Download The Knowledge of Educational Reform as Effect of Globalization: A

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
The Knowledge of Educational Reform as an Effect of
Globalization: A Case in Taiwan
By
Chin-Ju Mao (Associate Professor, National Chung Cheng University, Center
for Teacher Education and Graduate Institute of Curriculum Studies)
168 University Rd., Ming Hsiung, Chia-Yi, Taiwan 621
[email protected]
Jason Chang (Professor, National Taiwan Normal University, Department of
Education)
ABSTRACT
This paper emphasizes the role of knowledge as the focal point of
globalization processes. Using educational reform knowledge as an example, this
paper focuses on Taiwan’s educational reform movement since the 1990s until now.
We discuss the flows, networks, assemblages, connections, and reconnections of
educational reform knowledge under negotiation between the global and the local.
We discuss how neo-liberalism as a global educational reform discourse circulates in
the local context of Taiwan in which deregulation and decentralization were selected
and reformulated due to local political logic.
We argue that the global and the local are intricately joined together and
produce what we call a transmogrified practice of educational reform. As a form of
knowledge, neo-liberal education reform policy ideas were introduced from Western
countries (such as the USA and Britain) in the global and reinserted into the local
context of schooling. They have foreign qualities masked by local qualities, and
vice versa. The knowledge of educational reform is transformed in order to meet
particular national and local interests and identities. In particular, our analysis
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indicates how local struggles to reinterpret the meaning of education reform policy
and reformulate ways of practicing it faces an enduring local struggle – the widening
of social divisions.
Key Words: Globalization, Localization, Educational Reform, Neo-liberalism
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The Knowledge of Educational Reform as an Effect of Globalization: A Case in
Taiwan
Introduction
In most nations, educational reform is considered to be a strategic intervention
method. It can solidify a sense of national identity, enhance the viability of economic
activities and systems within world markets, and link macro issues of social
regulation with educational issues such as curriculum and instruction, all of which is
tied to the micro-constitution of future citizens.
Education reform efforts deal with
problem-solving, efficiency, and how particular ideas and reform methods frame
educational policy and the restructuring of education.
The circulation of educational
reform knowledge is an interesting phenomenon that signifies a globalization process
and its effect on local lives.
Knowledge about reform is usually viewed as an
epiphenomenona to the materiality of the world, and not as a productive object or
“social fact” constituting the world in which we live (Popkewitz, 2004). However,
this paper argues that knowledge about reform is an invisible yet powerful tool for
re-directing social life via reform policies.
In the era of globalization, schools are facing many issues, ranging from the
knowledge economy to productive workers, from nation-state citizenship to global
citizenship, and from local identity to cosmopolitan identity. Educational reform
addresses economic, political and cultural issues.
Previous research indicates that
the neo-liberal version of globalization is reflected in the framework of educational
reform (Arnove 2003; Burbules and Torres 2000).
In this framework, market
mechanisms such as decentralization, deregulation and privatization are introduced to
regulate education. Taiwan is not an exception to this trend, but its borrowing of
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neo-liberal educational reform ideas has different meanings in different historical
times.
It has been imported by local elites and experts, but was reformulated and
translated in the process of appropriation and practice in schools.
This paper argues
that Taiwan exhibits a ‘hybrid’ neo-liberal educational reform in which the globalized
discourse of neo-liberal educational reform appears as a local discourse, saturated
with local interests and political ideologies. Taiwanese educational reform in the last
sixteen years has oscillated between globalization and localization.
A neo-liberal
sense of educational reform has been exported from the global framewrok and
internalized with domestic cultures and politics, appearing as a local discourse.
Exploring this weaving together of different discourses about educational reform in
Taiwan helps to demonstrate that educational reform knowledge is like a global idea
circulating at the local level. This idea is connected with local interests and shaped by
political struggles.
In this way, it stimulates new ways of thinking about local
responses to the educational reform movement in the global context. It also points out
the invisible and often unnoticed effect of the circulation of global knowledge as it
reshapes the local adoption of reform policy.
In this paper, we first discuss how globalization affects education and results in
re-regulating schools.
