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The purpose and significance of Power, Voice, and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies aim to highlight the defining nature and impact of globalization in contemporary educational policy and praxis with particular attention to changing relations in local, state, national, and international contexts, from pre-school to postsecondary education. While globalization impacts major issues such as poverty, social justice, terrorism, citizenship, immigration, language, and human rights, the nature and appropriation of education and schooling remain at the center of these issues (Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). That is, educational systems, policies, practices, and praxis in Mexico, Thailand, India, Korea, the United States, the West Indies, and other nation states addressed in this edited volume require responding to and engaging with the new challenges, conflicts, opportunities, and costs of globalization.

Power, Voice and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies comes at a most propitious time in our tumultuous world. With the dawn of the new millennium, our global problems of poverty, hunger, disease, war, inadequate schooling, abuse and exploitation, homelessness, and natural disaster have become ever more challenging. That such issues have profound consequences on children across the globe is of no small consequence. It would appear that issues of social equity, social justice and democracy have been subverted in the quest for profit, dominance and social control. Amidst it all, we have become borderless societies where problems from one nation state encumber the resources and priorities of other nation states. Power, Voice and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies, while focusing largely on schooling and education in global contexts, provides a lens to view the nexus between schooling and many of the aforementioned global problems which confound us all. Many years ago, the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead stated “There is no greater insight into the future than to recognize that when we save our children, we save ourselves” (Mead, 1991, p. 2).¹ Her statement is as true today as it was many years ago. The chapters in this volume present challenges, but they also present opportunities for all of us to bring our best judgments and efforts to confront the very interdependent cultural and material dilemmas whose resolutions are necessary for global survival and growth.

The recent trend in globalization has had a positive impact on international education, in that it has compelled many societies to transcend national boundaries in an effort to exchange knowledge and expertize in teaching, curriculum and education policy. The practice of cultural borrowing and lending, in which one country adopts or borrows policies and practices from another, is a significant feature of international education, and has been accelerated by these globalizing trends. According to Tilly, internationalization of “capital, trade, industrial organization, communications, political institutions, science, disease, atmospheric pollution, vindictive violence, and organized crime has been producing a net movement toward globalization since the middle of the twentieth century” (Tilly, 2004, p. 13). In the area of international education, an intensification in international communication and cooperation has had a positive impact on educational research, planning and policy development (Schriewer & Martinez, 2004), and may, as some have argued, brought about a convergence of patterns in the organization of education across national boundaries. Nevertheless, globalization in education carries with it the potential to undermine developing and transitional societies in their efforts to maintain indigenous approaches to educating future citizens – a potential that may contribute to the “clash of localities” that is inherent in the globalization process, in which local tradition is frequently at odds with international trends (Mitter, 2001). A measured approach to transnational projects in education development will ensure that the process of cultural borrowing does not lead to the inadvertent export of ideas and values that are at variance with a given country's social, political and historical context, while simultaneously allowing for knowledge transfer across borders. Cultural borrowing is a necessary element in the transfer process, as it may provide the transitioning society with a model in the form of a curriculum, set of standards, or practices. However, as Dewey points out in Democracy and Education, any model or “ideal” must be adapted to meet the needs of the local context:We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement. (Dewey, 1997, p. 45)

Canada is a country with ten provinces and three territories, each of which boasts its own set of unique characteristics. Education is constitutionally defined as a provincial responsibility. Although several federal government departments have some responsibilities in the area of education, there is no federal department of education. Thus, it is difficult to examine educational policy at a national level.