The False Promise of Global Learning: Why Education Needs Boundaries

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Through the language of global learning, education is being reformed by corporations, political activists, and policy makers. Academic subject-based knowledge has been cast as elitist and outdated for a rapidly-changing world. The curriculum has been colonized in the name of teaching skills and attitudes for the global market and global citizenship. Can young people effectively contribute to society without an education in academic knowledge? Alex Standish argues that we can only educate children about the world if we are clear about the boundaries that provide education with its moral worth. These include the boundaries between: education and political activity, public and private realms, education and training, theoretical and everyday knowledge, communities, and subject disciplines. The False Promise of Global Learning demonstrates that the nature and purpose of education has become confused with social, economic, political, and therapeutic aims, and that control over the curriculum has been taken away from teachers and communities. This is a hard-hitting work that will resonate with all who have a stake in how - and why - we educate our children.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. The Origins of International and Global Education 2. Making Global Schools 3. Global Knowledge 4. Global Skills 5. Global Ethics 6. The Essential Boundaries for Educating about the World Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Alex Standish is a Senior Lecturer in Geography Education at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK, and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. As well as teaching PGCE, Teach First and Master's in Education students at UCL Institute of Education, he works in an advisory capacity for the Department for Education, the Mayor's Office, Department for International Trade, Cambridge Examinations, as well as several London schools with respect to curriculum and teacher education. Standish previously taught at Western Connecticut State University, USA. Together with Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, he co-edited What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth.

Review :
Criticizing the 'global' word in education is not the done thing at all, especially in the 'decentered' modern academy. Yet globalism has long required an intellectual challenge grounded in empirical observation of contemporary schooling policy. Alex Standish has done it while retaining an awareness of the distinctions necessary to learn real knowledge. He has written that very rare thing, an educational book that is actually necessary. "This book is timely and will repay careful reading. The main argument, that global initiatives in schools have undermined 'the very meaning and purposes of education' will be very provocative for some. Others will welcome the sustained case made for traditional subject-knowledge to be returned to the school curriculum. But all should avoid running for the barricades and instead engage with the arguments. For in the end this book, from a very clear standpoint, forces us to confront that key question: 'what does it mean to be educated in this day and age?' Standish lays out a convincing case that presumably rudderless educational systems have substituted the traditions of teaching and learning so cherished in modern times and replaced them with dubious notions of economic competition and the acquisition of skills as the drivers of educational policies today. Moreover, Standish argues, rather than being a panacea for the changes brought about by technological advance, such shifts in focus are less about meeting the challenges of modernity and are, rather, little more than bromides for an exhausted and increasingly anxious age. Alex Standish fundamentally questions our assumptions about global education and its promise to advance international understanding. His study indicates how the field of global education is driven by the goals of promoting particular values, rather by aspirations to expand knowledge of different societies. Indeed he observes that the rise of global education in the US and the UK school curriculum has helped legitimize declining knowledge of other countries and languages. Instead Standish suggests global education supports a particular model of global governance which has implications for democratic self-determination and development. ...the book is well documented and will likely serve as a catalyst for discourse among scholars and advanced graduate students seeking a diversity of perspectives on this timely, important topic. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.