LINKING MARXISM, GLOBALIZATION, AND CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION: TOWARD A COMPARATIVE AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY POST 9/11

ABSTRACT

In a post-9/11 world, where the politics of ‘‘us’’ versus ‘‘them’’ has reemerged under the umbrella of ‘‘terrorism,’’ especially in the United States, can we still envision an éducation sans frontières: a globalized and critical praxis of citizenship education in which there are no borders? If it is possible to conceive it, what might it look like? In this review essay, Awad Ibrahim looks at how these multilayered and complex questions have been addressed in three books: Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur’s Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, Nel Noddings’s Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, and Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending. Ibrahim concludes that, through creating a liminal, dialogical space between humanism, environmentalism, materialism, philosophy, and comparative education, the authors in these books offer a critical pedagogy in which e´ducation sans frontie`res is possible — a project that is as visionary as it is hopeful.

The Article

[W]e are no longer strangers to the gift bestowed on us by those who rule us by the “noble lie.” We courier our wedding gifts of democracy to the rest of the world by F-16 fighter jets. Unfortunately, we will mistake the disease (free-market capitalism) for the cure (liberty and freedom)… [W]ill we continue to interpret our defeats as victories, to reaffirm our hegemonically reproduced and ideologically conditional reflexes, or will we finally see the writing on the wall?
Peter McLaren & Ramin Farahmandpur

In a world of instant communication and swift travel, we have become keenly aware of our interdependence. Many of us are now concerned about the welfare of human and nonhuman life, preservation of the Earth as home to the life, and the growing conflict between the appreciation of diversity and the longing for unity… We dream of peace in a world perpetually on the edge of war. One response to these concerns is the promotion of global citizenship
Nel Noddings

[We] take the process of globalization for granted, but have serious doubts about whether globalization necessarily leads to a “world culture,” “internationality,” or “internationalism” in education… [Here] globalization is for real, but the international community of experts agreeing on a common (international) model of education is imagined.
Gita Steiner-Khamsi


Éducation sans frontières or education without (or free of) borders is a peculiar and mystifying notion. However, can education be free, especially, of borders and if it is possible to conceive it without borders, how might it look like? My desire in answering this question is subjective and personal. I am what you might call a universal subject, an identité sans frontières. I was born and grew up in Africa (Sudan), studied in France and Canada, hold the Canadian passport and now teach in higher education in the United States. I do not, however, pretend to hold the Solomonic wisdom nor do I want to occupy the role of the “native informer,” so my intent in this essay review is to look at how, in multilayered and complex ways, others have responded to and answered this question. Namely, I want to review Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur; Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, 299 pp.); Educating Citizens for Global Awareness (edited by Nel Noddings; Teachers College Press, 2005, 161 pp.); and The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending (edited by Gita Steiner-Khamsi; Teachers College Press, 2004, 235 pp.).

For French-language speakers, éducation sans frontière is a Lyotardian wordplay on the infamous and the world’s leading non-governmental medical relief organization: Médecins Sans Frontière or MSF. Purposely working against, without and across borders, MFS has a noble charter that is directly related to the books reviewed here, especially Noddings’s. MSF mission is to offer “assistance to population in distress, to victims of natural or man-made disasters and to victims of armed conflict, without discrimination and irrespective of race, religion, creed or political affiliation;” to observe “neutrality and impartiality in the name of universal medical ethics and the right to humanitarian assistance;” and to demand “full and unhindered freedom in the exercise of its functions.” Since MSF is run by volunteers who “are aware of the risks and dangers of the missions they undertake,” these volunteers “promise to honor their professional code of ethics and to maintain complete independence from all political, economic and religious powers” (http://www.msf.ca). If one replaces the word “medical” with “educational,” what picture would one have, especially at a global level? Reading the three books one ends up with overlapping, yet distinctive pictures. Though the noble charter is the same in all three books, the theoretical and discipline-based approaches taken by the authors offer different and in some cases, radically different answers and outcome.

In all three books, this noble charter is built around the tension between the material and the philosophical, the personal and the public, the abstract and the concrete, the suggestive and the didactic, the humanist and the exploitative, and the global and the local. McLaren and Farahmandpur’s book is unapologetic rote materialist, Noddings is humanist, environmentalist and philosophical, and Steiner-Kamsi is squarely within comparative education. Yet all authors are fully aware of this poststructural tension, make use of it, and push its boundaries in new directions. Also, all authors operate with and centralize the idea of globalization and relate it to education. They all ask: Is éducation sans frontières possible? Given their broad, suggestive and expansive approach, I will begin with McLaren and Farahmandpur’s answer first.

