Will Brehm  2:38
Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, welcome to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson  2:42
Thanks Will, very nice to be here.

Roger Dale  2:44
Thank you. A new experience. I’m looking forward to it.

Will Brehm  2:47
How would you describe the current state of the field of globalization in education studies?

Susan Robertson  2:52
I mean it’s been a turbulent year, a roller coaster of a ride in many ways. And with huge implications, not just for the way we think about global processes in education, but actually, the whole question of the nature of the institutions that we have, and what might well be happening to those institutions tucked inside nation states and within regions. So just very quickly, you know, the rise of populist politics, which, on the one hand, seems to be kind of globalizing. We go from Brexit out to Trump, the President Elect. Thoughts about France, potentially Netherlands, and other populist political parties getting some traction in the political arenas. And it seems to me that that these have all got major implications, not just for education as a sector, but actually for, I think, the work that education is probably going to have to do in order to be able to help us put on the table, different kinds of conversations about how we live in the world together. About how we don’t knee jerk into quick blames around migrants and asylum seekers, and so on. I mean, there are clearly very big structural issues, many of them we’ve been talking about, including my colleague, Roger. We’ve been talking about these in the journal. Big structural issues to do with neoliberalism, the ways in which development agendas have privileged particular countries over others. These are long standing issues and relationships, but they’ve actually created almost a kind of chasms now, and breaches that kind of feel as if there’s been a shift in the excess of the world. And somehow we’re going to have to try and use all of the amounts of patri potential in education, and the capacity to be reflexive that education systems have some possibilities of generating, in order for us to think about our societies, and where we’re heading, and what kind of future we might want to claw out of this really troubled set of development. So that’s kind of on the one hand.
On the other hand, it is absolutely clear  that we do see heightened degrees of engagement. I’ve been in New York earlier this year, and Sanders, Bernie Sanders, you can’t help but be in England and know that Jeremy Corbyn has a huge backing amongst quite well educated, very thoughtful, middle class, young people, but that’s actually going to have to be more than a conversation amongst, you know, concerned middle class young people, there has to be a bigger conversation and a more enlightened conversation that engages a much wider set of the population. So, Roger, what are your thoughts there?

Roger Dale  6:13
Well, I think, I mean, on one level, we could say that globalization is, sort of, grown out of hand, but at another level, it has become even more indispensable. Because we’ve talked about political, economic globalization and some form of cultural organized globalization. But what we see now is in a particular way, a globalization of politics with the rise of populist movements, in many places. And I think that one of the things that really we should be thinking about in education is how that new populism everywhere seems to have, as a fracture line, levels of education, levels of educational experience and levels of educational success. So we find it in the United States election, we find it in Europe, and not just with the UK deciding it wants to leave. And it’s very clear who decided they wanted to leave, it’s very clear who voted for Trump in the United States, and there is a section, a very large section of these societies who are feeling almost that they have to cross … they’ve been isolated by an educational divide, a divided educational experiences and educational outcomes. And I think that’s something that possibly has always been there.

But it is also to a degree, a consequence of the globalization, not only of the technologies of education, but a globalization of what really turned out to be, at the moment, the false promises of education. Education offers to all. We have education for all. Absolutely crucial central issue of global education on a global scale, education for all, yes, education for all, but education for all, is not necessarily delivering for all. And we have to look at the institutionalization of education at national and transnational levels. And we have to look at who were the beneficiaries, and who are the losers. Because the more that education, as we know it – but this is old hat – the more that education is seen as the crucial element, the more the blame, the responsibility for individual success and failure is pushed on to the individual. Because individuals are told: “You have had every opportunity. Education systems give you opportunity, and you’ve had lots of opportunity. And sorry, I mean, you can keep on trying if you like, you can do some more education to try to catch up, which we know won’t happen.” So I think this becomes an absolutely, in the course of this year, has become a much starker and in a sense, much simpler, almost global distinction.

Will Brehm  10:01
Do you think that the focus on the individual, as you were saying, and how education can contribute to inequality. Is this in a way, a result from human capital theory becoming dominant, like the dominant way to think about education. That it’s simply a way for an individual to learn skills, to get better employment in the future? Rather than thinking about education, as somehow part of society, as a public good. as something larger than the individual? Are we at the outcome of, you know, 40 years of neoliberal policies?

