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BOOK
REVIEW
A march of
mediocrity
Globalization:
Culture and Education in the New Millennium,
edited by Marcelo M Suárez-Orozco and Desiree
Baolian Qin-Hilliard
Reviewed by Piyush
Mathur
The
standard of academic writing on globalization has
generally been quite low; the volume of that writing, on
the other hand, is by now disturbingly high. The edited
book under review adds to that volume - but fails to
raise the bar of the discourse. Worse, bold endorsements
by powerful names displayed on the book's front pages
and back cover ironically highlight this commissioned
project 
as little
more than an expensive hollowness carved out by a
coterie of backslapping academics. Except for three
illuminating entries - by Sherry Turkle, Henry Jenkins
and Sunaina Maira - this collection of 10 essays is
laughably shallow.
Offered "as a tool for anyone
... interested in how education must adapt in a
fast-changing world", the book throws heaps of
banalities and vacuous claims at the reader - and only
occasionally delivers on the foregoing thematic promise
(pp ix-x). Most of the collection is devoted to aspects
of globalization other than education - such as popular
culture, technology, economy, and politics. Typically,
these poorly ridden hobbyhorses of the contributors are
only perfunctorily made to graze on the promised land of
"education through globalization" - as hurried
conclusions to the essays.
For the record, John
H Coatsworth hands us an inane, unoriginal, and
extremely ad hoc economic history of globalization - as
if to remain loyal to a god-forsaken convention in the
scholarship on globalization (pp 38-55). Raising no
doubts about what counts as education, David E Bloom
confidently makes such facile observations as "global
income inequality is mirrored by global inequality in
education" (p 62) - and drives home such equally facile
conclusions as "quality should be at the forefront of
educators' plan, but increased quantity of education is
also essential" (p 75). Carola Suárez-Orozco drags the
reader into a protracted, simplistic overview of
literatures on "identity" and "globalization" - before
plainly declaring: "Preparing youth to successfully
navigate our multicultural world is essential to
preparing them to be global citizens. Surely the
implications for a more tolerant world are obvious" (p
198). All too obvious, indeed!
Unable to leave
behind the antiquated world view of disciplinary purity
- and the vocabulary that goes with it - Howard Gardner
sticks his neck out as a prophet facing backward. He
pines for "genuine disciplinary understanding" as a
precondition to interdisciplinary education (p 248). "We
could not take seriously a claim of bilingualism," he
argues, "unless a person had mastered more than one
language; and so I reason that one should not evoke the
term interdisciplinary until one has exhibited
mastery of more than one discipline" (p 252). Inasmuch
as he conjures the fantasy of mastery, Gardner's analogy
is flawed from the start because the phenomena of
language and academic discipline are simply not
comparable in character or structure; moreover, Gardner
ought to have thought about "interlingualism" rather
than "bilingualism" if he wished to find a linguistic
analogue for "interdisciplinarism".
In any case,
many bilinguals actually start out learning two
languages simultaneously - rather than waiting to master
one language before starting to learn the other. For all
that, Gardner shows a lack of understanding of both
linguistic competence and education as processes of
learning rather than merely as exhibitory products in
their final stages of manufacture and up for assessment
- whereas one (some prophet like Gardner?) could certify
their bearers to be genuine or fake, legitimate or
illegitimate. On a different level, Gardner also
neglects to observe any distinction between the
interdisciplinary and the multidisciplinary.
The
collection's landscape of mediocrity, however, has its
classic low in the entry by Antonio M Battro, whose
"thesis is that the impressive global impact of digital
technologies on human society, and particularly on
education, is related to the universal capacity of
mind/brain to make very simple decisions" (p 79). While
much of Battro's essay is a woefully mundane
characterization of the World Wide Web, its outstanding
property is a retroactive historical justificationism
(so-called Whiggish history), which leads him to assert
that human learning has progressed quite rationally, yet
naturally, up to the point where the developed world is
in the digital age. "The new digital skills are based on
the old click options that we can trace in the evolution
of our species and in the development of the
individual," Battro writes - without any serious
evidence, worthwhile illustration, or even conceptual
clarity (p 82).
Elsewhere, he makes the
following claim - a lamentable mix of banality,
nonsense, and redundancy: "With a simple click on a
computer we can send a message, print a drawing, hear
music, see a video, control a robot, or take cash from a
bank terminal. This elementary ability to make a click
is the basic component of a skill that is found
in all cultures and in all individuals, whatever their
age and socioeconomic background, who are exposed to
this kind of digital device. I suspect that without this
basic digital ability it would be impossible to have
reached the current level of globalization in our
societies. This is, incidentally, one of the great
advantages of computer technologies education" (pp
79-80).
