous elements into the curriculum, decreasing state intervention in the education system, introducing school-based management, a more democratic form of curriculum, open teacher education program policy, and more. Discourses of deregulation and decentralization, rather than talk of marketization and privatization, were strongly intertwined with the national idea of democracy and state re-formation. This took place in the discursive field of educational reform, while economic recession and the government budget deficit problem didn’t receive public attention until 2001. The translation of the global idea of neo-liberal educational reform to the local educational system was selective and reformulated by local political logic. Therefore, the reformulation of neo-liberal educational reform in the Taiwanese context doesn’t have to be the same as it was in the USA or Britain (e.g. Apple, 2000; Whitty, 1997). A process of hybridization is occuring when the global idea of neo-liberal educational reform is circulating around the world.