Susan Robertson  10:42
Can I come in here? I think that you’re absolutely right. I mean, I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that. So we have the rise of human capital thinking, which sits neatly, doesn’t it, with neoliberalism. You know, this investment in yourself. And the initial talk, using human capital theory, enabled big multilateral institutions like the bank to get involved in education, in ways in which it had not historically. So we have the rise of human capital, its affinities with neoliberalism. At the same time, what you see is the rise of finance capital, and this very close relationship between finance capital as a fraction of capital and political parties, so a particular fraction. Wolfgang Streeck, who’s the former director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, has a very useful way of describing this. So what we’ve actually seen is the rise of the debt state, that replaces the tax state. And that debt state begins to emerge, particularly in the 1990s, where the rates of corporate tax and that drop, particularly low. And the movements also of capital, rise of tax havens, and so on. So the state itself also loses its capacity to govern. So it is on the one hand, it’s governing through quite pernicious forms of testing, and so on. But it’s not able to govern through forms of fiscal redistribution, and so on. And what it’s also then doing is that it, it’s borrowing and borrowing, and borrowing. It’s becoming very creative about, you know, off balance sheet accounting techniques, and so on. So across many of these different countries, what we’ve seen is an a huge expansion of the nature of kind of public debt or the state’s debt, Now what lines up with this also is the rising household debt, because essentially, if you’re responsible, you’re also responsible for financing your own opportunities, and so on. So the rise of the debt state, the rise of the indebted household, those two things, and where the state has more or less found itself unable to easily govern. Certainly not govern huge, big interest in the economic sphere, who’ve actually, particularly in the United States, I mean, it’s quite significant. Piketty, we’re talking about the end of 2015 now, but throughout 2014, and 2015, the numbers of books that emerged on, you know, inequalities from people like Stiglitz from writers like Danny Dorling, from the famous Piketty capital and so on. And what they’re also doing is describing this kind of phenomenon that we’re actually talking about. So we’ve seen big kind of structural shifts to do with the states unable often now, it’s got its hands tied, to actually deal with quite significant problems, because it simply doesn’t actually have the resources to easily do this. And perhaps where we do see some degree of success, and not all countries have been in the same kind of boat. There have been forms of redistribution in places like Norway, not in Sweden. There’ve been to actually interesting, the Netherlands has remained fairly equitable, but certainly not in England. The United States is one of the most inequitable countries now in the world, if we look at the GD coefficient. So that vote for Trump is actually a vote as a populist vote but actually it’s a vote that actually comes off the back of those complex dynamics to do with human capital theory, new liberalism, the rise of finance capital, the rise of the debt state, and so on. And I can’t see that, I mean, if we look at the policies that Trump is promising, it’s more of the same. So it’s hitting to the abyss even faster rather than you know, this kind of nostalgic return to, you know, we’ll take America back, and we’ll hammer the Chinese. and we’ll get manufacturing back. I mean, that’s an old…I mean, you can’t recover the past like that now. That is what populist politics is. It’s an empty and hollow promise,

Roger Dale  15:44
I think, to go back to the question about human capital theory and so on, I think, yes, that was clearly central. But I think we need to see it as something actually wider and older than that. And I think we need the triumph of the philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek. It’s a Hayekian world we live in, that says, individuals should be free to work for themselves, and everyone benefits from this. And we don’t need any state then because the state is an unwelcome and unnecessary and unfair involvement in what should be and what could be a life run around that basic principle of the market, which will solve everything. And so the trap, in the famous analogy, the train pulls everyone along with some maybe in the back carriages as it were. Now, I think that’s the thing, and what we’re seeing is increasingly, with the increasing gaps between earned and earned income and so on, and the total reluctance to do anything about anything that is a collective state funding of anything. And though it’s not gone as far as it might have, the argument about the coincidence of individual interests, via education through its privatization, so that you can get the education you want, and why should everybody have to have the same education and so on. So I think that is what underlies it. And it’s that philosophy that has created a few winners, but a lot more losers. In Hayek’s analogy, the occupants of the final carriages are becoming more numerous and noisier. And I think that’s what we’ve seen over the course of this year. It’s the culmination … there have been two or three opportunities for this simultaneous … Very interestingly, the United States election and the British exit, rare opportunities for expression of what we call populism. But what is really essentially, expression of the resentment of those who are left behind at the success of those who have seized the front.

