11 1.11 GLOBAL TRENDS IN EDUCATION
Another phenomenon needs mention. Although exchange of experience is not particularly well organized in this field, education does display a number of common trends and characteristics. If these are more evident in some places than others, it is nevertheless significant that they appear in various guises all over the world. In spite of all the cultural, historical, economic and ideological differences that exist among countries, or even regionally or sectorally within a single country, it is interesting and comforting to note that the education enterprise has, in this respect, the character of a worldwide concern. Here are some of the more significant of these trends.
The first concerns the choice of educational models. When it comes to choosing between two basic options restrictive selections or open admission the second more commonly finds favor. A number of developed countries are currently at grips with the transition between their earlier, highly selective systems and more open policies. Most developing nations opted at first for open educational systems, but lack of resources and demands of economic development have often led them to introduce more or less strict selection. They are concerned to avoid both the managed dictates of economic plans and the risks of laissez faire anarchy. Accordingly, they seek measures that reconcile respect for man with the demands of society, and individualization with the socialization of education.
Another common trend is towards technocratic systems basically designed to train workers and qualified professionals and to promote scientific and technical advancement. Although such a model tends intrinsically to restrict the educative base and encourage a considerable degree of selection, its effects have been neutralized in many countries where general development concerns have required the partial retention of open systems.
A more recent trend noticed in educational policies is the response to aspirations for freedom expressed by the broad mass of society. This liberating movement is particularly prevalent where economic and social development requires initiative and active participation by the whole population.
Public Provision of Education
Another dominant issue is the change in responsibility for educative action. Until the turn of the century, mainly the family, religious institutions, subsidized schools, apprentice guilds and independent establishments of higher education dispensed education. Today, in most countries of the world, these responsibilities rest chiefly on public authorities and the State. There are three main reasons for this. First, a general tendency to rely on public bodies to satisfy social needs; second, in almost all countries even where private initiative is encouraged it is considered that the State alone is in a position to assume responsibility for over all educational policy; third, many governments, aware of the importance of education’s ever increasing political role, are determined to keep control of it.
Among current developments in the structure of educational systems, the following trends should be noted. Extension of preschool education remains limited and generally within the school framework. The base of primary education is broadening and children begin going to school at an earlier age. The time spent at school is lengthening, and reforms often lead to incorporation of primary education into the first years of secondary school. Enrolment is increasing, and not just at the first level. There is vertical expansion as well, with growing numbers at higher stages. However, as the school population increases there are more drop outs and repeaters. In general, intake is at the lowest level of the system and outflow halfway up largely because of failures or at the top, after successful completion of studies. Admissions and departures midway through programmes are still rare, but beginning to be accepted.’ Critics who want greater attention paid to relieving the handicaps suffered by the most underprivileged social groups question the justification for strictly selective systems.
In spite of persistent opposition, school curricula are beginning to be less burdensome. Variations formerly noticed in the programmes of different elementary schools which were often a reflection of social discrimination are fading rapidly. More and more, instruction is given in the mother tongue. There is a tendency to raise the age at which choice of specialization is required which does not prevent more diversification of technical and professional education to fit the growing variety of jobs in modern industrial production. Links between various types of education are multiplying between general and technical education, polyvalent cultural courses and specialized training and among the humanities, science and technology, which figures increasingly in general education.
In higher education, traditional institutions are in a state of transformation, and all of post secondary education is expanding and diversifying. This diversification takes two opposite paths. One is the seemingly paradoxical grouping of multiple facilities in one large establishment or under one centralized administration (‘multi universities’) and the second is towards smaller, more flexible and more diverse types of institutions to cater for particular audiences in local conditions.’ Higher education is more and more staggered over several levels. Many new disciplines are being introduced, and interdisciplinary instruction is developing at the same time as higher education is becoming increasingly integrated with scientific research.
The scope of higher education has been enlarged to meet the new requirements of a larger student body, of research and community needs, and the appeals of those who want the university to act as a catalyst for social reform. New kinds of structures, students and curricula entail a thorough revision of selection and evaluation procedures. Student participation in the management of educational institutions and teaching programmes is growing.