Marx, Globalization and Critical Pedagogy at Ground Zero

Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism is a collection of nine previously published essays in journals and edited volumes. It is a massive metatheory that has many different threads. With fear of simplification, the authors’ main project in these essays is to critique globalization, especially global capitalism, postmodernism, cultural hybridity, and the “new imperialism.” They do this through a return to the relevant dimensions of Marxist theory while proposing, as a cure, what they call “critical revolutionary pedagogy.” For McLaren and Farahmandpur, globalization is a deceptive and euphemistic term. It hides its “ugly” face: imperialism, especially cultural imperialism, U.S. project of unilateralism and world domination, exploitation of labor, Wal-Martization, state sponsored terrorism, militarization of public space, corporate media, “moribund” or “bargain-basement capitalism” where the environment is transformed into “Planet Mall” for short-term profits and at the expense of ecological health and human dignity. Thus, “cannibalizing life as a whole” (p. 15). As they sum it up, their book

… does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of how we have arrived at this tragic state of affairs but attempt, if only modestly, to explore some of the central characteristics of U.S. imperialism and to situate these characteristics with a specific problematic that has been our province of research for a number of years, that of developing a philosophy of praxis that has gone by various descriptions: critical pedagogy, socialist pedagogy, and revolutionary critical pedagogy being among the most prominent (p. 1)

Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism begins with a fierce critique of Hardt and Negri’s best-selling book, Empire, published pre-9/11 and Iraq invasion. In it, Hardt and Negri announced the arrival of postimperialism and argued that, given the rise of Bush doctrine of New World Order; the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam; the expansion of nongovernmental organizations; the diminishing role of the welfare state; and the increase influence of multinational corporations and supranational organizations such as World Bank, WTO and the IMF, we have entered an era of “peaceful capitalist coexistence” (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005, p. 2). For McLaren and Farahmandpur, Hardt and Negri’s “stubborn insistence that state power has become obsolete or that its role has significantly diminished” (p. 3) is not only disagreeable, but it gives ammunition to the discourse of multinational corporations. In the case of the U.S., for example, McLaren and Farahmandpur argued, “the state continues to play a key role in advancing the U.S. imperial project of global dominance,” and it does so “by means of two interlocking processes: globalization and neoliberalism” (p. 3).

Neoliberalism, according to McLaren and Farahmandpur, is a festival of masquerade and a theater of the absurd where unregulated market mechanisms rule, antimarket policies are eschewed, social subsidies are eliminated, limitless concessions are offered to transnational corporations, the market is established as the patron of educational reforms, environmental regulations are scrapped, public education is dismantled, “grab-the-profit-and-run,” and downsizing or “corporate anorexia” are celebrated in the stock market. Neoliberalism, in short, is “capitalism with the gloves off” or “socialism for the rich” (pp. 15-16). Coupled with neoliberalism for McLaren and Farahmandpur is postmodernism. By tacitly accepting a market economy; concentrating on superstructure of culturalist discourse; celebrating the death of universalism in favor of “hyperindividualism”; mummifying Marxism; and by proposing itself at the center of “the theater of educational transgression” and not accepting that “we are hardly in a ‘postcolonial’ moment,” McLaren and Farahmandpur argue, postmodernist theory falls prey to an identity politics of “facile form of culturalism” (p. 25). Hence collapsing into a form of “toothless liberalism and antibrushed insurgency” (p. 18). In its final analysis, postmodernism – much like other “posts” in poststructuralism, posthistory, postideology where différence, discursive struggles and desire are valued over material and political economy – amounts to a “Great Delusion” and thus becoming a “radical right.”

So, what exactly are their contentions? They have three. First, they write, “ We believe that Marxist analysis should serve as an axiomatic tool for contesting current social relations linked to the globalization of capital and the neoliberal education policies that follow in its wake” (p. 22). They admit, however, “Marxist theory constitutes a social system of analysis that inscribes subjects and is seeped in the dross of everyday life. As such, it must continually be examined…” (p. 22). Second, when it comes to capitalism, their position is that it is “a universal system of domination that integrates and coordinates and ultimately subsumes all other forms of oppression to its brutal commodity logic and privileging hierarchies of exploitation” (p. 29). Third, when combined with capitalism, old-style militarism, financial practices, standardization of commodity, and the imposition of the law of the market, globalization has been whirled into a form of “new imperialism.”