Will Brehm  18:47
In your reading of the field of globalization in education research. Have you found papers and articles and research projects that are actively uncovering this sort of, you know, the issues that are making the world so turbulent in 2016, the issues of inequality, the issues of privatization, the Hayekian  world that Roger described, the financial capitalism that Susan pointed to. Are we finding these ideas inside the current research?

Susan Robertson  19:25
I can say, Steve Cleese, there’s a special issue that we worked on. And Steve Cleese actually has got a paper he was part of this group on Piketty that’s coming through Globalization Societies in Education, where Steve is actually talking about the particularly,  both the rise of human capital theory and finance sectors and so on. One of the things, actually, the journals are able to do now is use the  digital object identifier system. So we’re able to get papers, if we can fast track them through quickly enough, they don’t kind of sit out there in a bank waiting for an issue, they can sit out with a digital object identifier. And that means that we can actually be putting papers up and, you know, engaging with contemporary debates. You know, I was looking over some of the papers in the last issue of Globalization, Societies, and Education that has just come out. And lovely paper in there on Syrian refugees in Lebanon schools, hugely overcrowded, and it’s the eternal issue, isn’t it? Education in emergencies. You know, which curriculum do you use? And are you using the Lebanese curriculum? And all of the implications of distressed people. Are you integrating them, and with what kind of knowledge structures? How can their schools cope, what about the teachers, and so on?

So, there are papers coming through dealing with these issues, but I think it would be really nice, and we’d really want to encourage any of our colleagues out there in CIES and beyond to, and those who involved with the Globalization andEducation Special Interest Group as part of the comparative International Education society, to maybe pulling some special issues together where we have deep conversations, you know, around these kinds of issues. There’s a scope to do that, as opposed to just pick one off papers potentially coming through. I think, in our journal, the special issues are particularly welcome and successful because essentially, what they do is give us scope to have some deep and coherent conversations. There is one coming through around market making and so on that Janja Komljenovic has coordinated with some lovely papers, looking at the rise of the digital as a mechanism of governing the problems of markets and actually a paper in there from Curtis Riep, who as you might know, has been caught up in some very controversial incidents in Uganda, and the exposé to some extent, or their efforts to try and pretend that he was there under false pretenses in Uganda and researching the Bridge International Academies. But I want to use this as an occasion, Will, to just quickly say that it’s increasingly difficult to do that kind of academic work. I mean, it’s quite dangerous. I mean, Curtis’s situation is no way resolved at the moment. And we know that the more you privatize education, the more there are vested interests in there. The more there is efforts to enclose public sectors and the private activities and potential for even corruption and so on. Actually, that becomes incredibly difficult work and actually, unfortunately, many of our own education institutions ask our students to do a kind of risk analysis in that now. This is potentially dangerous territory, big corporations have got lawyers, they’re quite ruthless in protecting their clients interests, and so. And actually I think, a special issue in and around those issues is absolutely critical.

And perhaps just one other thing that I think I would like to see some work being done on is, you know, sitting quietly out in the backdrop here is all of the trade negotiations that are attempting to enclose education, to make it a private good. To progressively liberalize that. To limit the state’s capacity to govern the education sector. So here what you have is a key institution that the state is responsible for. And yet its hands are being tied behind its back in its capacity to govern. All of  the trade negotiations have a lock in, and progressive liberalization and lock-in clause to limit political intervention and let the market work itself out. I actually think this is an incredibly dangerous state of affairs. It’s as dangerous as populism. And that I think more of us investigating, opening up these trade issues, trying to … because they’re all done in secret, they’ve all got education in them. Education is hugely important for trade purposes now. Particularly for the developed economies. And there’s huge risk. They may well fall over all by themselves because Donald Trump actually, in his efforts to rescind things, might actually do us all something of a favor by rescinding the trans-Pacific trade agreement. But that’s another issue I think we need to discuss.