All over the world teachers now constitute a very important socio professional group; in some developing countries they form the largest group of wage earners.
To all this must be added the general trend towards extending the non school sector of education. Adult literacy campaigns are making headway, and the distinction between formal elementary education and literacy programmes is beginning to blur. Schools and universities are supplemented and sometimes replaced by a multitude of extra academic or para academic activities, calling for the use of methods long neglected or only recently introduced in traditional education. These developments are taking place in two main areas. First, in the socio professional milieu, with a whole range of activities designed to provide civic training and professional instruction, with schools and other educational institutions offering courses for improvement, retraining or catching up on instruction and universities admitting adults without any formal conditions. Second, in the socio cultural milieu, through freer and more flexible structures, where self learning is assisted by provision of new and varied sources of materials and data, by numerous leisure activities and by social and community programmes likely to promote participation and encourage mutual education.
Increasing stress is laid on the links between educational development and other developments in society and the economy.
The concept of educational planning, admittedly limited essentially to school and university education, has been adopted by many governments in the course of the past decade. Effective in varying degrees, complex and technical and sometimes seen as magic solution methodical planning contributes on the whole to a judicious use of available human and financial resources. Finally, education is generally trying to transcend its purely didactic role and set its sights on the full flowering of human faculties.
It is true that most of the phenomena reviewed above are sometimes only trends, not widespread practice, and often appear in varied forms. The essential fact is that even where these common trends have not yet emerged, or even when they lead to varying results, contrary currents rarely oppose them and there is little indication they will take a different course in the future.
This does not mean there are not highly divergent and even contradictory movements to be seen at other levels. Educational development follows organic paths, some countries tending towards centralization, State control and a global system, and others towards decentralization, loosening of State control and greater variety.
The fact remains that many developments show a general consistency which is all the more remarkable in that they have sprung from very diverse ideas, criticisms and protest movements, which may be grouped into four major trends.
Educational Reforms
The first of these consists in reforming and reorganizing existing education structures and modernizing teaching methods. With or without attendant structural changes on the socio economic level, reforms of this sort are on the agenda nearly everywhere. The measures and initiatives taken by public authorities, as well as scientific bodies and individual educators, have implicitly, if not explicitly, prepared the way for major innovations in a number of countries. Numerous changes have taken place in developing countries, largely as the result of central government initiative, although the scarcity of means and a certain bureaucratic inertia sometimes dampen innovative enthusiasm and incline people to wait for confirmation of experiments undertaken elsewhere. In some countries possessing enormous intellectual and financial resources, the extent and gravity of problems and the failures to date in confronting them provide strong arguments for those who stress that fragmentary measures are ineffectual, and thus advocate total reform.
Structural Transformations
In countries which more or less recently have gone through social and political upheavals, events have often led to profound structural changes in the educational world, affecting the student base, access to education at various levels, curricula revision and, although to a lesser extent, modernization of methods? The establishment of close ties between schools and their milieu is a top priority in countries which view the education system as a vast mass movement, where each individual who has received an education has a civic duty to teach those who have been denied learning opportunities.’ Similar preoccupations are found in countries trying to separate education from the State by socializing it and making it the direct and active responsibility of those involved. The problem of structural changes is predominant in countries which consider that education should be completely revolutionized, if necessary by outside forces. Here, it is proposed that education and productive work should be completely integrated and that students must cease to form a distinct social category.
In these varied experiments, we should distinguish between specific aspects, determined largely by existing political structures and particular ideologies, and other elements less directly bound to these factors and, as such, susceptible of wider application.