As a resistant pedagogy to this “new imperialism,” McLaren and Farahmandpur offer a “Freirean,” “working class,” “socialist pedagogy,” which they also refer to as “revolutionary multiculturalism,” “revolutionary citizenship praxis” or “revolutionary critical pedagogy.” We need “revolutionary critical pedagogy” because what we know now as critical pedagogy “must do more than unweave at night what each day is stitched together by the commodity logic of capital; it must build a new vision of society freed from capital’s law of value. A critical pedagogy, in order to advance revolutionary praxis,” they argue, “must be able to endorse the cultural struggles of workers and coordinate such struggle as part of a broader “cross-border” social movement unionism aimed at organizing and supporting the working classes and marginalized cultural workers in their efforts to build new international anticapitalist struggles along the road to socialism” (p. 150).

Revolutionary critical pedagogy centralizes class struggle, political economy, and political education in raising workers’ revolutionary consciousness. It is empowering, democratic, participatory, and worker-centered pedagogy; it critiques corporate-sponsored multiculturalism; moves beyond the celebration of hybridized identities and pluralism; calls for a redistribution of wealth and a return to socialism; links the social identities of marginalized and oppressed groups with their reproduction within capitalist relations of production; and “addresses the importance of unity and difference not only as a sense of political mobilization but also as a practice of cultural authenticity that neither fetishizes tradition nor forecloses its allegiance to traditional knowledges” (p. 152). As they summed it up, “We need nothing short of a social revolution” (152).

For those of us who are familiar with critical pedagogy, especially McLaren’s and Giroux’s work, you will see too much of a familiar language. There is hardly any new theorization. The connection between globalization, capitalism and pedagogy is a worthwhile project, but the 299 pages, could easily be reduced to half, and that would be generous. If the reader is concerned with Marxism, education, and globalization, I recommend this book. Otherwise, read chapter one and chapter five. There are three main critiques that I have for the book. First, its use of language. There are too many terms that are thrown around with a lot of assumption of who the read is or dare I say, should be. The irony of the book is that it calls for a “working-class pedagogy” in a language even those of us who are familiar with critical pedagogy will struggle over. Though the authors critique it, I am quite aware of the poststructural notion of reading, meaning, and textuality. McLaren and Farahmandpur do not invite their reader in, they tell you what you should think. They almost bark at you. When you are barked at so often, you get tired after awhile. In a classically Marxist language, we seem to be in a false consciousness, especially the Left; and as a postcolonial subject myself, I am told what I should think and how I should feel. How offendingly patronizing those moments were!

My second critique concerns their idea of identity politics. Reading and rereading the book, I am still not clear on how they deal with the question of difference: race, class, gender, sexuality and ability, among others. Here, it seems, there is no tension between these categories with which we should live. There is a clear language of locating and subsuming the discussion, unfortunately in a classic Marxist language, under class struggle. My final critique which, again, is related to language, is the feeling one has as one is working through and reading the text. There is an almost Godly-figure hovering over you and pointing its finger telling you the reader, especially if you espouse a Left position, that you are not Left enough. Sadly enough, there is an increased competition in the Left of making oneself more (linguistically) chic (see even the authors’ picture at the end of the book) and more radical than the last radical. It is an uncomfortable feeling and it permeates a good majority of the book.

Question: Is éducation sans frontières possible?

McLaren and Farahmandpur’s answer: Yes, but a totally different and radical notion of border, pedagogy, and globalization has to be created, one that is grounded on Marx(ism) and class struggle and aims for “nothing short of a social revolution.”

Globalization, Citizenship and Dialogue

In editing her book, Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, Nel Noddings took a different turn, not to the Left but to progressive Humanism since, as she put it, “… a progressive orientation toward global citizenship will promote peace” (p. 4). Educating Citizens for Global Awareness is a thin volume of seven chapters that was published by Teachers College Press and The Boston Research for the 21st Century. The book begins with a foreword by Daisaku Ikeda, founder of The Boston Research for the 21st Century and president of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist association. Ikeda begins with what could be a summation of the whole book. He writes, “The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States were a grave challenge to the ideal of dialogue between civilizations, the quest on which the world embarked at the start of the new century. They were acts of wanton mayhem that threatened to undermine humanity’s most basic right to live in peace.” He continues, “It is my belief that the eradication of terrorism calls for the creation of new, international political, legal, and economic systems, as well as security measures” (p. ix).

