Commodity or Culture?: Attempts at Cultural Integration through National Education Policy Goals
Research Evidence: Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and India
MacPhearson uses the
case study of the Tibetan diaspora in Canada, the U.S., and India to examine
three different approaches to integrating ethno-diversity into national
educational policy: integration; achievement; and sustainability. Canada
focuses on integration to create social cohesion, defined as a sense of trust
and civic participation that creates a common identity across cultural or
linguistic differences. The U.S. focuses on achievement, with MacPhearson
noting that Americans are more likely to tolerate inequality if some
marginalized people can join the ranks of the elite. One concern with both the
U.S. and Canada is that racialized people who find success often do so at the
cost of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. India, however, focuses on
sustainable ethno-diversity through participatory pluralism. Many Indians are
trilingual and the country has a tradition of giving minority groups free reign
over their own cultural traditions and education. The downside to participatory
pluralism is that the success or failure of these systems lies within the
cultural groups themselves, not the state.
Engel and Siczek
examine national education policy frameworks from the U.S., the U.K., Canada,
Ireland, and Australia to determine their respective stances on global
citizenship education. They found that all five countries focused on education
as a commodity to increase national wealth, produce more competitive citizens,
expand the influence of their countries globally and, in the case of the U.S.,
enhance national security. There was little to no mention of “global community”
or “shared humanity” in their findings. This is at odds with the UNESCO goals
of global education, leading Engel and Siczek to posit that any strategies for
internationalization established by individual states are bound by their
national aims, limiting their ability to form true global citizens.
Dryden-Peterson and Mulimbi examine the history of Botswana to determine how civic education played a role in its becoming one of the most peaceful countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The three main factors they identify are: high levels of wealth redistribution after independence from Britain, so all people feel like they have a role in society; high rates of education across all ethnic groups, not only the majority Tswana; and increased funding in primary education giving all citizens a link to government services and concepts of state citizenship. Through these methods, Botswana has transformed their conflicts from horizontal to vertical and avoided the civil unrest of their neighbouring countries.
Comparisons and Synthesis
MacPhearson’s argument
that, within education policy, multicultural integration and achievement are
fruitless in the long-term without sustainability, seems to be a direct
response to the findings of Engel and Siczek. The latter show that the national
governments of the top five “Anglo-Saxon” countries that are destinations for
international students – Canada, Australia, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S. –
have little in the way of explicit policy goals that match UNESCO’s intent to
promote globalized democratic citizenship education. Engel and Siczek often use
the term “commodity” when referring to how these countries view the concept of
globalized education; the neoliberal model at work here reduces the complexity
of global education to supply and demand, casting students as widgets.
Conversely, Dryden-Peterson and Mulimbi show, in their
analysis of Botswana, how a country’s education policy can change course to
meet the needs of its citizens without bending to corporate interests. However
it could be argued that Botswana does not function as an equal comparison to
the five aforementioned countries; Botswana built its education system for the
expressed purpose of not descending into civil war as its neighbours had done,
while the countries that Engel and Siczek examine did not face that existential
risk – not accounting for the tensions between Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland.
It would be interesting to explore the future of Botswana’s education system if the country moves towards increased global integration and interdependency. Would they also market their system to other Sub-Saharan states as a premier destination for international education, for the express purpose of generating capital? Once the existential crises of war have been removed and concepts of citizenship are enforced through hegemony, would the education system naturally creep towards neoliberalism?
Canada prides, and markets, itself as being a
multicultural country. However, based on this research, I wonder if
the Canadian concept of “multiculturalism” needs to be rethought, particularly
as it applies to how we inculcate our current and future citizens. A student
learning to be a citizen in Scarborough will have a very different cultural
experience than one learning the same lessons in rural Alberta. As hard as
Canada has worked to establish a unique culture for itself, and to entrench
those values in students, it could be argued that it has always been a patchwork
country of regions held together more so by geography than shared cultural
identity.
I have taught students from across the socio-economic spectrum; both heartbreaking examples of poverty, and families so wealthy their main form of transportation was by private helicopter. Although there will always be some similarities between high school
students, the concepts they have of what it means to be a Canadian citizen vary
wildly. How do I teach both those students that as Canadian
citizens, both their cultures have equal weight? Can both cultures be
sustainable and successful, or is the immigrant forced to acquiesce to
normative structures in order to survive?
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WORKS CITED
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