Second, we propose hybridization as an analytical concept in
the dialectical process between globalization and localization. In this exchange, the
knowledge in global circulation plays an important role in identity construction.
Third, we analyze how neo-liberal educational reform ideas, illustrating particular and
distinctive patterns of reform knowledge in global circulation, were transformed and
reinserted into local discourses of national imaginary and international competition.
We conclude by pointing out the theoretical implications of comparative studies in the
global era and consequences of local adaptation to neo-liberal educational reform.
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What Is Happening to Us: Globalization as an Effect
Globalization as an influential force has been reshaping the world.
Bauman
(1998) indicated that globalization is not about what we wish or hope to do. Rather,
it is about what is happening to us all, because there are unintended and unanticipated
consequences of globalization.
This section demonstrates how globalization as an
effect reshapes our ways of life, especially in terms of economy, politics, and culture,
and how this relates to educational reform and practice.
National cultures and social boundaries are being radically transformed and
redrawn in the face of expanding global capitalist markets and increasingly fast-paced
transformational movements of people, communities, ideas, and media images.
Gibson-Graham (1996, p.121) pointed out that globalization is like “a set of processes
by which the world is rapidly being integrated into one economic space via increased
international trade, the internationalization of production and financial markets, the
internationalization of a commodity culture promoted by an increasingly networked
global telecommunications system” (quoted from Stromquist & Monkman, 2000, P.4).
Beginning as a global economy, this economic space is also connected to cultural and
political influences.
All these factors shape education in policy-making or practice.
A general description of globalization characteristics that closely affect
education can be summarized in the following dimensions – economic, political, and
cultural.
In the economy, there are new pressures on the roles of worker and
consumer in society. Competitiveness is a major principle in the globalized market,
and knowledge has become one key component in the attainment of competitiveness.
With the rise of multiple technologies and globalization dynamics, permanent
structures of knowledge and meaning have crumbled. In contrast, science and
technology receive much respect because the knowledge of technology and science
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has assumed a powerful role in production, making its possession essential for nations
to pursue economic growth and competitiveness.
The concept of the knowledge
economy or “knowledge management systems” proposed by international agencies
(such as The World Bank and OECD) comes at a time when knowledge is
increasingly embedded in technical capital (Curry, 1997).
In the face of an
increased speed of knowledge circulation, schools have to reconsider what students
should learn in light of changing job markets.
It has been argued that students
should learn new technical, social and mental skills to adapt to changing job demands,
to coexist with others, and to be cope with the fluctuations of human life (Ministry of
Education, 2001). That is to say, in the future, educational aims will be concerned
with adaptability and flexibility.
In politics, nation-state sovereignty is being challenged while international
investment across national borders promotes the flow of economic capital, the
mobility of people (including investors as well as migrant laborers), and the
opportunity of cultural encounters.
The sovereignty of nation-states is being
constrained by their need to balance transnational capital needs, international political
pressures, and domestic political and social demands (Bauman, 1998).
Due to the
free movement of capital and finances, the “economy” is progressively exempt from
political control.
As Bauman described: “Whatever has been left of politics is
expected to be dealt with by the state…, but whatever is concerned with the economic
life the state is not allowed to touch.” (Bauman 1998, p.66). Thus, the sovereignty
of the state is being shattered by demanding world markets.
Correspondingly, the concept of ‘citizenship’ is in ambivalence. This is because
it is derived from the concept of nation-state sovereignty and is commonly
characterized by precise roles, rights, obligations and status within the nation-state.
Traditionally, educational systems have been highly national in character and were
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organized by a state-administered order.
On one hand, education is an ideological
apparatus to sustain a state’s legitimacy and identity.
By appropriating cultural
resources, school curriculum officially teaches cultural knowledge and forms a sense
of social cohesion and national identity (Apple, 1996). On the other hand, under
conditions of globalized economy and media information, schools are expected to
prepare students for a changing reality, and curricula should be organized to include
heterogeneous cultural sources such as popular youth culture and media literacy
(Grossberg 1986; Giroux & McLaren, 1994; McCarthy, et al 2003).
A curriculum is
designed to help students “construct their own knowledge” and work together in
groups on complex tasks.