For Ikeda, there are two sides to/of globalization: positive and negative. The positive side is democratization and the spread of awareness of human rights, and the negative is war, ethnic conflict, rising economic disparity, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and the destruction of the “global ecology.” Education, for Ikeda and the rest of the authors in the book, holds the key to resolving especially the dark side of globalization. This “true education,” as he called it, “summons forth the innate goodness of humanity – our capacity for nonviolence, trust, and benevolence. It enables individuals to reveal their unique qualities and, by encouraging empathy with others, opens the door to the peaceful coexistence of humanity” (p. ix). If we are to foster “global citizens,” Ikeda argues, this kind of humanistic education is crucial. Situated within the Buddhist notion of “dependent originations” – the understanding and appreciation of interdependence – this “creative harmonization” calls for wisdom (the ability to perceive the interdependence of all life), courage (the courage to respect one anothers’ differences), and empathy (the ability to share the pain of every person and all of life).

The Executive Director of The Boston Research for the 21st Century, Virginia Strauss, wrote the preface which was followed by Nel Noddings’ introduction of the book. Opening with Thomas Paine’s “My country is the world; to do good is my religion,” Noddings’ first question is, “what is global citizenship?” Because it is global, she contends, our definition of citizenship can no longer depend on the modernist notion of citizenship, referring to a national or regional identity, nor can we align it to a global citizenship that is solely defined in terms of economic, profit, and interest. The new definition, for Noddings, is anchored on the notion of “concern.” Global citizenship should be concerned with, first, the welfare of the national, the regional, the global and their inhabitants; second, the health of our physical world and the preservation of well-loved places; third, the balance of diversity, unity and universality; and, fourth, the worldwide social and economic justice. Emphasizing her ideas of caring about and caring for, Noddings spent the rest of her introduction explaining these “concerns.” Ironically, Iraq was only mentioned once and Afghanistan was totally absented in an introduction of a book on global citizen and peace education post 9/11.

The first chapter is written by Peggy McIntosh. This is a worthwhile read and probably, beside Nash and Ladson-Billings’ chapters, a highlight of the book. McIntosh introduces an approach to global citizenship that is both personal, historical and social. She associates global citizenship to several capacities of the mind: the ability to observe oneself and the world around one; make comparison and contrasts; see plurally; see power relations; and balance awareness of one’s realities with the realities of entities outside of the perceived self. She also associates global citizenship to several capacities of the heart: the ability to respect one’s own and others’ feelings and delve deeply into them; experience conflicting feelings; experience affective worlds plurally; wish competing parties well; observe and understand how the “politics of location” affect one’s own and others’ position and power in the world; and the ability to acknowledge the embedded nature of culture in the hearts of ourselves and others (p. 23). To help teachers operationalize this framework McIntosh developed fives interactive phases.

Phase 1 acknowledges the absent, Phase II admits the needs to include the absent, Phase III acknowledges the absence of the absent as a dynamic and a question of power relation, Phase IV works with non-binary thinking and sees everyone as a knower and everyone’s knowledge production is worth of study, Phase V is a “version in which the world of knowledge is redefined and reconstructed to include us all” (p. 33). Depending on the political choices we make, according McIntosh, this will take us 100 to 200 years to conceive.

In Chapter 2, Stacie Nicole Smith and David Fairman show how a group of students in grade 10 World History class in Newton, Massachusetts, was able to work with conflict resolution. Students were required to develop a better understanding of how and why Americans might legitimately disagree on what the United States should do in response to September 11. They were introduced first to “Workable Peace Framework.” This is a framework that begins with the identification of the source of conflict (one of four: identities, interests, beliefs and emotions), and builds on conflict management strategies. The latter can either move towards peace (prepare to seek peace, explore needs and concerns, acknowledge needs and rights, control violence, and engage in negotiation) or war (stop trying to meet each other’s needs, resort to threats, abandon talks and wage war) (see p. 45). This framework is another highlight of the book and noteworthy.