The slippery slope of Battro's "thesis"
degenerates into a pathetic romanticism as he proffers
the contradiction that "the primary message we
communicate through the Web is love, in spite of the
many who use it to stimulate hate and violence and even
produce terrorist acts" (p 90). This is immediately
followed by a whiff of empty normativity, as he
proclaims: "The educator's task is to foster the good
work in us" (p 90). But perhaps his climax comes even
later - in the self-fulfilling, pseudo-scientific
prophecy as follows: "We already have significant data
... to give cross-cultural evidence of the expanding
digital skills among children in the globalized world.
With this evidence we might expect a very profound
change in education in this century, perhaps emerging
not as a change of paradigm, a clash of cultures, but as
the unfolding of a very powerful intellectual capacity,
a digital intelligence that was waiting for the right
tools to flourish. These tools are the digital tools of
today" (p 94).
Encountering statements such as
the above in a peer-reviewed academic work would
normally bewilder the academic reader: but not within
the context of this volume. Indeed, the volume is full
of precisely such vague and hyperbolic statements - that
best behove a first-year English Composition paper set
to get a C (let's say in the typical US university).
Consider, for instance, the following claim (by the
editors): "Globalization is generating changes of a
magnitude comparable to the emergence of agriculture ten
thousand years ago or the industrial revolution two
hundred years ago" (p 14). Or, the following rather
presumptive statement in the Preface by Courtney
Ross-Holst (to whom the volume is dedicated): "Knowledge
today is spreading faster than at any time before in
human history ... Advances in communications let
students anywhere in the world access the best teachers
and newest ideas" (p x).
That, I am afraid, is
at best unnecessary sloganeering and at worst an
ironically selective characterization of the "anywhere"
of the world. Most of this volume is a combination of
the above two flaws, overshadowed by the hackneyed, the
unempirical, and the pompous.
The three
surprises
Stranded within the volume's visceral
maze are the essays by Sherry Turkle, Henry Jenkins, and
Sunaina Maira, the three authors who have done their
homework and actually have something to say. Turkle
focuses on the heuristic and existential implications of
the increasing computerization of learning - and even
larger social - environments through globalization. She
points out "the ambiguities and contradictions that
computations technologies engender in human thought and
affect" - and argues that "the important work in this
domain needs to be done in this 'gray zone' rather than
in the more simplistic 'computers are all good and all
bad' style of analysis that has been endemic in
discussions of the Internet and global culture" (p 109).
Based upon a set of highly convincing
illustrations - comprising her personal observations,
interactions, and examples from the history of
computerization - Turkle drives home a number of deep,
troubling points about the impact of computers. "We have
an environment that privileges the manipulation of
personae over the knowledge of the self," she argues (p
98). This abstract statement is better grasped in light
of a prior observation that the "same children who write
multiple narratives for screen avatars can be ignorant
of the simplest strategies for sharing their 'real'
feelings with other people" (p 98).
This
shrinking realism in life (to put it in my words) has
much wider implications, which Turkle very thoughtfully
highlights: "The simple clarities of our globalized
computer worlds depend on their virtuality. The real
world is messy and painted in shades of gray. In that
world we need to be comfortable with ambivalence and
contradiction. We need to be able to put ourselves in
the place of others in order to understand their
motivations. Above all, we need to resist binary
formulations" (p 112).
In addition to the
problem of emotional detachment is the concern related
to the historical change in the relationship between
computers and their users. Turkle's point here is that
an increasing number of contemporary users of computers
only know (or focus on learning) how to put computers to
use - instead of knowing (or figuring out) how the
hardware or software actually works. As such, the
typical computer user - especially via the Macintosh
revolution in screen simulation - has been losing
control over the knowledge that comes with computing;
the user is also losing in intellectual curiosity.
Turkle complains: "Simulations enable us to abdicate
authority to the programmer; they give us permission to
accept the opacity of the model that plays itself out on
our screens" (p 107).
Within the context of
school education, "the ideas that children are learning
are the ones embedded in online gaming, search engines,
and productivity software such as word processing,
spreadsheets, and presentation tools. [These ideas]
constitute a particular esthetic in educational
computing in which presentation and simulation are
seen as their own powerful ideas" (p 101). As a case
in point, Turkle argues: "PowerPoint encourages
presentation, not conversation. It does not encourage
students to make an argument. It encourages them to make
a point. A good slide show, with its swooshing sounds,
animated icons, and flashing text, closes down debate
rather than opening it up, because it conveys absolute
authority. Teachers [at school level] now regularly take
books off reading lists if those books 'don't give good
PowerPoint'" (p 101). "The global reach of presentation
software," Turkle concludes, "has fetishized the
outline" (p 101).
