Education in a Globalizing World: Why the Reach Exceeds the Grasp

Education in a Globalizing World: Why the Reach Exceeds the Grasp. 2007. Penerbit UKM: Bangi. ISBN 978-967-942-811-7 (paper back cover). 40 pp. RM20.00. Joan M. Nelson.

Education is key both to individual success and to national development and capacity to compete in the increasingly integrated international economy. Yet many people believe that globalization weakens governments’ capacity to improve education, perhaps even spurring a ‘race to the bottom’ due to fiscal pressures and neo-liberal influences. Trends in middle-income countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and East Asia show that, on the contrary, government spending on education has risen rapidly in recent decades. So has private spending on education, as middle classes expand. In many countries, private schools are providing a rapidly increasing share of instruction. Public school systems have been slow to address growing problems of quality, equity and efficiency, and to respond to changing education needs. One result is growing dualism: quality education for those who can pay, less good service for those who can’t. That pattern feeds the growing income inequality many observers associate with globalization. The core problem is not the globalization is squeezing spending, but that institutional reforms needed for better education systems are extremely difficult – in wealthy as well as middle income countries. Efforts to reform education contfront a syndrome of technical, administrative, and political obstacles. The syndrome is surprisingly similar in many countries, despite important differences in national education systems. As a result, improvements are uneven, slow, and prone to backsliding. The obstacles to reform are largely internal to each country. But globalization, in the form of accelerating economic competition, is indeed heightening pressure for much more rapid improvements in the performance of ppublic education. Malaysia, as one of the most throughly globalized economies among middle-incomecountries, may face this pressure in particularly acute form. There are no formulas for overcoming the embedded obstacles to reform, but effective action requires a much stronger emphasis on the strategy and tactics of implementation then has been the practice in most countries.

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Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

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Malaysia

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