KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION AS INTERNATIONAL COMMODITIES: THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMON GOOD

Abstract

Knowledge and Education as International Commodities: The Collapse of the Common Good Philip G. Altbach Philip G. Altbach is J. Donald Monan, SJ professor of higher education at Boston College and director of the Center for International Higher Education. A revolution is taking place in education. Education is becoming an internationally traded commodity. No longer is it seen primarily as a set of skills, attitudes, and values required for citizenship and effective participation in modern society—a key contribution to the common good of any society. Rather, it is increasingly seen as a commodity to be purchased by a consumer in order to build a “skill set” to be used in the marketplace or a product to be bought and sold by multinational corporations, academic institutions that have transmogrified themselves into businesses, and other providers. Nowhere is this trend more clearly exemplified than in the current debate about GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, now taking place internationally within the World Trade Organization. The commodification of education will have major implications for how we think about schooling and the university, the ownership and transmission of knowledge, and indeed the role of citizenship in modern society. The implications are immense, both for nations and for the globalization and internationalization of education. There are positives and negatives in this new dispensation, just as there are in the broader globalization agenda of which education is a part. Globalization is probably both inevitable and unstoppable, and much of it is positive as well. Yet there are many problems associated with globalization, from environmental degradation to growing inequalities within societies and internationally. The problem with the current debate about globalization is exactly the same as with discussions of its educational implications—the pros see only a bright future of economic integration, while the cons focus only on the negatives. Neither has a balanced vision that takes into account pitfalls and possibilities. In the knowledge industries, of which education is a central part, globalization is already a key feature. We see implications in the growing use of the Internet for communication as well as for the marketing of knowledge products of all kinds, in the strengthening of a global labor force of highly skilled personnel, in the use of English as a widespread medium for scientific communication and increasingly of advanced training in many fields, and in other ways. Indeed, higher education has been internationalized since the very beginning of universities in medieval Europe, when there was a common medium of instruction, Latin, and both students and professors routinely moved from country to country. Now, perhaps 2 million students study outside their home countries, and a world market already exists for faculty and researchers. The Internet has greatly expanded the international flow of knowledge. One might ask why higher education needs to be subject to the legal strictures of the WTO when internationalization is taking place anyway at a pace and under conditions generally suited to the higher education community. The challenge for us is to understand both the context and the implications of the globalization of the knowledge economy. My purpose here is to point to some of the problems created or exacerbated by current trends. The picture is certainly not entirely negative, but a balanced perspective requires careful analysis of the downside—viewpoints often not articulated in the rush toward the global future. Underlying this discussion is a conviction that education at all levels is not simply a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. An education system provides the skills needed for economic success, but it also builds the underpinnings of a civil society and of national participation. An understanding of the past, of culture, and of democratic values, among other things, is part of education, and these elements cannot be subsumed in some global marketplace. They are integral to any society, and are part of the patrimony of a people. Similarly, university-level basic research, certain curricular offerings, and other elements of academic work do not lend themselves easily to commercialization. In other words, there are values of the national and social common good that must be protected and preserved in a globalized educational environment. Protecting culture, intellectual independence, and the values of a civil society are simply not on the same level as free trade in automobiles or equal access to markets for soybeans—or even to the other service-related activities that are included in the GATS agenda. To pretend that all intellectual “products” are simply to be bought and sold on a commercial market is an oversimplification that contributes to giving globalization a bad name among growing segments of the population. Ensuring that an accounting firm, for example, has free access to international markets or that software is not pirated is simply not the same as protecting an educational system.

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