Читать книгу Globalization - George Ritzer - Страница 48

Higher education has spread through increasing areas of the world, with enrollments increasing from 100 million to 150 million students in only a decade (Altbach et al. 2019). This global spread is even truer of schools of business administration, especially those that offer MBA programs (Clegg and Carter 2007). Recently, American universities have, in effect, been opening “franchises” in various countries, especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf area. Universities are now even graded on various world rankings systems (Luque-Martínez and Faraoni 2019).

However, primary and secondary schools have not done as well in keeping up with globalization. Three key failures have been associated with today’s primary and secondary schools as they relate to globalization:

1 Schools are generally not engaging young people in learning with the result that when asked, most students say that school is “boring.” The various facets of globalization – economic, sociocultural, demographic – are everyday realities for young people, but the schools offer little that is relevant to those realities.

2 Schools, especially in the North, are not responding adequately to the needs of the large numbers of immigrant youth from the South. They often “quickly become marginalized as racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically marked minority groups… . The results of these general trends are painfully obvious in multiple measurable ways: from the high dropout rates among immigrant, ethnic and racial minorities in many wealthy countries, to stark differences in achievement patterns between native and racialized minorities” (Suarez-Orozco and Smith 2007: 3).

3 Arguably the most alarming problem is associated with the failures of schools in the less developed countries. As noted by UNICEF (2018), globally 11.9% of children are not in primary school, but 23.4% of children in the poorest countries are not in school. Globally 32.3% of children are not in upper secondary, but 50.4% in the poorest countries are not (UNICEF 2018). The problem is the worst in countries ravaged by conflict and natural disasters. As a result, they fall ever-further behind children in the North. In addition, these failures contribute to the enormous problem of illiteracy which is concentrated in the South and growing illiteracy there can only serve to widen the gap between North and South.

Primary and secondary schools need to change in order to adapt to the realities of the new global world.

The above gives at least a sense of the range of globalizations, but, in fact, even this iteration touches only on a small number of the globalizations to be dealt with in this volume. One important point about the idea that there are multiple globalizations is the fact that it further complicates the whole idea of finding a point of origin for globalization. Clearly, there are different points of origin depending on whether one is focusing on globalization in the economy, or politics, or science, or higher education, and so on. It clearly makes far more sense in the search for origins (assuming one wants to search for them) to specify different origins for each of the many forms of globalization than to seek out a single point of origin for globalization as a whole. Furthermore, even within each of the forms, there are sub-areas each of which is likely to have a different point of origin for the beginning of globalization (for example, malaria has been spreading globally for centuries).