Students are expected to be active and creative,
transforming into productive and flexible citizens. Between social solidarity and
individual flexibility, the aims of curriculum are caught in a swaying global-local
tension that is fundamentally cultural.
Under the effect of globalization, global circulation of ideas and information,
commodities, and media culture has contributed to the emergence of what some refer
to as a global culture, or an increase in cultural homogeneity. At the same time,
global flows of diverse cultures have increased opportunities for cultural encounters
and the production of new hybrid cultural forms.
It is these developments that lie at
the heart of the postmodern condition – the historic juncture in which universalist
ideals conflict with particularist visions, unity is challenged by diversity, and
imagined national communities are crosscut by the politics of culture and calls to
recognize collective forms of identity and difference (Hall, 1996; Appadurai, 1996;
Harvey ,1989; Lyotard, 1984).
In the era of globalization, education is a contested terrain where the politics of
culture is being fought.
Educational institutions are deeply implicated in the
postmodern debates and dilemmas concerning the politics of knowledge, culture, and
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identity.
Stuart Hall argued that the increasing pace of globalization tends to
undermine cultural identity, which is detached from specific times, places, histories,
and traditions, and appears to be ‘free-floating’” (Hall, 1992, p.303).
This
free-floating feeling can become so unbearable that people try to re-identify
themselves with particular reference either to native and national cultures or to global
consumer cultures1.
However, many scholars reject this “either-or” dichotomy. They believe that
in the cultural dimension, local particularity interacts with global homogeneity in a
more complicated, not straightforward, way.
This phenomenon is captured in such
terms as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1992), ‘vernacular globalization’ (Appadurai,
1996), and hybridization (Bhabha, 1994).
These all illustrate that cultural
globalization is associated with the new dynamics of re-localization.
Globalization should not be interpreted as a simplifying process of cultural
homogenization, but rather an articulation between the global and the local (Hall,
1996, p.407).
The practice of schooling and educational policy making falls under
the same global-local-in-between context.
Education are deeply shaped by global
forces and continuously internalized within local realities.
Hybridization: A dialectical process between globalization/localization
The mix between globalization and localization is a key point in understanding
what is happening to us in the era of globalization.
Giddens (1990) stated
conclusively:
1
Consumer culture means more than consumption (Featherstone, 1991). It is created through the
advertising and simulatory effects of the mass media. By consuming, ‘taste’, ‘fashion’, and ‘lifestyle’
become key sources of social differentiation, displacing class and political affiliation, and form new
points of reference identified by individuals as a construction of personal identity.
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Globalization can …be defined as the intensification of world-wide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings
are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is
a dialectical process such local happenings may move in an obverse
direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local
transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of
social connections across time and space (Giddens, 1990, p.64).
As mentioned above, localization is a part of globalization. Localization is a
reflexive community reconstruction in the face of dehumanizing implications such as
the rationalizing and commodifying logic of globalization. Therefore, globalization
should not be viewed as a unified, global phenomenon. Rather, the dynamics and
interactions occuring in both global and local dimensions are focal points of how
globalizing forces reshape human life in general and educational practices in
particular.
In this section, we propose hybridization (hybridity) as an analytical concept
which is theoretically relevant to discussions of how educational reform shifts
between the global and the local and how it is re-formulated and translated by the
local.
Hybridity and Hybridization: Analytical Concepts
The idea of hybridization or hybridity is underscored by recent post-colonial
scholarship (Young, 1995; Spivak, 1992; Bhabha, 1994).
It has redefined the
relation between colonizers and the colonized, and the belief that colonial politics
embody fluid and pragmatic relations within a field of multiple power relations.
It
highlights an overlay of difficult discourses that join the global and the local through
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multiple and multidirectional complex political and cultural patterns. The concept
of hybridity makes it possible to think of educational reforms as plural assumptions,
different interests, and complicated procedures in which the practices of reform are
undertaken.
Hybridization provides a way to consider the interrelation of
globalization and localization processes as constituted through fluid, multiple, and
historically contingent patterns. There are many theoretical implications to applying
hybridity and hybridization concepts to the analysis of the playing field between the
global and the local. This is especially true in the arena of education.
