Globalization, Culture, and Education
It was with a mixed feeling of uneasiness and eagerness that I learned that globalization was the conference theme I was to address today. No word seems more widely used at conferences, and yet no word is more loosely defined or more emotionally laden. The phenomenon it describes is indeed too pervasive and far-reaching to ignore, but the word globalization tends to reduce this complex reality to a specific set of consequences, often negative, and often limited to the economic.
Perhaps it is because the early gains in affluence and equity brought about in the fifties and the sixties by transnational markets and an emerging global economic order in many countries has since given way to a situation where, in these same countries, the trends have reversed and the poverty and equality gap has widened. Studies show that in 49 out of 77 countries (77% of the world's population) there was rising capital share, falling labor share, and an increasing inequality ratio since 1975.
Perhaps it is because the word globalization itself carries with it the implication that the effects and hoped for benefits flow in basically one direction, from West to East (or North to South), as if, like that discredited word colonization, where there are colonizers and the colonized, so also the world is divided into the globalizers and the globalized. Who wants that?
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