Education, globalization and the nation state

Abstract

Globalization has become a topic of great interest to social scientists, not only in the field of economics, but also in political and cultural studies. Despite the volume of theoretical work in this area, however, the issues it throws up have only recently begun to be taken up by educational theorists and, even here, somewhat one-sidedly within the postmodernist tradition. The final chapter in this book examines theories of globalization, their use by education theorists, and the implications for education of recent global trends in economics and politics. Specifically, it seeks to assess the arguments put forward by postmodern educational theorists, such as Usher and Edwards (1995), that globalization portends the demise of national education and the national education system as we know it.