Search results

This chapter presents a survey of education development in Oceania, a region of diversity held together by its commonalities, shaped by the largest ocean on the planet. The chapter outlines the regional contexts of Oceania and offers a brief historical overview of formal education. Oceania, like most regions, has struggled to mediate between global agendas and national and regional aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination. The chapter recounts ongoing efforts to navigate education in the post-colonial period, efforts to negotiate some of the aspirations of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Education for All (EFA), and other global agendas of the early 2000s with, more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this survey, we hope to demonstrate collective efforts to respond to global agendas, to shape and strengthen regionalism, while maintaining sovereignty in a globalized world. We also highlight the evolving identities of the region, in particular the relationships between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific countries that collectively make up Oceania.

The purpose of this paper is to compare two UNESCO reports on educational development in Cambodia, one from 1955 and the other from 2010, in order to understand how the global education development agenda has impacted shadow education.

The study is conducted through a textual comparison of two UNESCO reports written 50 years apart.

Although the educational problems facing Cambodia were similar in both reports, the recommendations differed in important ways. The 1955 report advised the country to expand slowly access to education in order to maintain quality, while the 2010 recommended quickly expanding access. A major difference found in the reports regarded the issue of fees in schooling, which did not appear in 1955. School fees in Cambodia are typically extracted through the system of private tutoring, known in the academic literature as shadow education. Such an insight, this paper argues, suggests that the difference in development approach between the two reports is one of the reasons shadow education has flourished in the country.

Through a historical comparison of development efforts in one country, it becomes clear that the education development agenda is partly to blame for the rise of shadow education.

This chapter examines the evolution and legacy of African socialism and the features of postcolonial educational transformation in Africa. Drawing on critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature on African socialism, the chapter discusses the role of the state in educational transformations with illustrations from selected countries. The failed promises of African socialism and elements of continuity emerge within a complex suite of factors that influenced postcolonial development in education and other sectors. Empirical research on educational transformation in African countries offers important insights into the difficulties of implementing socialist and other development policies in African countries influenced by global trends.

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.¹ The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

The purpose of this paper is to tackle some of the concepts and ideas that the intellectual and business community can learn from Chomsky's thinking in relation with a new global responsible management education environment. The first part of the work will present some of the key elements about Chomsky and education that the authors would like to emphasize. These are relating management education, critical thinking, and systems theory in the twenty‐first century business milieu.

An insight on post‐colonial theory and education will, afterwards, incorporate the hermeneutical tradition into the mainframe of critical thinking theory. The paper incorporates a decentred approach to education questioning presuppositions and moral values from “fundamentalist market theory.” Cultural studies and non‐western thinkers in this field are another important contribution to back up Chomsky's ideas on business and education.

When the paper relates social and economic performance concepts to critical thinking business education some questions arise about how to improve the responsible perception and understanding of the global environments and how the authors have to rethink education in a competitive profit‐oriented business community. The ideas of Chomsky can help them to deal with these issues departing from his political vision and his thinking on university education.

Critical management has been questioning in the last years different management models to put forward a responsible paradigm for business organizations and educational institutions. Post‐colonial theory has been another important intellectual ground for critical thinking in the business educational environment, opening up the debate about how to reconcile performance and responsible practices.

Chomsky's committed political views open up the way for many educational institutions and business organizations to become responsible in a technological business environment severely damaged by greed and personal interest. Management schools will have learned from his contributions and the actions of many international organizations engaged in changing for the better attitudes and material values in favour of management for globally responsible practices and the construction of new learning objectives.

In business studies, comparative, critical, cross‐cultural, and diversity management many scholars have been dealing with some of the subjects of serious concern by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leftist professor presented in this study. The paper has to take into consideration a transversal approach of business education in relation to the concept of cross‐cultural performance, already developed in the work on cross‐cultural and diversity management.

The article engages the “double identity” of being a feminist activist and academic in a tertiary institution in a post‐colonial society. The aim is to grapple with the personal experiences of a “change agent” in a tertiary education sector that is going through political transformation. The author also reflects on the impact of neo‐liberal capitalism on tertiary institutions, and its depoliticising effect on feminist activism. It engages the establishment of gender studies programs.

The article is a viewpoint and uses the personal reflections of a feminist scholar at a South African university to illustrate issues of personal location at a university as a site of struggle, but also location in the global South. It elaborates on the difficulty of changing male dominated institutional cultures and ways in which feminist activism is subverted.

The article shows how the experiences of being a change agent make “the personal political” and this contributes to taking a psychological toll. It exposes the intransigence toward change in hierarchical male dominated institutional cultures and recommends feminist solidarity across tertiary institutions, as well as using institutional opportunities for feminist purposes as counter measures to co‐option.

The value of the article is located in the reflection of a feminist scholar on her own experiences in the context of a South African university but may open a space for feminist scholars in tertiary institutions globally to relate to these experiences.

In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe have set out to internationalise or become world-class universities as part of their strategic ambitions. Thus, finding ways to become visible on a global scale and transcend beyond the countries in which they operate has become of major interest to most universities. The authors of this chapter were curious to determine how universities adopt imported organisational templates as a strategic ambition. One should not assume that the semblance of such imported concepts is mere institutional isomorphism stemming from internationalisation and globalisation. The study employed semi-structured interviews and institutional documents as data collection tools among ten (10) university actors in a flagship university in Ghana. The study used postcolonial theory to critically examine the drivers and current practices embedded in dominant hegemonic global discourses, such as internationalisation. The findings revealed that the drivers and reforms underpinning university internationalisation ambition are framed within economic rationalities, producing human capital, self-marketisation to promote visibility, and a quest for global competition couched within global neoliberal ideology. The study recommends the need for university actors to (re)focus and (re)evaluate university internationalisation discourse to ensure a balance between local relevance and global forces.