Chapter 3 is by Nel Noddings who revisits her idea of “place-based education.” The chapter is an answer to why we love certain places and be ready to fight and kill for them. It also investigates the connection between the concepts of local and global citizenship. In Chapter 4, Gloria Ladson-Billings explores what she calls “new” or “flexible citizens.” These are “complicated citizens” who are created within, and in relation to global capitalism, international travel, communication, and mass media. As she summarized it, “Instead of being bound by geopolitical boundaries and national loyalties, people who are developing multiple allegiances that transform them into “flexible citizens.” Such citizens,” she argues, “are more committed to their work and careers than to any particular national identity” (p. 74). Yet, she distinguishes between “diasporas” and “cosmopolitanisms.” The former, for Ladson-Billings, “are comprised of marginalized, displaced, and victimized subjects trying to make a place for themselves in the modern world,” whereas the latter “are worldly, progressive intellectuals who decide to be global citizens” (p. 74, original emphasis). Ultimately, Ladson-Billings argues, the aim of education is the creation of that organic, cosmopolitan, and active citizen and intellectual who is investing in developing a consciousness of global citizenship and is engaged in the public good, locally and globally.

In Chapter 5, Stephen Thornton is thinking about the different ways in which we can incorporate in the curriculum teaching for and teaching about internationalism, especially in social studies classrooms. From World War I, to Serbia, Balkans, Great Depression, UN, and Austro-Hungarian Empire, among others, he sees nationalism and internationalism as inextricable and provides many suggestions on how to include teaching for and about internationalism. Chapter 6 by Robert Nash is a personal letter to secondary school teachers on teaching about religious pluralism in public schools. “The events of 9/11 have thrown our provincial and isolationist American worldview, particularly its religious, political, and cultural elements, into turmoil,” he writes (p. 95). Nash provides probably the most urgent discussion on how to think and talk about, as well as how to teach religions in public schools. His letter is a must read for every history, government, and social studies teacher. It is personal, genuine, and offers tremendous experience and wisdom on what might be described as the most urgent discussion that needs to take place in the West: the role of religion in public space, especially extremism whatever its believes and wherever it comes from. He argues that we need to become “more globally aware, religiously literate citizens” (p. 93). The globally aware and religiously literate citizen is a “cosmopolitan person who is knowledgeable about, and receptive to, the complexity and richness of religious diversity throughout the world;” one who is “literally educated and knows that it is impossible to understand the history, culture, or politics of most modern societies if one is ignorant of the fundamental role that religion has played in every country” (p. 93-94). After all, Nash quoted Rig Veda, “Truth is one, but the wise call it by many Names” (p. 104).

Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Linda Lantieri wrote Chapter 7 where they make the case that, once given the occasion, young people can do wonder. The chapter tells the story of a middle school in Quincy, Massachusetts. It all began when a Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih visited this middle school. Masih talked to the kids about child labor. Two years later, students received the news that Masih was shot dead suspiciously in Pakistan. Students banded together and mounted a campaign again child labor. They created an endowment in his name and forced the United Nations to pass a resolution to toughen child labor laws. For Carlsson-Paige and Lantieri, this is the kind of citizen we desperately need, one who is not only aware, but can do something. Nel Noddings followed this chapter with the book conclusion that answered the question, “what have we learned?”

Nel Noddings is a philosopher and as such she has some areas where she shines and in others where the light seems to dim a little bit. The book is more in the latter than in the former. How can one write an introduction and a conclusion on peace, global education, and war without a mention of the current political situation especially in the Middle East, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan? One literally sees a change in language and tone when Noddings reverts to philosophy, specifically her idea of “care.” In the book, she tries to apply that idea to the ecological system with less success. When she talks about fertilizers, pesticides, and biogenetic diversity, one wonders why doesn’t she focus on what she does best, philosophy? Her idea of “place-based” education and pedagogy is redundant and is addressed better in other chapters in the book.