The following are some examples of discourses regarding educational reform
in Taiwan. These illustrate how the concepts of hybridity and hybridization can be
employed in the analysis of educational reform amid global-local tensions.
Neo-liberalism as a circulation of global discourse on educational reform in the local
Internationally and nationally, neo-liberal ideologies are the most powerful
elements within current discourses of reform in public policy.
The neo-liberal
version of globalization, particularly as implemented and ideologically defended by
bilateral, multinational, and international organizations, is reflected in the framework
of educational reform. This framework privileges particular policies for evaluation,
financing, assessment, standards, teacher training, curriculum, instruction, and testing
(Arnove, 2003).
Market mechanisms of decentralization, deregulation and
privatization are introduced to regulate education.
Business sector management and
efficiency models have been appropriated as a framework for educational
decision-making. Students are seen as human capital, and education needs to equip
students with the requisite skills and dispositions to compete efficiently and
effectively in an intensively competitive world economy.
Internationally, many
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governments promote notions of open markets, free trade, reduction of the public
sector, decreased state intervention in the economy, and the deregulations of markets
(Morrow & Torres, 2003). Neo-liberalism has become a set of global ideas about
reform circulating in many locals.
If we think of neo-liberal reform as an example of global reform discourses
circulating in many locals, it implies that global ideas of neo-liberal reform will not
travel from the central nations of the world system to the peripheral and less powerful
countries without contestation and transformation.
Globalization is internalized
within a national debate so that the international circulation of reform idea appears as
a local discourse.
For example, the Taiwanese government is one of traditionally
centralized states.
By employing the ideas and framework of neoliberalism, it
devolves its power to local governance and market regulation of education. This is
done in response to its domestic tendency of democratization and the government
budget deficit.
In the 1990s, educational reform discourses in Taiwan focused on
deregulation and decentralization, and were in accordance with the social aspirations
of democracy and the cultural urge of indigenization.
Because of deregulation and
decentralization, curriculum reform was made possible, and this directed the political
imagination toward discourses of democracy and Taiwan-centricism.
have been nationally debated since 1987.
These issues
The process of hybridization made
neo-liberal educational reforms appear to be part of international circulation of reform
ideas, and projected particular national interests and political ideologies.
From 1987
to the 1990s, the deregulation discourse was strongly intertwined with the idea of
decentralization because it was in accord with the social tendency of democratization
that involved a range of initiatives to increase local autonomy and transfer the
strength of civil society from state control to local control. The demand for political
democratization overrode the need of economic reform in the 1990s, when global and
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Asian economic recession had yet not come.
Educational reform discourse during
the early 1990s was less coupled with the talk of marketization.
Even though
marketization language was used, it was especially pointed to decentralize the
textbook publication mechanism.
The interpretation of marketization for
deregulating textbook publication was framed in talk of challenging the ideological
state apparatus.
It was argued that through maketization, school textbooks could be
exempted from political ideological indoctrination by the state(see Chen 2003).
In
educational reform discourses in the 1990s, this was originally a political concept
rather than an economic concept.
In the early 1990s, the educational reform policy
took measures involving deregulation, decentralization and indigenization. There
were multiple reform policies, such as introducing indigenous elements into the
curriculum, decreasing state intervention in the education system, introducing
school-based management, a more democratic form of curriculum, open teacher
education
program
policy,
and
more.
Discourses
of
deregulation
and
decentralization, rather than talk of marketization and privatization, were strongly
intertwined with the national idea of democracy and state re-formation.
This took
place in the discursive field of educational reform, while economic recession and the
government budget deficit problem didn’t receive public attention until 2001. The
translation of the global idea of neo-liberal educational reform to the local educational
system was selective and reformulated by local political logic.
Therefore, the
reformulation of neo-liberal educational reform in the Taiwanese context doesn’t have
to be the same as it was in the USA or Britain (e.g. Apple, 2000; Whitty, 1997).
A
process of hybridization is occuring when the global idea of neo-liberal educational
reform is circulating around the world.
