Urban Education, Work, and Social Mobility in Oceania: World-Systems Patterns, and Limits, for Peripheral Zones
This chapter considers the question of urbanization and urban education in Oceania, from a world-systems analysis perspective. This is set first in the context of well-established ideas of upward social mobility through education, and how this logic has e
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Urban Education, Work, and Social Mobility in Oceania: World-Systems Patterns, and Limits, for Peripheral Zones Tom G. Griffiths
50.1 Education, Development, and Social Mobility A direct relationship between education and projects for national development is so well established in policy that it is difficult to imagine otherwise. Ongoing efforts by the World Bank to present its work, and its loans for education in particular, under the banner of poverty reduction, are illustrative of this dominant discourse (Klees et al. 2012). Similarly, the Millennium Development Goal X.X to achieve Universal Primary Schooling by 2015, while unlikely to be realized (UNESCO 2015), reflects in part the development promise attached to expanded education. Scholars examining the expansion of mass schooling from the ‘world culture theory’ perspective highlight that the claimed or intended link between education and national economic development is a part of the “world polity’s myth of progress” (Ramirez and Boli 1987, p. 155). The argument here is that an identifiable world culture, centred on ideas about the nation-state and extending to ideas about its institutions and how they contribute to state formation, disseminates the view that “formal education is necessary and beneficial for economic growth, technical innovation, citizen loyalty, and democratic institutions, among other things” (Meyer et al. 1997, 149). A world culture theory perspective locates causation for the expansion of mass schooling, and indeed for other identified areas of educational policy convergence, within a world culture of schooling. Alternative theories arguing for economic (and political economy) causation are dismissed, their rejection based primarily on their supposed inability to account for the simultaneous expansion of schooling across
T.G. Griffiths (*) School of Education, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 W.T. Pink, G.W. Noblit (eds.), Second International Handbook of Urban Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40317-5_50
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diverse polities, in divergent stages of capitalist economic development (see for example Ramirez 2003). Debate about this question is part of a broader critique of world culture theory within comparative and international education. I will return to this debate below, but want to highlight here the shared, cultural attributes of formal education centred human capital formation for national economic growth, and political formation as citizens of the nation-state (see Griffiths and Arnove 2015, part of a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education).1 Understanding human capital theory and its influence on formal education policy and practice, particularly in current times, rests in the post-World War II projects of reconstruction and development. In the context of the cold-war struggle for political and ideological influence, and the dismant
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