Globalization and the governance of national education systems

Abstract

After a century of centralization of state and education systems, an opposite world trend of decentralization started in the 1980s. This chapter takes a broad perspective and attempts to locate decentralization within the context of globalization, governance and ideologies that argue for a decentralized role for the state in education. Globalization has direct as well as indirect effects on education; the former is the borrowing from or imitation of the world model and the latter are the societal changes that the schools, teachers and students experience related to pressure from globalizing economic and cultural forces 1. Although an important component of the new type of governance (NG), decentralization alone is not sufficient to make such governance complete. Therefore, decentralization often makes part of a larger package of reforms (educational restructuring) including introduction or reinforcement of freedom of choice, privatization and sometimes centralization of goal formulation, curriculum, and assessment. All this makes monitoring and evaluation an increasingly important task of the central state. The chapter argues that a new mode of governance (NG) has emerged as a way for the central state to respond to (i) multiple and sometimes contradictory demands and requirements, some of which result from global processes and others from the inherent difficulties for the central state to finance and run large-scale systems such as education; (ii) re-orientation in policy and research from structuralism and state centrism to agent-orientation and an economic view of man and the concomitant elite assumption that rationalization (enlightenment) in society is growing 2; and (iii) unprecedented education budget cuts. The chapter gives an overview of the role of the state during the past decades and presents some aspects of globalization which are assumed to have contributed to restructuring of national societies and the emergence of the new mode of governance. © 2007 Springer.