Overall, generously read, there are basically four main ideas in this book that are new for me. The first is McIntosh’s interactive Phases. She developed them as part of a larger framework she calls S.E.E.D. (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). These phases are not only practical, but they offer concrete ways to deal with equity, diversity, and global citizenship. Thanks to McIntosh’s framework, the latter is no longer an abstract category. For those of us who teach social foundations, I highly recommend these phases. The second idea is Stacie Nicole Smith and David Fairman’s notion “Workable Peace Framework,” which I discuss above. Given what is happening in some postcolonial countries in Africa, South America and Asia, as well as in the Middle East, this framework is worthy of study. The third idea that is noteworthy in the book is Nash’s letter. It is layered and I will do no justice to explain every idea in it. Read it! The fourth idea is more personal. Ladson-Billings’ “flexible citizen” hit home, it stared me in the eye. This is what I would term the “universal subject,” which is myself. Born in Africa, studied in France and Canada and living in the United States. The allegiances are multiple. Given her intellectual capital, the universal subject is she who can live and function anywhere. She carries not her bags, but her books. She can be in Australia one year, the U.S. the following year, while spending her sabbatical year between France, Germany, Argentina and South Africa.

Question: Is éducation sans frontières possible?
The volume’s answer: Yes, of course! In peace and (global) citizenship education, there are many examples showing this possibility.

The Politics of Educational Policy and Intellectual Borrowing and Lending

The third book, The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, was edited by Gita Steiner-Khamsi of Columbia University. Conceived within a post-Fordist economy, the book comprises 12 chapters that are divided in three parts, an introduction and a conclusion by the editor, and a foreword by Thomas S. Popkewitz. Although the authors in the book come from many disciplines, the book distinctly locates itself within the field of “comparative education.” In his foreword, Popkewitz offers a succinct summary of the book while adding his own vision of globalization and the politics of educational borrowing and lending. He begins with a fiercest critique of how globalization is increasingly treated as a fait accompli, on the one hand, and fatalistically ahistorically, on the other. We need to deal with globalization not as “planet speak” – a ubiquitous word that everybody knows – but as an empty signifier that is historically and socially defined. This is, he argues, the advantage of this book. It deals with an educational policy phenomenon – educational borrowing and lending – and explores its historical and contextual dimensions in their national and transnational studies. As such, education plays a central role in globalization, especially in the process of knowledge production, yet Popkewitz argues, education “often is assumed peripheral, if considered at all” (p. viii) in the discourse of globalization.

The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending centralizes education at the heart of globalization and sees the school as “the major institution in which the circulation of knowledge about the modern self is positioned” (p. viii). Well summarized by Popkewitz, the book has seven basic themes. First, there is a post-structural understanding of knowledge production, where knowledge is historically and socially produced and so there is no universal and absolute knowledge. The very idea of citizenship has to be contextually defined within a participatory notion of civil society. Second, following this is the need to empirically examine how knowledge flows within networks, social systems and institutions. Borrowing, lending and converging become central concepts in the process of knowledge flow. Borrowing, for Popkewitz, does not mean copying. It is a concept to examine “how patterns of thought move through and are transmuted in different layers of the local and global systems” (p. ix). Third, what was missing in the first two books is centralized here: how concretely and empirically the local and the global talk to each other, so to speak, dialogue, produce and reproduce each other. The studies in the book look at how the local family, child, community, and nation take up, translate and transform the global in local varieties.

Fourth, from multiple angles, the book examines the role of international agencies, such as the World Bank, IMF, UN, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Care and Save the Children. Fifth, while centralizing comparative education, the book is exceptionally interdisciplinary and it gives, sixth, systematic and historical understanding of the relationship between the local and the global, as I already indicated. Finally, the book offers a non-normative approach to comparative research. Unfortunately, the field of comparative education, according to Popkewitz, “often is designed around developing ameliorative models for the “transferring” of ideas and practices” (p. x). That is, transfer what works! Instead, the studies in the book show how people hold on to their localities while learn “lessons from elsewhere.”

In her short introduction, Gita Steiner-Khamsi gives an overview of the book, which is a response to “the global trend of transnational borrowing and lending in education” (p. 1). It is an examination of the politics of why and how educational policies are imported or exported, and how they are adapted locally once they have been transferred from one context to another. As she put it, “this book addresses globalization in education, and attempts to introduce both a historical and a contextual dimension that we find lacking in the ongoing debate [on the link between] the increase transnational flow of goods, finance, communication, people and ideas (globalization), and changes in national educational systems” (p. 3). Complexifying the “semantics of globalization” and thinking through the idea of “global civil society,” Steiner-Khamsi argues for a reconceptualization of the idea of “borrowing.” For her, borrowing “draws our attention to processes of local adaptation, modification, and resistance to global forces of education” (p. 5).