Radical Criticism of Education
Belonging to the third movement are proponents of ‘de institutionalizing’ education and ‘de schooling’ society. Such theses, which as yet have no experimental basis, accordingly remain intellectual speculation. They are grounded on an outright condemnation of ‘institutionalized’ education and lead either to intermediary formulae or radical plans for a total ‘de schooling’ of society. This extreme thesis is developed from the postulate that education constitutes an independent variable in each society and a direct factor in social contradictions.’ The school’s position in society and the play of forces to which it is subjected make it incapable, however, of being the instrument of a true education in the service of humankind or of promoting ‘conviviality’.’ On the contrary, it serves the purposes of repressive, alienating and dehumanizing societies. According to Illich, therefore, institutions should be ‘inverted’ and the school suppressed, so that men and women may regain their freedom in a society shorn of formal schooling, resume control of the institution and thereby recover his initiative in education. In their absolute form, these concepts do not seem to conform to any of the world’s existing socio-political categories, but their authors think that de schooling society would sooner or later lead to an over all change in the social order likely to break the present vicious circle in which education is trapped. Even those who endorse these ideas recognize that while young persons can form their characters and learn by living within the community and performing practical tasks, some form of schooling is still necessary for certain kinds of learning. Be that as it may, these novel theories, which are close to other movements among young intellectuals, are interesting both for the controversies and play of ideas that they touch off and for the lively way in which they propound the problem of education. They help to throw light on possibilities from which other systems, even very different, may well draw inspiration.
Dissent by the Users of Education
A fourth movement, swelled by the dissent of the users themselves, has made its appearance in certain countries where education is of increasing concern to politicians, educationists, researchers and philosophers, as well as to the students themselves and the general public.
The analysis of reactions often seen among working class people confronted by rigid educational systems parents who notice negative reactions in their children or students skeptical of the value of the educational possibilities offered them yields fruitful results. When the school system remains the exclusive preserve of an intellectual elite, the product of the bourgeois class, which built the system and continues to dictate its laws and moral values, students become confused by the divorce between an outmoded education and the reality of the world around them. They become frustrated, dissipate their energies, grow bored or put their hopes in something else.
Student dissent made a niche for itself in history when widespread criticism infiltrated the heavily defended bastion of education. Despite its sometimes confused and naive character, its two edged radicalism, student protest opened a breach.’ Apathy among the student population constitutes, in its own way, another form of dissent. Disaffection and lack of enthusiasm among students in many countries is undoubtedly a sign that antiquated education systems are being rejected.
Interest in education has never been greater. Among parties, generations and groups, it has become the subject of controversy, which often takes on the dimensions of political or ideological battles. Education has become one of the favourite themes of empirical or scientific social criticism. It is easy to see why public figures are taken aback when their authority is challenged not courteously as in the past, by a few enlightened personalities ¬but massively by angry and even rebellious students. Also understandable is the wary reaction to many conclusions from present day research, to the extent that they undermine the foundations of certain postulates once regarded as immutable. We believe that all these forms of dissent overt or covert, peaceful or violent, reformist or radical deserve consideration in one way or another when educational policies and strategies are being mapped out for the coming years and decades.
Where then are we to find the characteristic sign of the present moment, among this constellation of divergent or coincident trends, varying methods, teeming ideas and generous intentions?
For more than twenty years, attention has remained focused on a few major questions how to obtain quantitative expansion in education, make education democratic, diversify the structures of educational systems and modernize content and methods.
A few years ago a new framework of problems took shape. In essence, it boils down to three questions. Are school systems capable of meeting the world wide demand for education? Is it possible to provide them with the immense resources they need? In short, is it possible to continue the development of education along the lines laid down and at the rate we have followed?
To these very pertinent questions must be added queries of a different sort in order to throw fuller light on the dimensions of the problem as it affects man’s future development.
We can and we must, given the present state of affairs, inquire into the profound meaning of education for the contemporary world and reassess its responsibilities towards the present generations which it must prepare for tomorrow’s world. We must inquire into its powers and its myths, its prospects and its aims.
We conclude the unit with the hope that national authorities responsible for education will avail themselves of assistance offered by international organizations, recognize the primordial necessity of placing educational problems in an over all context, and seek answers to this all important question does the educational apparatus, as now ¬conceived, really satisfy the needs and aspirations of man and societies in our time?