The construction of national imaginaries in the global
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As discussed above, the global idea of reform did not follow a direct route, but
circulated and then was internalized as a national debate.
It is interesting to note that
when the cross-boundaries of global ideas were introduced into the local, they were
rearticulated and reformulated into indigenous discourses (Popkewitz, 2000).
Foreign qualities are masked by local qualities, and new elements are generated
within this process of hybridization.
This also holds true for the construction of
national imaginaries in the era of globalization.
The ideas of nation and citizen are not naturally produced through a common
language, race, or geographical boundary.
The nation-ness of a community is
formed through discourses that project individuals into a collective narrative that
enables people to know, understand, and experience themselves as members of a
“community”(Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991, p.49).
Educational policy discourses and
theories of education generate the attitudes, dispositions, and capabilities of the
“citizen” who contributes and participates in a nation. Anderson (1991) has called
this imaginary unity institution an “imagined community” in which cultural
representations are historically fabricated to produce nation-ness.
The construction
of national imaginaries provides a way of thinking about the educational reform
discourses and how they were exported from the global and rearticulated in national
and local contexts.
Popkewitz (2000) created the term ‘indigenous foreigner’ to explain how
national imaginaries were a hybridity that mixed with global discourses and national
concerns.
In pursuing the indigenous foreigner idea, he pointed out that when a
nation deploys a global reform discourse to reformulates its national imaginary, the
global discourse circulates without a history of time and place. The indigenous
foreigner can be examined in Taiwanese educational discourses.
The idea of
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deregulation was embodied in the practice of Taiwan’s educational reform.
implementation ran parallel to the democratization of society.
Its
It was argued that by
deregulating, the decentralization of the educational system could be made possible
and this would transfer the power of making educational decisions to the public and
decrease state control.
The idea of deregulation as a scaffolding enables a discursive
field for developing more reform projects in education, such as integrated curriculum,
action research, and teacher professionalization. The emergence of such a discursive
field is encouraged and more connected with the political zest of democracy than
economic concerns of efficiency.
Integrated curriculum, action research, teacher
professionalization, decentralization, and deregulation, sometimes separately and
sometimes within the same policy discussions of educational change, construct the
new manifest destiny of the country through claims of political democracy, personal
liberation, and social reconstruction.
Since 1987, Taiwan has been undergoing a new process of state formation.
The previous KMT state2 had a long tradition of authoritarianism and centralization.
Therefore, while the new DPP state is building a new imagination of democratic
society and its own political legitimacy, its new educational reforms are initiated by
the state-centered administrative apparatus under claims for the professionalization
and subjectivities of teachers and the decentralization and autonomy of educational
administrative system.
The global and the local are intricately joined together and
produce what we shall call a transmogrified3 practice of reform – a top down policy
of massive educational reform to insert a grass-root sense of transformation in
The KMT state was also called “ the Nationalist state.” It was led by Chiang Kai-Shek when it
retreated from the communists in mainland China in 1949. The KMT state relocated to Taiwan and
rebuilt its hegemony over the island from 1949 to the 1990s. In 1999, the KMT lost its power to the
new political party, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
3
The tern,’transmorrified,’ borrow from T. S. Popkewitz’s (2000) “ Comparative Strategies for
Educational Research” in that he used “transomrgrified” to refer to the complexity of the discursive
deployments of original educational literature in translation and borrowing.
2
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teachers and the future of democracy. Therefore, discussions of educational reform in
general and the teacher-as-professional in particular, occur as a particular, historical
hybrid of the global and local. These discussions travel across national boundaries in
the form of universal principles, but also are transformed into hybrid forms that meet
particularly national and local interests. They become not only part of the authorized
discourses of world systems of neo-liberal ideologies about educational reform, but
also project the construction of national imaginaries.
Neo-liberalism as a distinctive form of reform knowledge in global-local
circulation
Taiwan underwent its most drastic educational reforms in the past 16 years,
especially regarding content and curriculum in elementary and junior high schools.
Martial law was abolished in 1987. After 1987, Taiwanese society went through a
massive transformation in political identification, creating an indigenous sense of
Taiwan rather than China and the reconstruction of cultural identity in the face of
globalizing forces.