Will Brehm  25:26
And Roger, what about you? What have you seen in the academic literature that is addressing a lot of the concerns you spoke about earlier?

Roger Dale  25:36
I think it’s very interesting. I have something, I suppose, of a bee in my bonnet about the mobility literature. It seems to me that it tends to be highly normative, and I think … to be trying to find ways of improving mobility, and so on. And, I think that’s unfortunate. And in the current circumstances, it becomes more and more I think a smokescreen for some horrible things that are happening. I mean, intrinsic to mobility is the idea that people are voluntarily mobile, and they should be prepared to be more mobile, because it’s very good for them. Well, I mean, we don’t have to look far to go and tell that to some people. So I think the distinction … I would like to see …well, I don’t know if we could rescue mobility now, but a matching emphasis on migration. It would be nice to have a matching emphasis,  in this sense, the sending countries rather than the receiving countries, though, because the receiving countries are the center of the official knowledge producing world that we are all involved in, then we get, I think, a distorted picture. But these are responses to the kind of seismic shocks that go on through, I think, fundamentally through, the extension to all areas essentially of marketization and the absolute minimizing of any kind of public sector that might be able to work. So I think that to me is the big issue. There’s a lot of work on migration. I’ve done a bit myself on migration into Europe. And it’s extremely interesting to see what happens to people when they arrive. But it’s solid, I think, by the association of migration with extremism as well. And that’s unfortunate, and it’s something that I think we can possibly respond to, but no can’t do anything about.

Susan Robertson  28:35
I mean, I mean, maybe also encouraging people to look at some of these not so obvious counter flows, if you like. We can see, for example, in some of the data that China’s now a very large receiving country of particularly US students, mobile to China. China, in part, encouraging students here. Well, that may well be temporary now. You’re absolutely right, Roger. But encouraging students to go to China as partly-based scholarships, quite a lot of it is study-abroad. But what we don’t understand well enough, what that’s about is this, the workings-out of what Phil Brown, and Hugh Lauder call the global auction, and in other words, what they’re talking about is the promises, Roger said earlier, of investing yourself in social mobility and so on. And yet we see high levels of graduates in jobs that in no way match their investments. They, in many cases, won’t actually earn the amount of money into the future to pay down their loans and so on. So who’s going off to China? What’s their motivation? What are their experiences in places like China? How do they sit in with the very distinct nature of the education system in China? How do they understand how to fit in? How do they understand Chinese society? And the kind of knowledge structures, which will be distinctly different in China. Is there a Is there a westernization process going on there that enables a kind of a level of comfort. So, I think some keeping our eye on some of those.

Roger Dale  30:29
I mean, I think the movement, large scale, really, movement of students from North America into China is a very good example of the kind of the normative loading of mobility that I was talking about. Mobility is good. You have to be mobile, it’s a mobile world. And if you want to make it, you’ve got to be mobile. But the studies of mobility, just assume its goodness. That’s why I say they’re very normative. Exactly the same sorts of physical movements are taking place. But when we call them migration, they become very negative. And I think that it’s that kind of analysis that we need to make it okay, I know. Don’t stop doing mobility studies, but don’t actually pretend that’s doing anything more than describing what Craig Calhoun calls the lifestyle of frequent travelers.

Will Brehm  31:41
I’ll give another example of this mobility and being normative, but maybe even bringing in some of the ideas of the inequality, the rise of inequality in the US. In the work I do in Cambodia, I met a university that partnered with a US university. And they are telling me now that they are getting … They have a program that does two years in Cambodia, two years in America. And so the assumption was that many Cambodian students would sign up for this to get that American degree. But what they’re actually finding is that a lot of American students are signing up for it, so they can go to Cambodia to pay cheaper fees.

