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Those numbers follow them all the way through their school career. And I have mixed feelings about it because in one way I think it helps teachers to see what people know in a very limited way and how they can help them. In another, I think it's a horribly constraining way of looking at pupils. So much international research now shows that if a pupil has application and determination he or she can outdo a child with [a higher] IQ who's got no determination and motivation.
Are we asking too much of schools if they've got to compensate for some children with very limited skills? Guy Claxton There's a kind of shift in the core metaphor: And some kids come into school with bits of their brain musculature not very well developed for all kinds of reasons. But that doesn't mean they're then consigned for life to a bottom stream or, in the old days, a secondary modern school.
As a teacher it means you have to see yourself almost like a fitness trainer, that you're in the business of helping some kids who have got very good skills to get even better and other kids who maybe haven't got very good skills at all to build them up from the bottom, just as when you go to a gym there's a whole range of people working at their own level of fitness to get better. Every classroom should be seen like that, rather than kids being clumped into the bright ones and the average ones and the weak ones. Rachel Wolf One of the top-down things that we've got to get a lot better at is understanding the importance of general education rather than allowing people to get so specialised about vocational education.
We should not be allowing people to specialise so early. It is harder when you're an adult to go back and learn these things if you haven't got those basics. I think it's a really big problem. But doesn't this also mean tackling some teachers' expectations? Their expectations of some working-class children are very low. Guy Claxton Part of the problem is that vocational education gets associated with lack of "academic ability". That association between brain work equals intelligence and hand work equals unintelligent really needs to be peeled apart.
Melissa Benn I think there's a real emerging contradiction in this discussion between these really imaginative, cutting-edge ideas, and the agenda which is this very s, sitting in rows, Latin mottos and all the rest. Peter Hyman I think education must be the only industry where people think it's good to go back to 50 or 60 years ago. I mean, can you imagine it in medicine if people said, "Well, actually, I want the treatments of the s: While we're all talking about a bold view of education, at the same time we're having cuts to educational maintenance allowance, cuts to the enrichment fund, cuts to all sorts of facilities.
How does that square up? Guy Claxton Of course, if you take resources away it's going to make innovation more difficult. But the real ingredients that will shift schools is not lots of money or changing structures, it's trying to fire the imagination,.
Melissa Benn In my own children's school they have lost thousands and thousands of pounds in funding. You have a comprehensive that has improved enormously and is very imaginative in all sorts of things being thrown back, not quite to square one, but having a more difficult time. So I think there's again a political problem there. Rachel Wolf I don't think money is the answer. There's been enormous extra investment in schools over the last decade.
Now some of it has helped. But actually I think it has diverted attention from what does transform learning, which is great teachers. Sue Street Partly you're right but I also think money needs to be targeted a little bit more at the wrap round services. Meaning, for example, after-school homework clubs, provision of extra activities, life-changing activities.
I took a group of army cadets out into the middle of West Sussex from central London on a Duke of Edinburgh expedition and it was the first time they had really seen a cow and had to cross a field with a cow [in it]. That is an experience that is actually going to stay with them for life. But boy, did they learn how to be resilient and resourceful, especially when cooking in the rain and those sorts of things. A school can't afford that. Where also the money needs to be targeted is work with social services in our most vulnerable learners, because trying to get action at a rate that is actually going to do something for that child is virtually impossible.
The next thing is we have got generational educational failure. We have got parents who didn't do very well at school who are actually scared to walk through the door of a school. That is where it becomes so difficult for schools to engage those parents to support their child. Melissa Benn I think a lot of what you're saying needs to be done is done in good comprehensives, in good community schools. It's a signal that something isn't right. Melissa Benn Nobody is saying that there aren't areas where there needs to be improvement.
It's how you improve it. Do you improve it by putting government resources and political energy into setting up new schools outside the maintained sector or do you perhaps find ways where you make the improvements? But you don't do it outside the common weal.
Local authorities are a very useful central resource for all sorts of things for schools. Is that still going to exist in terms of free schools and academies or is that going to become more and more undermined? Rachel Wolf I just wanted to raise a couple of things that I've come across in the States which I think are very interesting on the teacher effectiveness point. One is around charter schools, which are the model for free schools. The biggest group behind charter schools has been groups of teachers and people in education who have felt often that the public schools in very deprived areas haven't been approaching things in the right way.