Part One of the book comprises three chapters. The first chapter by a well-known scholar in comparative sociology and history, Charles Tilly of Columbia University, is meant to set the stage theoretically for the book. Tilly argues that there is a misconception of globalization as a “new” phenomenon. “Since the movement of human out of Africa some 40,000 years ago, humanity has globalized repeatedly,” he writes. “Any time a distinctive set of social connections and practices expands from a regional to a transcontinental scale, some globalization is occurring. Each time an existing transcontinental set of social connections and practices fragments, disintegrates, or vanishes, some de-globalization occurs,” he adds (p. 13). Tilly’s chapter deals with “global flows.” He differentiates between three recent flows or waves of globalization: around 1500, between 1850-World War I, and post-1945. What distinguishes the latter wave of globalization is the “relative emphasis on commerce, commitment, and coercion” (p. 16). He calls it the “darker sides of globalization.” Looking at economic disparity and the ecological effects of globalization, Tilly offers a larger social context analysis of the existing inequalities within globalization.

In Chapter 2, Jurgen Schriewer and Carlos Martinez offer an analysis on how, given the global flow of ideas, there is a tacit assumption that scholars and people in general would be reading the same books and/or sharing increasingly similar ideas. This is not true. Hence, the authors make a distinction between globalization or internationalization (which is real) and internationality (which is imagined). This is a dense and confusing chapter. Chapter 3 by David Phillips presents a conceptual framework for studying cross-national “policy attraction” in education. By studying the British fascination with and interest in educational provision at all system levels in Germany (including universities), Phillips provides a model and a methodology for studying policy borrowing, which he sees it in the following stages: cross-national attraction, decision to borrow, implementation, and internationalization or indigenization. As Steiner-Khamsi put it, “cross-national attraction can be interpreted as an act of international cooperation advancing convergence… or as an act of inter-state competition strengthening divergence…” (p. 10; emphasis added).

The meat of the book, however, is in Part Two, dealing with “the politics of educational borrowing.” This section, according to Steiner-Khamsi, is informed by three ideas: 1) that “externalization” or educational reforms tend to take place more frequently where politics can interfere, such as privatization of education, standardization, and deunionization of teachers, among others; 2) that the implemented policies at the local level barely resembles their original sources; 3) that to legitimize their reforms, decision makers and policy makers make international references, even though similar policies may exist in their backyard. In Chapter 4, Iveta Silova addresses what Phillips calls in Chapter 3 “phony policy borrowing.” This is more rhetorical than actual policy, that is, policy makers borrow the rhetoric from elsewhere with no intention of implementing the practices that accompany that rhetoric. Latvia, for example, ratified a minority-language policy without implementing it when it came to the Russian-language speakers.

Chapter 5 is exceptionally interesting where the author, Tali Yariv-Mashal, shows how the “Israeli Black Panthers” borrowed both the rhetoric and the practice of the Black Panther Movement in the United States. In Chapter 6, Carol Anne Spreen discusses the case OBE or outcome-based education in South Africa. Convincingly, she demonstrates the indigenization of OBE, originally borrowed from the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Chapter 7 by Bernhard Streitwieser shows the ongoing debate about the role of education in post-unification Germany. Should education be for Erziehung (with an emphasis on personal, social, and political development) or for Bildung (with an emphasis on literacy). Streitwieser found that the role of education was conceived differently in East vs. West Germany, and the current system reflects that tension.

In Chapter 8, William deJong-Lambert asks: What happens to science when it is used as an instrument of oppression? He looks at the Polish academic community which used Lysenkoism, a method to propagate Marxist genetics in Poland. Lysenkoism ended up, deJong-Lambert shows, providing Leninism and Stalinism with “scientific rationality.” deJong-Lambert goes on to investigate how the Polish scientific community is dealing with that legacy now. Chapter 9 by Frances Vavrus is, I think, worthy of study. She examines how the World Bank policies of water privatization were translated locally in Tanzania. By translation, she means both literally (from English into Swahili) and figuratively. Using Bourdieu’s idea of champ or field, where complex and contradictory discursive frameworks are constructed, Vavrus demonstrates the interplay between external and internal, top-down and down-up, global and local changes. Vavrus offers a complex reading, yet she doesn’t account for power relations: Who gives and who has the money? There seems to be no center of/to power. Another chapter worthy of study is Thomas Luschei’s, Chapter 10. Luschei looks at the current Brazalian educational reforms that started in 1998. It is called Escola Ativa and modeled after, borrowed from the Colombian model of Escuela Nueva. Luschei shows how, in order to be able to borrow $62.5 million from the World Bank, the Brazalian government had to discredit its own previous reforms. In the end, Luschei argued, Escola Ativa became a joint rhetorical venture between the World Bank (which needed to hear the language of borrowing and reform), the Brazalian government (which needed the money), and the Colombian model (which seemed to have “worked”). They were telling each, Luschei conclude, that the money was not going to waste.