As a way out of the globalized
education's superficial stress on presentation, Turkle
advocates developing "readership skills for the
culture of simulation" (p 107). The mainstay of
Turkle's "new criticism" is a rejection of "simulation
resignation" - whereby the user habitually and passively
accepts "simulations on their own terms" - coupled with
"the development of simulations that help users
understand and challenge the model's built-in
assumptions" (p 107).
Cultural
issues
Henry Jenkins' essay is a
delightful identification and validation of popular
trends in cosmopolitanism resulting from the 1990s wave
of globalization. His underlying objective is to debunk
the fashionable hypothesis that globalization is
Americanization or even Westernization of the world:
"Much as teens in the developing world use American
popular culture to express generational differences or
to articulate fantasies of social, political, and
cultural transformation, younger Americans are
distinguishing themselves from their parents' culture
through their consumption of Japanese anime and manga,
Bollywood films and bhangra, and Hong Kong action
movies" (p 117).
Jenkins calls these young
people "pop cosmopolitans"; pop cosmopolitanism,
meanwhile, refers to "to the ways ... the transcultural
flows of popular culture inspire new forms of global
consciousness and cultural competency" (p 117). Jenkins'
account includes cases and illustrations ranging from
the growing popularity of Indian movies, music, and
fashion models and Japanese anime in the West to that of
US products in Asia, and to the growing number of US
remakes of foreign entertainment products. He focuses on
"two kinds of cultural communities: the South Asian
diasporic community (the 'desis') that prepares the way
for Bollywood films and Bhangra music, and western fans
(the 'otaku') who insure the translation and circulation
of Japanese anime and manga" (p 125).
Undercutting another fashionable hypothesis that
globalization has mainly depended on corporatization,
Jenkins emphasizes and illustrates how "grassroots
cultural production and distribution demonstrated a
demand for Asian content that preceded any systematic
attempts to distribute it commercially in the West" (p
125). He goes on to caution, "We underestimate the
impact of these grassroots intermediaries if we see them
as markets or even marketers" (p 125). That is because
these intermediaries "also play a central role in
shaping the reception of those media products,
emphasizing rather than erasing the marks of their
national origin and educating others about the cultural
traditions they embody" (p 125).
Jenkins also
addresses the issue of whether pop cosmopolitanism is
merely a matter of superficial consumption of foreign
cultural products. His shrewd, original observation is:
"The pop cosmopolitan walks a thin line between
dilettantism and connoisseurship, between orientalist
fantasies and a desire to honestly connect and
understand an alien culture, between assertion of
mastery and surrender to cultural differences" (p 127).
As a case in point, he asserts: "Some anime fans do
cultivate a more general knowledge of Japanese culture.
They meet at sushi restaurants; clubs build partnership
via the Internet with sister organizations in Japan.
Members often travel to Japan ... some study the
Japanese language in order to participate in various
translation projects ... Discussion lists move fluidly
from focus on anime- and manga-specific topics onto
larger considerations of Japanese politics and culture
..." (p 129).
As Jenkins provides deeper details
of the economic and social infrastructure of pop
cosmopolitanism, he gives the trend a strong
intellectual and political validation: "What
cosmopolitanism at its best offers us is an escape from
parochialism and isolationism, the beginnings of a
global perspective, and the awareness of alternative
vantage points" (p 130). He also views pop
cosmopolitanism as an extremely worthwhile, essentially
indispensable, trade-off on the turf of international
understanding: "While the uneven flow of cultural
materials across national borders often produces a
distorted understanding of national differences, it also
represents a first significant step toward global
consciousness" (p 133). His advice to the educationists
is that they "should ... not ... push aside taste for
popular culture in favor of preference for a more
authentic folk culture or a more refined high culture
but rather to help students build upon what they have
already learned about cultural difference through their
engagement with Asian media imports and to develop a
more sophisticated understanding of ... the current ...
state of global culture ..." (p 136).
Political and economic qualifiers
The
third crucial entry to the volume is Sunaina Maira's
brilliant post-September 11 ethnographic exploration
into the struggles of an underclass of juveniles in the
United States - "working-class Indian, Pakistani, and
Bangladeshi immigrant students in the public high school
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since fall 2001" (p 210).
Contra Jenkins, what with his focus on well-off pop
cosmopolitans, Maira highlights issues in immigration
status, poverty, the United States' post-September 11
biases against resident Muslims and its worldwide
domination - as an underside of globalization and what
stands neglected within globalization studies.
Maira's study is very courageous also because -
unlike the English-language Indian media - it refuses to
rehash the success stories of (the often dubiously
nationalistic) minority of Non-Resident Indian
technocrats. Her subjects of study are "recently arrived
(within the last one to five years), mostly from small
towns in South Asia, and with minimal to moderate
fluency in English" (p 211). Out of those, most of the
Indian pupils "are from Muslim families ... from Gujarat
... [and who] work after school, up to twenty hours a
week, in fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and retail
stores and as security guards" (p 211).
