Digital Globalization and the Ends of Education

Abstract

Education occupies the nexus of an ever-changing field of technology and the market forces of globalization. This chapter analyzes how its effects are manifest in relation to practices grounding the socio-economical and politico-ideological conditions of teaching and learning. Platforms for e-learning and performative standards of digital literacy have influenced curricular objectives on the premise of turning out students prepared to compete for success in the “wired” international e-marketplace. The demands of corporate agendas advocating the necessary technological competence of a new careerism have transformed educational goals. We have an academic responsibility to expose the relation of knowledge to power and the ideological underpinnings of claims to reason in a computerized information society. We must recognize the ethico-political dimension of knowledge that a technological rendering of education diminishes.