These schools are now basically taking over teacher training. And they have incredibly intense feedback groups between schools, videoing principals across schools. They are doing a lot of work analysing their pupil populations and how teaching works best with them. And I think one of the reasons that's happening is because you have given teachers more freedom to go and set up their schools and do things differently. The other interesting thing is they've started trying to measure individual teacher effectiveness.
In fact, the LA Times tried to print a list of all of the teachers in the area and how much value-add they were creating. Now there are all sorts of problems with that. Melissa Benn I think that's appalling, publishing the names of teachers. I was talking to someone who teaches year six, the Sats year in primary school, and he was saying, "This year I will be deemed a failure as a teacher because I have a completely different class to the one I had last year, which was full of bright, motivated [children from] a more socially mixed class.
Peter Hyman The model that I think will be moved to because they have to, and it may work and may not, is a sort of New York model, where you've got a powerful commissioning authority with someone who is genuinely willing to hold the schools to account. How do we ensure resources are equitable, we're all measuring the same things and best practice is acknowledged and replicated?
Guy Claxton Teachers as we know from many decades are past masters and mistresses at subverting things that they are told to do, but they don't buy. You have to get that buy-in. Sue Street [We also need] the guarantee that that is not going to change every two years, because that's another huge thing.
It takes two years to even start to embed practice and learning. Because we're all human. It takes five years in a school to see the results. And if you're changing every two to three years there is an amount of goodwill that is lost every time something changes. It'd be great if we could get all political parties to agree exactly what we've been doing round the table.
What are the important things? Let's write a schemer. Standardisation is what is needed. Melissa Benn It's a very interesting idea to draw up common objectives and a broad curriculum. The centralised curriculum was introduced by a Tory government in the late eighties and that was very prescriptive.
I would like to see actually a government that was less partisan and less determined just to see its particular project succeed and was more concerned with the whole education. You feel that behind the scenes they just want these 24 schools to succeed. And all governments have done this. From the s onwards they've had their particular school that they … you know, the CTCs with the Tories, the city academies, they've all had good elements in them, but they've been set up against the maintained stock.
transition; the changing nature of the educational objectives and strategies of k political formation, through education of people, a failure to link the educational and the education and training system has ultimately to balance equality policies . (and) dramatic turning points reached and passed without an understanding. Neoliberal policies have had an impact on educational systems globally. The Educational Politics of the AKP: The Collapse of Public Education in Turkey.
I'd like to see a national conversation about exciting changes in all schools rather than those of us who are not part of this project being told — look, this is where the future is. Peter Hyman The two big challenges? One we've talked quite a lot about is the curriculum and how we prepare students for the21st century.
There's a big curriculum review going on.
And I think everyone who believes in what we've said today about skills and attributes has got to get involved because otherwise by default we will potentially go back to a sort of s education, which we don't want. The amount of resources and quality of teaching and leadership required in those schools to lift them up is huge. Rachel Wolf I think we shouldn't underestimate the parents. There's sort of an unpleasant assumption sometimes that "poor" means "disengaged", and I don't think it's true. That's a big gap that is not about disengagement.
Allowing more diversity provision to find out what works is incredibly important. Charity warns that rising number of academies and free schools is piling on extra pressure as clothing grants are axed. What is education for in the 21st century? How do you define holistic?
But the real ingredients that will shift schools is not lots of money or changing structures, it's trying to fire the imagination, Melissa Benn In my own children's school they have lost thousands and thousands of pounds in funding. Melissa Benn Well, I think money would help.
You don't come in with some brand-new structure and suddenly we're going to have a five-term year and we're all going to buy in this glossy package from the States. The learning work between a student and a teacher can't actually happen unless you've done all of the stuff in a nice supported environment which often includes just one teacher for predominantly most of the day up until about the age of 13 to Retrieved March 27, from archive. And they have incredibly intense feedback groups between schools, videoing principals across schools. But this may also be an opportunity to imagine more than mere a technical compliance with special education laws and regulations that can undermine the spirit of those regulations Fulcher, However, what these values, virtues, and dispositions look like, how they are demonstrated, and their appropriate expressions remain divergent as regards Western versus Eastern and African societies for example. One of the areas where often our weaker students suffer when they transition from primary to secondary is the absolute culture shock of suddenly having eight different teachers in a day who all teach in a slightly different way.
