Abstract
Scene 1: In a seminar as part of the International Doctoral Program at the Siegen University in Germany, a group of German and Brazilian students had as a debate theme—globalization. Concerned that the linguistic factor might impede communication I proposed that, to initiate the reflection, each one of the participants write down some ideas about the theme based on their experiences. Upon opening the debate, various German students presented their annotations, stressing in their presentations positive aspects such as access to goods produced in other parts of the world, communication with people from other cultures and nations, and the possibility of travel. Given the silence of the Brazilian group, I asked for the reason. I thought that maybe they had not understood the exercise itself. They said this was not the case and as they began to speak I realized that the reason for their silence was the difference in points of view. For them globalization was associated with job instability and the maintenance of unequal relations between class and countries.
We live in a paradoxical time. A time of vertiginous mutations produced by globalization, the society of consumption and the society of information. But also a time of stagnation, frozen in the impossibility of thinking social, radical transformation.
— Boaventura de Sousa Santos
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong.
—Arundhati Roy
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Notes
Octavio Ianni, Teorias da globalização (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira 1996), p. 113.
See also Peter McLaren in the interview with Lucía Coral Aguirre Muñoz, “The Globalization of Capital, Critical Pedagogy, and the Aftermath of September 11: An Interview with Peter McLaren,” The School Field vol. XII, no. 5/6 (2001), pp. 109–156;
J. Petras and H. Veitmeyer, Hegemonia dos Estados Unidos no novo milênio (Petrópolis: Vozes 2000).
In another article, McLaren and Ramin Faramandpur put it this way: “To call globalization a form of imperialism might seem a rhetorical exaggeration. But we believe that this identification is necessary because the term globalization (italics in original) is calculated by bourgeois critics to render any radical politici-zation of it extreme. The ideology of this move is invisibly to enframe the concept of globalization within a culturalistic logic that reduces it to mean a standardization of commodities (i.e., the same designer clothes appearing in shopping plazas throughout the world” (“Teaching against Globalization and the new Imperialism: Toward a Revolutionary Pedagogy,” Journal of Teacher Education vol. 52, no. 2 (March/April 2001), p. 138).
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, “Freire, Marx, and the New Imperialism: Toward a Revolutionary Praxis,” in Judith J. Slater, Stephan M. Fain, and Cesar A. Rossato (eds.), The Freirean Legacy: Educating for Social Justice (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 37.
Michel Hardt and Antônio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Atílio Boron, Império e imperi-alismo: uma leitura crítica de Michael Hardt e Antonio Negri (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2002).
Nicholas C. Burbules and Carlos Alberto Torres, Globalization and Education: Critical Perspective (New York, London: Routledge, 2000), p. 27.
I am referring to the text of Susan Robertson, Xavier Bonal, and Roger Dale, “GATS and the Education Service Industry: The Politics of Scale and Global Reterritorialization,” Annals of Congress of Comparative and International Education Society (University of Central Florida 2002). The authors identify four important categories for commerce in education: (a) offer to the outside—distance education, didactic material, specialized services that can cross borders of the signatory countries; (b) consumption outside the country: students can study in other countries; (c) commercial presence: international investors can open institutions in another country; (d) physical presence of people: possibility of people traveling between countries to offer educational services.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emílio ou Da Educação (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995), p. 91.
For a contrasting view on Angicos and Washington, see Moacir Gadotti, “Paulo Freire and the Culture of Justice and Peace: Perspective of Washington vs. the Perspective of Angicos,” in Carlos Alberto Torres and Pedro Noguera (eds.), Social Justice Education for Teachers: Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream (Roterdam: Sense, 2008), pp. 147–159. The author uses the two territories as metaphors of distinct paradigms of civilization. “Even analyzing dialectically—unity and the opposition of contrary forces—these two points of view are fundamentally irreducible, like war and peace, military and Utopian power, fundamentalism and dialogue” (p. 148).
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 61.
Carlos Alberto Torres Novoa, “Grandezas y miserias de la educación lati-noamericana del siglo veinte” Paulo Freire e a agenda da educação latino-americana no século XXI (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2001), p. 196.
See Néstor G. Canclini, Culturas híbridas: estrategías para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México: Grijalbo, 1989).
See Danilo R. Streck, “Revisitando a educação como ação cultural” [Revisiting education as a cultural action], Pedagogia no encontro de tempos (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2001).
The detailed analysis by Douglas Kellner of the tumultuous North American presidential elections of 2000 confirmed the good quality of the information of a great part of the newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, when compared to television, which, however, continued being the great constructer (in this case, distorter) of public opinion. See Douglas Kellner, Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election (Lanhan, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
See Robertson, Bonal, and Dale, “GATS and the Education Service Industry,” 2002.
The argumentation about Latin America is based on the analysis by Lourdes Benerfa, “The Foreign Debt Crisis and the Social Costs of Adjustments in Latin America,” in John Friedmann, Rebecca Abers, and Lilian Autler (eds.), Emergences: Women’s Struggles for Livelihood in Latin America [UCLA Latin American Studies 82 (1996)], pp. 11–27.
See Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Benedita da Silva, “Race and Politics in Brazil,” in Larry Crook and Randall Johnson (eds.), Black Brazil: Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1999), p. 21.
Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” The Guardian, November 3, 2001.
Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Miseducation (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
See Eduardo Galeano, “The Theatre of Good and Evil,” in Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke (eds.), September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke (San Francisco: City Lights Books, Freedom Voices, 2002).
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© 2010 Danilo R. Streck
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Streck, D.R. (2010). Daily Life, Globalization, and Education: Educational Practice and the Reading of the World. In: A New Social Contract in a Latin American Education Context. Palgrave Macmillan’s Postcolonial Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115293_2
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