Susan Robertson  32:26
And that’s interesting. So these are the unintended consequences, aren’t they. They’re logical if you begin to think about them. So I know, the branch campuses have become quite popular, in part because what you can do is you try and manage the immigration issues. So you have a branch campus out there. So those immigration figures in your home country aren’t looking problematic. But individuals are making decisions. And we can see these in some of the figures. I know Texas A&M, for example, they’ll have quite a number of American students out in their Texas A&M campuses in the Arab region, because it’s cheaper to live out there, study out there, and so on. So these are very interesting institutional and national and also individual decisions that kind of coalesce around how to manage a future, where actually what we’re talking about is where education is regarded as central still, in this sense, to be socially mobile. If you don’t have a degree, you’re not able to easily navigate any of the employment, you know, the labor market systems and so on. And I actually, can I just put a couple of other issues on the table? I think that I’d love to see, perhaps, so a bit of joined up kind of work and thinking. The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, which, as you know, these were the yellow umbrellas. They were ongoing protests really, particularly engaged with by young people, in many cases in Hong Kong, they talked about them as young people who themselves were finding, you know, having invested in education and returning to Hong Kong, unable to get jobs and so, but this also gets tied up with the sense of a lack of democracy in Hong Kong.

But it’d be very nice to see a special issue, where some of the different dynamics around these issues, as they play out in Istanbul and Gezi Park, for example. And some of that’s actually tied up with some different dynamics to do with development in Istanbul and the relocation of families to the outer edges. How do those all link up, and what are the common and different dynamics? Chilean student movement. The Occupy movement, the Umbrella movement, the Arab Spring, and so on. And there’s something that’s very interesting about a kind of politicization, in interesting ways that I don’t think we’ve put our …  I know there’s discrete studies being done Occupy, but who’s pulling these together? And what are the points of commonality and so on?  That’d be a fabulous set of papers, if we could pull those together, because it might help us also understand where the new energy and the new possibilities for thinking and a new future might actually come from. And if we can perhaps, take some of that account, which probably largely sits out into the social media now and begin to think with each in particularly interesting kinds of ways, maybe using new and different methodologies. Could we have some more visual work on that kind of happening here? Could, you know, for example, even sitting on the website, you know, some visual moving, You know, podcasting materials, and so it doesn’t always have to sit in the journal and in a text based form. It might actually take some other experimental forms. So I’m just kind of thinking that we can open up some of our conversations in interesting kinds of ways as well.

Will Brehm  36:31
There seems to be so many different directions to go, going forward. And I want to go back to something that Roger said earlier. He talked about the false promise of education. So Roger, what would it mean for researchers to take that idea seriously? To say that the false promise of education is real, and now what do we do as educational researchers going forward?

Roger Dale  36:56
Well, for me, I mean, we take as a first principle, that’s the assumption: that education has never fulfilled its promises. But those promises are much more useful to those who make them, than to those who are receiving these promises. If we look at it, and it’s the whole notion of the contribution of education to a social contract, if you like, comes through, has been changed into education as the means of enabling everyone to prosper, economically. Not to necessarily prosper, politically, or culturally or personally even. It has been made highly instrumental, because from the start, it’s become evident that most of the people who are doing better in the world, were more educated. So there must be something in this correlation. And we take the correlation to say that the correlation is the same for everybody. But as we know, correlation is not the same as causation and that slippage has happened frequently, and it also happens on the part, sometimes, of beneficiaries, I mean, I’m one of the greatest beneficiaries. My generation is the generation of the greatest beneficiaries of state education that there’s ever been, I suspect. But there is, nevertheless, that association between level of education and a justifiable claim to privilege.

Will Brehm  39:07
Well, it really seems like there are so many directions going forward for 2017: the big ideas and the directions that you’ve proposed really give us a lot to reflect on at the end of this year and into 2017. So Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, thank you so much for joining FreshEd to end this year.

Susan Robertson  39:28
And can I just say, Will FreshEd from where I sit, actually offers such a wonderful space for dialogue around these issues. So in closing, getting close to the closing of 2016, I just want to congratulate you on such a fantastic initiative, and wish FreshEd all the best for 2017. So great work, Will.

Roger Dale  39:55
I agree with that. Brings fresh air to comparative and international and global education. Thank you.

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