The final part of the book is on “the politics of educational lending,” where the authors argue that we need to keep the actors in mind and that there is no educational process of borrowing and lending that is free of politics. Dana Burde in Chapter 11 looks at the role of NGOs in a preschool reform project in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The project focused on establishing and enhancing parent-teacher associations (PTAs) as a way of building civil society. These PTAs however did not work, yet NGOs kept on holding on to their original ideas because this is how they get their fundings. In Chapter 12, Phillip Jones investigates the role of the World Bank as both a loan and lending entity. In the 21st century, the World Bank sees itself more as an education policy lender than a loan-providing bank. As such, it is rearticulating and reimagining itself at least discursively. In her conclusion, Gita Steiner-Khamsi reminds us of the history of comparative education where the emphasis was on exporting what “worked.” Noteworthy in the conclusion is her definition of the “externalization thesis.” Defined first by Schriewer, Steiner-Khamsi sees externalization as an educational borrowing or “the references to lessons from elsewhere… in which either an imaginary international community (“international standards”) or a concrete other (e.g., national education systems, reform models, reform strategies, etc.) is evoked as a source of external authority for implementing reforms that otherwise would have been resisted.” Phrased otherwise, “the act of lesson drawing often is used as an effective policy strategy to certify contentious policies at home” (p. 203, emphasis added). She concludes the book with a second overview of the lessons learned from the different chapters.

There are many interesting chapters in this book, especially Tilly, Phillips, Yariv-Mashal, Vavrus and Luschei’s. McLaren and Farahmandpur would be enjoy this book since as Popkewitz put it in the foreword, “Through the concept of externalization we … can consider the idea of neoliberalism that floats through much of contemporary comparative analysis.” Indeed, neoliberalism floats through much of this book, yet it is complexly layered and one can see many approaches to the global politics of educational borrowing and lending.

Question: Is éducation sans frontières possible?
The volume’s answer: Yes, of course! It is already taking place and all the chapters in the volume show that. Indeed, the very concept – éducation sans frontières – was first read and introduced in this volume (see p. 3).

There Is No Conclusion With Globalization

In Globalization, Zygmunt Bauman (1998) writes that, “‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips; a fad word fast turning into a shibboleth, a magic incarnation, a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries. For some,” he continues, “‘globalization’ is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy; for others ‘globalization’ is the cause of our unhappiness” (p. 1). Clearly, this is the tension in all three books. McLaren and Farahmandpur are unhappy with globalization, though they acknowledge its impossibility, since it is obliterating the communal sense of work and productivity. Globalization, for McLaren and Farahmandpur, is another name for predatory and exploitative capitalism. For Nel Noddings and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, there are many possibilities that come with globalization. Following an Aristotlean approach, if not a post-structuralist one, Noddings and Steiner-Khamsi are calling for a contextualized notion of globalization that is both resistant to and work with global forces. On a personal level, as a universal subject my approach to globalization and is probably closer to Noddings and Steiner-Khamsi and their authors than to McLaren and Farahmandpur. Yet, what McLaren and Farahmandpur raise will haunt me for awhile. It is powerful and ethically unresolvable. But we need to read their questions since, as Bauman put it, “The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering… Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguable the most urgent of the services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves” (p. 5). The best is yet to come, but it will not come if we don’t envision it. I read all three books with that lens and I advice you to do the same. Yes, there is life after the Panopticon and yes, we need to move through the world as opposed to the world moving by us (Bauman, 1998). Indeed, we need to feel chez soi locally, nationally and globally. This would require éducation sans frontières and rigorous intellectual border crossing. In this sense, applied to education, MSF charter should be our guiding philosophy, our critical revolutionary pedagogy post-9/11.

Reference
Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.