Review of the book Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State, by Joel Spring. Published by Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006

Harper, M. Todd

English

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Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, PerspectiveVolume 2Number 1 Special Issue on Hispanic Immigration,Education and Empowerment in the U.S. South.Article 7June 2010Book Review: Pedagogies of Globalization: TheRise of the Educational Security StateM. Todd HarperKennesaw State University, tharper@kennesaw.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/jgiThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal ofGlobal Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. For more information,please contact digitalcommons@kennesaw.edu.Recommended CitationHarper, M. Todd (2010) "Book Review: Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State," Journal of GlobalInitiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective: Vol. 2 : No. 1 , Article 7.Available at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/jgi/vol2/iss1/7Journal for Global Initiatives 2(1) (2007). pp. 104-106Book ReviewTodd Harper, Kennesaw State UniversityPedagogies ofGlobalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State.Joel Spring. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.While in graduate school during the 1990s, many of my peers took up PauloFreire and decided that they would "subvert" the "capitalistic nature of Americaneducation" by «empowering" their writing students in the composition classroom.No longer would they stand in front oftheir classroom and lecture on the comma.Rather, they would send their students out to work on collaborative projects thatwould be brought back and shared with the rest of the class, now a communityof interested scholars rather than a collection of empty minds waiting to be filledby the insights of the instructor. Their "bogeyman:' of course, was the "sage onthe stage" standing at the front of the traditional classroom with its perfect rowsof seats, filling those empty minds with the valuable knowledge of the hegemonicculture in the way that a child might place pennies in a piggy bank. This sort ofeducation, they reasoned, only prepared students for life in the factory with itslong lines of employees who sat quietly along the assembly line and who listenedattentively and in silence to the boss man shouting orders.I imagine that Joel Spring, the author of Pedagogies of Globalization: TheRise ofthe Educational Security State, would recognize the humor ofone facultymember, having had his pedagogy piously critiqued in class by one ofmy peers,reminding the student that (a) none of the graduate student's upper middle-class writing students were likely to wind up working on an assembly line; (b)composition, a general education requirement of all students, was one of thecourses most symbolic of the "system" that the institution offered; and (c) it waseven questionable whether the United States still had an industrial economy.From this last point, he moved the class into a more productive discussion as towhether the group projects, collaborative learning, and experiential knowledgethat were advocated by some of the composition scholarship as "radical" werenot more helpful for the global service economy of the United States at theHarper 105end of the 20th century than the rigid, traditional pedagogies that had beenadvocated at the first part of the century.It is not that Spring would object to Freire or classroom pedagogies thatemphasize collaborative learning, shared knowledge, and experiential projects.Indeed, Spring advocates progressive education as «empowering people as actorsin the reconstruction of society" (p. 253). In the same way he finds the search inclassical education for «the source of human happiness and the just society asexemplified by Confucianist, Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions"(p. 253) and the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples «based on centuriesof experience with how humans interact with each other and the environment"(p. 254) as important tools for education in a global society. Instead, I think thatSpring would smile at the exchange mentioned above because ofmy friend's naIveunderstanding of the relationship between the state and various pedagogicalsystems, and I am even more certain that he would have chuckled as my frienddrove me and our professor home in his beat up old BMWFor Spring, the relationship between the state and various educationalpractices is complex, particularly when it involves cross-cultural fertilization,as say, from villages in South and Central America to an urban university inLouisville, Kent~cky. The opening line of the first chapter, in fact, reads, «Theglobalization of common educational practices involves an interplay betweenclassical, industrial-consumer, progressive, and indigenous pedagogies, globaland local languages and cultures, and the nation-state and civil society" (p. 1). Atone moment, for instance, the state might advocate progressive education in itsschools as a means ofreaching out to minority students and bringing about greatercommunity and equality as it did in the 1960s, while within a heartbeat, the samestate might revert to standardized testing and teaching as was first advocated in the1980s in A Nation at Risk and later realized in George H. W Bush's No Child LeftBehind. In either case, Spring observes, the state was responding to its economicand military needs. When diversity was thought to be a way to bring new workersand, more importantly, additional consumers into the global marketplace, notsurprisingly, progressive practices were staunchly argued and rewarded by thestate. However, when America's economic hegemony seemed threatened byJapan, the United States ironically adopted the conservative education model ofthe Japanese, which emphaSized strict discipline, rewards for students who roseto the top, longer hours, more homework, and more standardized testing.However, what interests Spring the most is not just the relationship betweenthe United States and its constantly changing system of education, but ratherthe interplay of various well-established pedagogies on a global scale. Forexample, in the case of Japan and the United States in the 1980s, each state feltthreatened by the other. As I noted above, the United States began advocating106 Journal for Global Initiativesthe long hours and intense workload of the Japanese school system, arg_uing thatits own educational system had created a culture of mediocrity. Yet, at the sametime, Spring quotes Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori as warning, (~t thethreshold of the 21 st century ... the reality is the Japanese education system isdeteriorating and this cannot be overlooked» (p. 216). Spring then quotes thePrime Minister's Commission on Educatio,n which sought blame in the systemsstrict nature: "Through the standardization of education resulting from excessiveegalitarianism, and the cramming of immoderate levels of knowledge, educationorientated towards the individuality and competence of the children has beengiven neglect» (pp. 216-217). Even when pedagogies are the same, such as in therecent emphasis on English instruction, Spring notes the nuanced differencesamong various states. For example, in Southeast Asia, English instruction isvie.wed as a means to competing in the global market whose language is becomingEnglish. In Central Asia, where there are pockets of Muslim fundamentalism,English instruction is teaching the enemy's language, while in the United Statesit is maintaining hegemony.Spring's book is not simply an analysis of comparative systems of education.Rather, it states and seeks solutions to some of his own fears of an industrial-consumerist global economy. Spring worries that too great an emphasis is placedon producing workers who find fulfillment in the goods they consume, advertisingthat creates new needs within the system, the use of "planned obsolescence» tosell new products that replace old ones, and branding (pp. 239-240). Ultimately,he fears that the industrial consumer culture has created workers who definehappiness in terms of unattainable desires that are somehow located in the mostrecent product that can be bought. For Spring, there are no easy answers. Instead,states must combine various educational theories and practices that would findthe attainment of happiness in the greater personal freedom of the worker andthe fulfilling nature of his or her work. What that combination might look like,Spring never indicates-he knows that the specific context of each state and itseducational system will determine the solution. Rather, he leaves us as readersand citizens of our own state to ponder the solution.

Book Review: Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State

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Book Review: Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State

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