Challenges and pitfalls facing international education in a post-international world

Taking as its starting point that the adjective international is an inadequate, but unavoidable, label to describe the content of a contemporary international education, this article sets out to explore some of the issues facing international education in a post-international world. It draws mainly on writings in French as a deliberate counterweight to international education’s over-reliance on anglophone sources. The article’s main theme is that the practice of international education is determined, in ways of which we are often unaware, by the social, cultural, political and ideological context in which we live. It tries to identify some of the areas in which the impact of this context is most apparent. The first part of the article focuses on the continuing role of the nation state and on education for citizenship and multiple identities, stressing that citizenship education cannot be subsumed within ‘education for inter-cultural understanding and respect’ and drawing attention to Amartya Sen’s warning about the dangers of ‘plural monoculturalism’. The remainder of the article explores other areas in which hidden and sometimes unexamined presuppositions influence thinking and practice in ways that would benefit from challenge. These include the following: the impact of western utopianism; the balance between reason and emotion and the need for ‘an intelligent heart’; the pitfalls of service education and education for rights; the balance between contemporaneity and transmission; and attitudes towards happiness, adversity and language.