Unlike
Jenkins' pop cosmopolitans, Maira's subjects of study
"do not have the time or resources to participate in US
public culture ..." (p 216). In fact, they "are rooted
in their (low-income or immigrant) neighborhoods, and it
is their consumption of popular culture from their
country of origin that marks them as 'transnational'
..." (p 216). The prime concern for these juveniles -
who are by default, and often unbeknown to themselves,
"migrant workers" - remains acquisition of US
citizenship (p 218). After September 11, 2001, Maira
argues, "citizenship seemed to become less a matter of
choice [for these pupils] than a hoped-for shield
against the abuses of civil rights" (p 215).
For
all that, on one level, Maira's subjects of study "can
perform the economic citizenship required of the
neo-liberal citizenship but cannot win cultural
citizenship" (p 219). On another level, and based upon
her interviews with them within the context of the
September 11 and the US bombing of Afghanistan, Maira
argues that these young people - but specially the
Muslims among them - are participating, not in
cosmopolitanism but, in a "dissenting citizenship ...
based on a critique and affirmation of human rights that
means one has to stand apart at some moments, even as
one stands together with others who are often faceless,
outside the borders of the nation" (p 222).
Maira goes on to detail the empirical and
theoretical specifics of this dissenting citizenship,
arguing that the critique of the US state offered by
these juveniles is not something that "some middle-class
South Asian community leaders [in the US] are willing to
voice" (p 221). Moreover, "the critique goes beyond the
debate between liberal and conservative appraisals of
cosmopolitanism's possibilities ... because it raises an
issue that is not emphasized enough by these critics:
that of cosmopolitanism and, related, of globalization,
as an imperial feeling (p 223). More to the
point: "The perspective of Muslim immigrant youth is
very much rooted in their identities as Muslims,
who are targeted as such by the state, and also sheds
light on US national policy as a manifestation of
imperial policy at this moment" (p 223).
In her
conclusion, Maira draws attention to the thus
complicated location of such South Asian immigrant
students in the post-September 11 US high school. She
underlines the need to develop "an ethnography of the
new empire to undergird the theories of globalization" -
especially one focusing on"the experiences of youth as
actors on a global stage" (p 227). Given that the key
youthful public faces of globalization have so far
happened to be drawn from MTV, on one hand, and migrant
technocrats, on the other, Maira's peculiar focus is
certainly most welcome - and very much needed.
Conclusion
The overall low quality of
this volume, coupled with its powerful packaging,
obliges me to mention, as if by way of retrospect, an
important editorial statement regarding education
through globalization. "Multitasking, learning how to
learn, learning from failures, lifelong learning, and
the ability to master and move across domains," the
editors point out, "now have a premium" (p 6). Inasmuch
as I hope that the contributors to this volume
themselves embrace the above features, there is one
important asset for the globalizing educationist that
the editors neglect to mention - while knowing exactly
how to use it: credentialism.
The editorial
introduction, for instance, compulsively introduces the
contributors in a self-congratulatory fashion, using
"Harvard" as an adjective - as if it were an industrial
trademark: "Harvard historian John Coatsworth" (p 15);
"Harvard economist David Bloom" (p 16); "Harvard social
anthropologist James Watson" (p 20); "Harvard cultural
psychologist Carola Suárez-Orozco" (p 21); and "Harvard
psychologist and education scholar Howard Gardner" (p
23). That leaves us with: "Antonio Battro - the eminent
Argentinean physician" (was a visiting professor to
Harvard) (p 18); "eminent Massachusetts Institute of
Technology psychologist Sherry Turkle" (p 18); "two
leading scholars of globalization and culture, Henry
Jenkins and James Watson" (MIT, Harvard, respectively)
(p 19) - and the lone non-Ivy Leaguer, the plain and
industrially nondescript "cultural theorist Sunaina
Maira" (p 22).
The cheesiness of this whole deal
is thrust well into the reader's face by way of powerful
- but quite misguided - endorsements on the covers. The
introduction identifies several features that supposedly
make this volume unique; well, there is one feature that
is worth reporting: The volume "is based on
commissioned, heretofore unpublished essays ..." (p 24).
Go figure!
Globalization: Culture and
Education in the New Millennium edited by Marcelo M
Suarez-Orozco and Desiree Baolian Qin-Hilliard.
University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles;
The Ross Institute, London, 2004; 275 pages, US$19.95.
ISBN: 0-520-24125-8.
Piyush Mathur,
PhD, an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi, and Virginia Tech, USA, is an independent
observer of world affairs, the environment, science and
technology policy, and literatures.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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