Global Village or Global City? The (Urban) Communications Revolution and Education

This paper argues that the global communications revolution of the last twenty years has been mainly confined to the wealthy, urbanised and educated countries of the world, to the detriment of the development of education, culture and progress in the largely rural Third World. Advances in communications technology have, almost by definition, been confined to urban areas with developed infrastructures and a skilled and educated workforce. The global economy to which improved communications in all fields has given rise is largely concentrated in the densely populated highly urbanised OECD countries, from which corporate wealth and power exercise hegemony, particularly in the educational and cultural spheres. Neoliberalism, the ideology of globalisation, has fashioned a concept of education to suit the needs of Western industrial nations. Education is seen at the engine of the economy, propelling the curriculum in the direction of the utilitarian and the vocational, with an emphasis on science, mathematics, computer and business studies, and the promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit. Economic competition has led to a move away from input or process standards towards performance and outcome standards, with frequent testing and the listing of scores in tables, as measures of international comparison. Concomitantly, an urban based "Western" consumer culture, embracing pop music, Hollywood films, fast-food chains, branded soft drinks, "airport" novels, "infotainment", etc., is spreading to all parts of the world, threatening indigenous educational-cultural values in the largely rural Third World and developing countries. Globalisation, and the neoliberal educational programme and urban cultural values it espouses, would appear to offer little in the way of remedying the educational problems of these regions, which need, in the first place, a massive improvement in material resources - schools, equipment and facilities and textbooks, as well as other social service infrastructures. Globalisation has given rise to economic and social inequalities, particularly between north and south and seems unlikely, in the short term, to be able to correct them. In recent years, however, a worldwide anti-globalisation movement has sprung up, and demonstrations against international capital and its agencies - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation - are commonplace. Several grass-roots bodies opposed to specific aspects of the global project have also arisen, and the World Social Forum attempts to unite these movements on a programme for socio-economic justice and educational equity in opposition to the market-driven globalisation of international capital. This project would appear to offer hope for a more equitable future.