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Unit 28: Globalization of Education

to raise their skills and standards of education. Others fear that it is merely a modern version Notes
of cultural imperialism that will lead to the creation of a universal, ultimately Western society.
One aspect of the globalisation of education has been the creation of ‘twinning projects’ between
one Western and one non-Western university (www.ssn.flinders.edu.au).
European elites who entered India were accused of Western imperialism actually rediscovered
India’s languages and religions and identified the region’s social, legal and political traditions
and they also argued that the transplantation of Western institutions into developing countries
shapes the behavior of those involved and thus makes for greater similarity with the people in
which the institutions first evolved. In fact a study has shown that the process of transferring
such institutions results in an increasing similarity of outlooks and values.

Through Globalisation of education, which is being knowledge transfer from the
Western countries into developing countries, is intended to improve the skills and
capabilities of the people receiving it.

28.1.1 General Agreement on Trade in Service
Further, education, as a service industry, is part of globalization process under the umbrella of
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). However, there is every possibility that this
might force countries with quite different academic needs and resources to conform to systems
inevitably designed to service the interest of corporate educational providers, and thereby
breeding inequality and dependence. Thus, several teachers’ organizations are on record
opposing the inclusion of education in the GATS, on the ground that education was not a
commodity. Incidentally, there is an emerging threat from the process of globalization in the
recent times. “Globalization can lead to unregulated and poor quality higher education, with
the world wide marketing of fraudulent degrees or other so-called higher education credentials”.
It seems that countries like India, are likely to turn into “an increasingly attractive market for
foreign universities and hence other nations are going to use GATS’ provisions to their
advantage”.
28.1.2 Globalization Theory
Globalization is both a process and a theory. Roland Robertson, with whom globalization
theory is most closely associated, views globalization as an accelerated compression of the
contemporary world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a singular entity.
Compression makes the world a single place by virtue of the power of a set of globally
diffused ideas that render the uniqueness of societal and ethnic identities and traditions irrelevant
except within local contexts and in scholarly discourse.
The notion of the world community being transformed into a global village, as introduced in
1960 by Marshall McLuhan in an influential book about the newly shared experience of mass
media, was likely the first expression of the contemporary concept of globalization. Despite its
entry into the common lexicon in the 1960s, globalization was not recognized as a significant
concept until the 1980s, when the complexity and multidimensionality of the process began to
be examined. Prior to the 1980s, accounts of globalization focused on a professed tendency of
societies to converge in becoming modern, described initially by Clark Kerr and colleagues as
the emergence of industrial man.

28.1.3 Recent Trends
In the wake of globalisation process and to cope up with the changing priorities of the people
the planners are bound to revise their strategies in the education sector. Thus, several specialist
committees, involving the elites and captains of industry and education, constituted by the
Union ministry are engaged in the process. Whereas, the public interest demands a wider

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