Finally, what is the best asset with which to come out of school? Guy Claxton Open mind and inquisitiveness. Sue Street Knowing that they don't know everything but knowing how to find it. Melissa Benn Informed curiosity. Peter Hyman The ability to think.
Topics Education The big debate. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Cambridge tops league table of world's best universities. Nick Clegg says that modern Britain expects too much from teachers.
He argues in a speech that teachers cannot be responsible for all society's problems following last month's riots. A diversity of practices and views also marks this area of education, resulting in general ambiguity about overall aims and best means.
Controversies over which attitudes of sustainability are most important to inculcate, and whether it is important to inculcate them, intertwine with debates over what crises are most pertinent and what skills and competencies students should develop. Measures are in place for standardizing sustainability knowledge in higher education worldwide, as well as for comparing the development of prosustainability attitudes. In this rich and diverse field, as processes of convergence and hybridity of glocalization continue to occur, the promise of globalization and the significance of education in relation to it will no doubt remain lively areas of debate in the future, as globalization continues to impact communities in diverse ways.
There is no shortage of normative and explanatory theories about globalization, each of which points to particular instances and evidence about domains and contexts of globalization. However, when it comes to understanding the interconnections of globalization and education, some consensus regarding best practices for research has emerged. In fields of comparative and international education and global studies in education, scholars are increasingly calling today for theories and empirical investigations that are oriented toward specificity, particularity, and locality, in contrast with the grand theories of globalization elaborated by political scholars.
Qualitative and quantitative analyses can be undertaken to measure global educational achievements, values, policy statements, and more; yet researcher reflexivity and positionality, what is traditionally conceived of as research ethics, is increasingly seen as vital for researchers in this politically and ethically contentious field. In either case, cultural assumptions can interfere or interact in problematic or unintentional ways with methodologies of data gathering and analysis, for instance, when questions or codes related to race, ethnicity, or class, for example are applied across diverse sites by researchers, who may not be very familiar and experienced across divergent cultural contexts.
Among recent strands of educational research fueled by appreciation for globalization is the exploration of the global economy of knowledge. Such research may consider the practices and patterns of movement, collaboration, research production and publication, and authorship of researchers, and examine data from cultural, political, and economic perspectives, asking whose knowledge is regarded as valid and most prized, and what voices dominate in conversations and discourse around globalization and education, such as in classrooms studying global studies in education, or in leading research journals.
As globalization of education entails the globalization of knowledge itself, such inquiries can be directed to various sites and disciplines outside of education, in considering how communication, values, and knowledge are being dynamically revised today on a global scale through processes of globalization. Research that focuses on globalization and education uses a wide array of approaches and methods, topics, and orientations, as well as diverse theoretical perspectives and normative assumptions.
The foregoing sections have explored this general field, major debates, and topics; the relationships have been traced between globalization and education; and there have been brief comments on considerations for research. One key point of the analysis has been that the way globalization is conceived has implications for how its relationship with education is understood.
This is important, for as is illustrated here, the ways of conceptualizing globalization are diverse, in terms of how the era of globalization is framed chronologically as essential to the human condition, to modernity, or as a late 20th-century phenomena , what its chief characteristics are from cultural, political-economic, and technological views, and whether its impact on human life and history is seen as good or bad.
A broad consideration of viewpoints has highlighted the emergence of a middle position within research literature: However, these processes are uneven, and they can be seen to impact different communities in various ways, which are clearly not, on the whole, simply all good or all bad. That the processes associated with globalization are interrelated with the history and future of education is undeniable. In many ways global convergence around educational policies, practices, and values can be observed in the early 21st century. Yet educational borrowing and transferral remain unstraightforward in practice, as educational and cultural differences across social contexts remain, while the ultimate ends of education such as math competencies versus moral cultivation are essentially contested.