There were two major curriculum reforms, “Indigenization
Curriculum (1994-1999) and a “ Nine-Year-Integrated Curriculum (1999- present),”
which came to fore under the mixed effect of localization and globalization.
The term “indigenization curriculum” was in direct opposition to the previous
sinocentric-oriented curriculum.
The so-called sinocentric-oriented curriculum had
been implemented since 1949, the year that the Kuomintang government led by
Chiang Kai-shek relocated to Taiwan.
The curriculum not only emphasized the
teaching of Chinese history, geography, and Chinese literature, but also excluded
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content about Taiwan’s particular history, geography, and culture from textbooks.
As
such, this curriculum carried the tasks of inventing Chinese tradition and suppressing
any consciousness related to Taiwan-centricism.
This curriculum, in a way, helped
to legitimatize the KMT government (Mao, 1997a).
In the 1980s, a sweeping transformation of Taiwanese society became a threat to
the KMT state’s authoritarian rule.
Taiwan’s industrialization brought changes both
in economic production system and in technology.
Its market economy created a
large pool of wage laborers and a new middle class.
The expansion of educational
opportunity reduced the rate of illiteracy and increased the number of educated people
who were active participants in modern society.
challenged the authority of authoritarian state.
Burgeoning social movements
In 1989, the people’s right of
association was finally recognized in the enactment of the Civic Organization Law,
which had been frozen due to martial law.
It was during this era that the call for indigenization curriculum arose. Generally
speaking, indigenization curriculum was a curriculum which tended to teach
Taiwanese history, local cultures, and ethnic languages in schools.
“indigenization” is pronounced as ‘ben-tu-hua.’
In Chinese,
In the Taiwanese context,
‘ben-tu-hua’ was a cultural and politically sensitive movement with the aspirations of
“getting to know Taiwan,” and turning native interrogation experiences about Taiwan
into an assertion of Taiwanese subjectivity. Since the notion of ‘ben-tu-hua’ was
saturated with massive political meaning of the independence movement, the term
‘ben-tu-hua’ was replaced with ‘xiang –tu’ in the educational system, and this took up
the meanings of homeland and localization.
By depoliticizing, indigenization
curriculum was interpreted more as local education than an education of nationalism.4
4
For a detailed discussion, please see Mao (1997b) “Constructing Taiwanese Identity: the Making and
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From 1998 until now, the international economy has changed rapidly.
The
whole world faced and struggled with economic distress. The advantage of the Four
Asian Tigers’ (including Taiwan) economy has gradually shifted to the big tiger –
China.
While Taiwanese society confidently claimed its democratic political
transformation and became more conscious of its Taiwan-centric cultural
indigenization, it found itself besieged by the hardest competition in the global
economy. This produced a kind of discourse which came up and challenged the
discourse of Taiwan-centricism.
It was argued that the society might use its
Chineseness rather than its Taiwanness as leverage to maintain its economic
competence as the global market shifted to China. This rhetoric, in a sense, sapped
the strength Taiwan-centric discourse legitimacy.
In the dialogical process of
economic globalization and cultural-political indigenization, a new curriculum was
promulgated.
It was coined the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum (1999-present).
This curriculum did not aim to change teaching content as the Indigenization
Curriculum opposed the Sinoization Curriculum. On the other hand, the significance
of this curriculum reform was to make flexible the mechanism of deciding what and
how to teach in the school curriculum.
It carried the spirit of democracy into the
system of public schools, and at the same time was sensitive to the development of the
global economy.
Curriculum is not only about what to teach and how to teach, but also relates to
the ways in which curriculum makers understand learning, the organization, and the
production of knowledge. Their ideas about curriculum and pedagogical practices
did not come from an empty history. They mixed global production of academic
knowledge with their local interests. Schooling, therefore, became an institution
Practice of Indigenization Curriculum.”
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which produced system of governing that tied the local and national with the global
through pedagogical practices and knowledge which was mediated by local elites.
Schooling constructs the national imaginaries, and teaching national history and
cultural knowledge give cohesion to the idea of national citizenry.
It also constructs
the cosmopolitan subjectivities that flexibility and adaptability are the main
characteristics of productive workers and world citizens in the future.
The new Curriculum Guideline stated goals and principles of the curriculum
rather, unlike the Curriculum Standard that detailed what and how to teach. The
goals of this new curriculum were to help students achieve the capacities of “knowing
themselves, creativity, life-long learning, communication, respecting others and
cooperation, cultural learning and international understanding, using information
technology, actively exploring and resolving problems, and independent thinking”
and so on (Ministry of Education, 2001) upon completing studies in their 1-9th grades.
The details of what and how to teach were left to teachers and schools to decide.
In
accordance with a democratic space opened up for new ways of practicing curriculum
and pedagogy, the ideas of school-based management and teacher-as-professional
were introduced by academic elites and became part of the discursive field of
educational reform.
It was claimed that along with the principles of new curriculum,
an individual school could decide what and how to teach according to their local
differences and teachers’ professional opinions.
In a way, it embodied the idea of
democracy in the daily life of schools and was supported through school-based
management and the enhancement of teacher professionalization.
Moreover,
discourses of school-based curriculum and action research were coming to terms with
the implementation of the new curriculum.
The significance of its flexibility, in a way, was that it made space for connecting
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the earlier discourse of localization with the creation of global citizens in the face of
globalizing forces.
However, we also witnessed an interesting phenomenon. While
society recognized differences of social entity and emphasized the teaching of local
and ethnic languages and cultures, most curriculum practitioners and parents paid
much attention to learning subjects of Science, Computer Technology and English.
These subjects and knowledge were considered by policy-makers to move the country
into a higher level of economic competitiveness. However, the only concern for
individual parents and students were those subjects which could create
competitiveness in job markets.
From 2000-2003, the discursive construction of educational reform was gradually
shifting to economic concepts.
According to official documents and legislators’
records, interpellators and officers in the Ministry of Education stressed the “realities”
of global competition and made a closer linkage between education and the future of
the national economy.
It was argued that the quality of students was decreasing due
to the past ten years of educational reform that over-simplified curriculum content and
added more local cultural learning.
According to academic test score results, some
argued that students were becoming less competitive internationally.
Learning
English earlier also became a major issue in the discourse of enhancing global
competitiveness.
Talks of rigid standards and English-learning in educational reform
were naturalized by the “realities” of global competition.
The tendency was to
depoliticize the discourse of educational reform, which in the past ten years had been
highly politicized by the DPP government and its supporters.
By harnessing the
economic anxiety of the middle class majority, this process of de-politicization made
it very difficult for those with less economic, political, and cultural power to be heard
accurately.
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Bauman (1998) pointed out that in the globalization of the world, except
extra-territorial elites who have the freedom of mobility, a bulk of the population lies
in the local, the new middle class. They bear the emerging problems resulting from
a changing identity-providing social milieu, and processes that intensify global
competitiveness.
This group suffers from economic survival anxiety, political
powerlessness and disinterestedness, and an on-going shifting reference of cultural
identification.
Their situations make them vulnerable to the anxiety of
competitiveness, and they easily buy into talks of rigid standards and English learning.
Businessmen have targeted this anxiety and turned it into a desire to create a market
of language and cram schools. Besides carrying the task of educational reform, the
Ministry of Education in Taiwan is facing the problem of marketization in that
English learning and other related topics were promoted by cram-school businesss
and other private institutions of education as a required commodity which should
purchased as early as possible. The government in 2003 was taking an impossible
mission to de-marketize a market that had already taken on a life of its own.
On the other side of society, there remain some people who are more ‘localized’
than ever before. Unpacking the social roots and social consequences of globalizing
processes, Bauman (1998) pointed out that what appears to be globalization for some
means localization for others.
As freedom of mobility becomes a scarce and
unequally distributed commodity, this privilege becomes the main stratifying factor of
the society. While trans-national imaginaries were created through discourses of
global economic competitiveness, there is a growing gap between official institutions
(including schools) and the everyday realities of those who do not fit into the
economic logic of the new global order.
This implies that there is a growing gap
between metropolitan cities and rural areas. Children who live in rural areas went to
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schools with limited economic and human capital resources, often with no teachers
for their English learning. Some of them graduated from elementary schools without,
or with the most basic, skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Their parents went
to cities for work and left them with their grand-parents at home.
coming and going of their teachers.
moving society.
They saw the
They were left behind far away from the
Global processes appear as an uninvited and cruel fate for them.
Without any control of their destiny, they see the world is moving and passing them
by. The widening of social divisions is being increased, which is also an integral
part of globalization processes.
However, these experiences of disempowerment
were un-accounted for in educational reform discourses or were translated as
individual pathology.
The needs and voices of those children and their families have
not be accurately articulated in educational reform discourses.
Conclusion
Based on Taiwanese experience of education reform, we demonstrated that there
is far more to globalization than its surface manifestations.
The effects of
globalization challenge and influence how we have understood education and acted
upon it. There is much to discuss regarding how globalization effects educational
system reform and transforms teaching and learning as they have been understood
within the contexts of educational practices and policies that are highly national and
local in character.
By employing a dialectic view of the global and the local, we
proposed a post-colonial concept of hybridization (and hybridity) to analyze a
complicated process of how the nation and local react to global processes.
W argued
that a global idea of neo-liberal educational reform circulated among nations and was
21
re-translated by their elites.
In the case of Taiwan, educational reform discourses
shifted along with internal dynamics of political development mixed with political
ideologies. Educational reform discourses were the internal “logic” through which
ongoing national educational change was discussed.
National narratives circulate as
if they were local, with no history except in the logic of the principles that the
categories are to represent: the problem-solving child, the progressive curriculum, the
professional teacher, and the decentralized school (school-based management). In
other words, the universal principles are not universal but embody specific social and
cultural forms.
Global ideas of neoliberal reform are not directly exported through
the world system from nations of the center to nations of the peripheral, but rather are
circulated and transformed. From this perspective, the significance of local responses
to the globalization processes can be deliberately analyzed. The vast scholarship of
such a discussion provides more theoretical implications for research and realistic
understanding for policy makers.
As discussed, Taiwanese educational reform discourses from 1987 to 2003 have
shifted between the global and the local.
From 1987 to the 1990s, although
educational reform discourses brought neoliberal ideas to the national debate about
educational change, they strongly connected with the ideas of decentralization and
deregulation and were loosely coupled with the ideas of marketization and
privatization. Political democratization also plays a determining factor.
Discourses
of deregulation, decentralization, and talk of school-based management and
teacher-as-professional all indicate a major change in the relation of the state to civil
society.
Also, the making of national imaginaries by introducing Indigenization
curriculum produced cultural and political anxiety. The construction of a new national
memory entails a deconstruction of old images. People were dissociated from the
old collective identities and re-imagined themselves within other collective narratives.
22
These narratives were more Taiwan-centric, and intensified ethnic antagonism.
From 1987 to the 1990s, Taiwanese society experienced more democratic ways of life,
but at the same time suffered more from party politics struggles.
Education policies
and practices were no exception to this circle of political struggle.
However,
until,the economic recession of 2000, the urge for economic competitiveness made
the educational reform discourses shift to an economic concept. This concept caught
the existential anxiety of the majority of the new middle class – creating a fear of
being left behind by global society. On the other hand, a gap between those at the
globalized top and those at the bottom is increasingly widened.
Education, as capital
that is convertible into other capitals, has become the main stratifying factor rather
than the equalizer of society.
Fraser (1989) once interpreted how public policy
discourses are constructed by truncating people’s needs into strictly economic terms
and preventing them from spilling across the boundaries separating the economic
from the political (pp.168-172).
In Taiwan, once educational reform discourses are
shifted to the totally economic language of neo-liberalism, the ideals of democracy
and social equality, which have evolved since the post-martial era, will rapidly recede.
Taiwanese scholars must ask which forms of inequality educational reform policies
are producing, and which forms of cultural hybridity are recognized or created in the
dual processes of globalization and localization. After asking these questions, we
can realistically think of how to produce more equitable and just distributions of
educational capital for individuals in the local.
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