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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 1 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 2 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 3 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. 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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. 8 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 9 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 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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 15 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 16 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.” 17 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 18 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. 19 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 20 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). 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