Thus, specificity is important to understand globalization in relation to education. As cultural and political-economic considerations remain crucial in understanding major aspects of both globalization and education, positionality and research ethics and reflexivity remain important research concerns, to understand globalization not just as homogeneity or oppressive top-down features, but as complex and dynamic local, global, and transnational intersections of people, ideas, and goods, with unclear impacts in the future.
The global transformation reader: An introduction to the globalization debate. The Blackwell companion to globalization. Central America, social change, and globalization. Capitalism and its alternatives. The modern world system. Robinson , Theories of globalization, in G. Robertson , Globalization: Social theory and global culture Thousand Oaks: For an historical example of how negative cultural comparison has interconnected with international political relations, see H.
Kotef , Little Chinese feet encased in iron shoes: Freedom, movement, gender, and empire in Western political thought, Political Theory, 43 , — Anderson , Imagined communities London: Nussbaum , For love of country? Wallerstein , The modern world system New York: Wallerstein , Globalization or the age of transition? International Sociology, 15 , — Lingard , Globalizing educational policy London: Sklair , Globalization: Capitalism and its alternatives New York: Robinson , Transnational conflicts: Central America, social change, and globalization London: Castells , The rise of the network society Oxford: Giddens , The consequences of modernity Cambridge, U.
Polity , 64 ; see also D. Harvey , The condition of post-modernity London: Appadurai , Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Perraton , Global transformations: Politics, economics, and culture Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press ; M. Waters , Globalization London: Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing. Smith , Transnational urbanism: Ritzer , The McDonaldization of society Boston: Mathews , Ghetto at the center of the world Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Huntington , The clash of civilizations?
Foreign Affairs, 72 3 , 22— Fukuyama , The end of history and the last man London: Beck , The risk society: Toward a new modernity Cambridge, U. Negri , Empire Cambridge, MA: War and democracy in the age of empire New York: Bello , Deglobalization: Ideas for a new world economy London: Deglobalization in the age of austerity London: Hines , Localization: A global manifesto New York: Harvey , The condition of post-modernity: An enquiry into the conditions of cultural change Oxford: Burchill , Liberalism, in S.
See, for instance, J. Stiglitz , Making globalization work New York: An introduction to the globalization debate Cambridge, U. Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing , Reagan , Non-Western educational traditions: Alternative approaches to educational thought Mahwah, NJ: Of course, scholars such as Michael P. Smith would reject describing these processes as belonging to globalization, as people, nations, and communities played significant roles.
Freire , Pedagogy of the oppressed Victoria: Manzon , Comparative education: The construction of a field Hong Kong: Walby , Globalization and inequalities London: See for instance J. Stier , Taking a critical stance toward internationalization ideologies in higher education: See for instance M. Darling-Hammond , Surpassing Shanghai: See for instance P. Sahlberg , Finnish lessons 2.
What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Darder , Paulo Freire and the continuing struggle to decolonize education, in M. A Peters and T. The global legacy pp. Shin , Bilingualism in schools and society London: Norberg-Hodge , Ancient futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a globalizing world San Francisco: Jackson , Challenges to the global concept of student-centered learning with special reference to the United Arab Emirates: Besley , Narratives of intercultural and international education: Aspirational values and economic imperatives, in T.
Education and dialogue pp. Holsinger , Inequality in education: A critical analysis, in D. Comparative and international perspectives pp. Maisuria , Does capitalism inevitably increase inequality? West , Digital schools: How technology can transform education Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press ; N.
Callister , Watch IT: The risks and promises of technologies for education Boulder, CO: Burbules and Callister, Watch IT. See for example, S. Wilgus , Equitable partnerships for mutual learning or perpetuator of North-South power imbalances? Ireland—South Africa school links, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 44 , — Nussbaum , Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions Cambridge, U. Hytten , Education for critical democracy and compassionate globalization, in R. Philosophy of Education Society. The treasure within Paris: Understanding, assessing, and enhancing noncognitive skills in primary and secondary education New York: Kang , Identity-centered multicultural care theory: Jackson , Altruism, non-relational caring, and global citizenship education, in M.
Jackson , Education for sustainable development: From environmental education to broader view, in E. Jackson, Education for Sustainable Development. Scott , Learning for change: Exploring the relationship between education and sustainable development, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 1 , — Kennedy , Local lives and global transformations: Towards a world society London: