The work of education is to cultivate the signs of healthy, flourishing, and engaged children. In the Platonic sense, education endeavors to nurture logic (truth), ethics (goodness), and aesthetics (beauty). In the words of the Holy Father Pope Francis, “The mission of schools is to develop a sense of truth, of what is good and beautiful. And this occurs through a rich path made up of many ingredients. ...True education enables us to love life and opens us to the fullness of life” (Address with Italian schoolteachers, parents, educators, pupils and other workers, May 10, 2014).
In the modern era the education of children, youth, as well as adults, has been closely aligned with the world of work and the practice of citizenship. In the age of mechanization, dramatically increased by automation, robotics Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Assisted Design – that is, as the 4th Industrial Revolution gains new kinetic momentum, the future of work is creating new opportunities and challenges for the future of education.
The technological changes now unfolding are generating “unhelpful prognostications about the coming ‘end of work’”. MIT’s recent report on “The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions” claims,
(The) world now stands on the cusp of a technological revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics that may prove as transformative for economic growth and human potential as were electrification, mass production, and electronic telecommunications in their eras. New and emerging technologies will raise aggregate economic output and boost the wealth of nations. Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined. They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era.
How can we move beyond unhelpful prognostications about the supposed end of work and toward insights that will enable policymakers, businesses, and people to better navigate the disruptions that are coming and underway? What lessons should we take from previous epochs of rapid technological change? How is it different this time? And how can we strengthen institutions, make investments, and forge policies to ensure that the labor market of the 21st century enables workers to contribute and succeed? (The Work of the Future, 2019, p. 1).
In this paper, I first introduce some relevant data on the state of education around the world and the factors that continue to impede progress. Second, I examine the broad features of a conceptual model framing education in the current era of globalization. Finally, I offer a reflection on the new challenges and new opportunities in education today.
Education Today
All human societies known through the ethnographic record face a common task: transferring a range of skills, competencies, virtues and values, and sensibilities to the next generation. Anthropologists have developed a specialized field of research examining the socialization of the young as culturally constituted, highly varied across societies, and ever evolving (Suárez-Orozco, Spindler and Spindler 1994).[1] All societies organize formal institutions to nurture in the next generation the qualities to carry forth the work of culture.
Education, broadly conceived as formally structured, socially organized, and directed teaching and learning, has always been connected to, yet purposefully set apart from, the other institutions of society. Teaching and learning in schools tend to be formalized – for example, around strict time, subject, age, and level or grade demarcations – while learning outside of schools tends to be more fluid and informal (see Cheng, 2007).[2] Schools usually focus on acontextual learning, whereas learning outside of schools is nearly always context-dependent and hands-on. Learning in schools is often organized to achieve increasing levels of abstraction, whereas learning outside school tends to be applied and designed to solve concrete problems. In general, the focus in schools is predominantly on teaching, whereas the focus outside of school is on learning. These dichotomies are heuristic and do not represent strict binary oppositions: in reality, there is fluidity in all human learning whether in or out of school.
While formal public schooling is frequently set apart from other institutions in society – such as religion, kinship systems, politics, and the systems of production – some degree of calibration and convergence between what goes on in schools and the post-educational opportunity structure is vital. Whether it is by shaping the sensibilities and habits of mind of future citizens or by imparting skills to prepare and keep them for the labor market, schooling is interconnected with the economies and societies that encompass them. Schools should reflect – and reflect upon – the cultural and socioeconomic realities of the communities of which they form an essential part.
At a time when more is asked of formal education than ever before and when youth the world over need socioemotional learning, sharper tools for communication and collaboration, higher-order cognitive skills for critical thinking, as well as the metacognitive abilities for reflecting on their own learning so as to become lifelong learners, many schools risk anachronism and redundancy. Twenty-first-century economies and societies are predicated on increasing complexity and diversity – the twin corollaries of an ever more globally interconnected and miniaturized world. The gap between what schooling is and what it needs to be defines the three most important challenges to schools today.
First, basic primary and secondary education remains an elusive mirage for millions of children. Approximately 262 million children and youth are not enrolled in schools – including “64 million children of primary school age, 61 million of lower secondary school age and 138 million of upper secondary age”.[3] For those who are enrolled, the little education – especially in the form of literacy, will be vital but perhaps not enough to thrive to their full potential – see.[4] Too many children in low and middle-income countries are falling further and further behind their peers in the wealthy nations. According to Research by the Center for Universal Education at Brookings “at the current pace of change, it could take approximately 100 years for those furthest behind to catch up to the learning levels of those for whom the education system is working well”.[5]
The second challenge facing schools is unfolding at a vital link between the wealthy countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the global South. Schools are struggling to properly educate growing numbers of immigrant and refugee youth arriving in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and elsewhere; as we shall examine below, many immigrant and refugee youngsters are marginalized as racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically marked minority groups (Banks, Suárez-Orozco, Ben-Peretz 2016).[6] The marginalization of immigrant and refugee youth is increasing and their social belonging is thwarted.[7]
Third, the curiosity leading to the “great ocean of truth” – that is to cognitive, behavioral and relational engagement in learning – withers in too many schools. Sir Isaac Newton’s words echo through the ages: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.[8] But in both high and middle-income countries, the predominant phenomenology of experience for too many youths in school is the antonym of curiosity: it is boredom and disengagement.[9]
Education faces new challenges in a world more globally interconnected and more unequal. For many youths growing up in low- and middle-income countries, the ravages of poverty continue to extract terrible costs. Hunger and malnutrition – even as progress is made, continue to cripple millions. “A total of 842 million are estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger, regularly not getting enough food to conduct an active life”.[10] School readiness, [11] is a distant mirage for millions of children.
Children are the most visible victims of undernutrition. It is estimated that undernutrition – including stunting, wasting, deficiencies of vitamin A and zinc, and fetal growth restriction (when a baby does not grow to its normal weight before birth) – is a cause of 3.1 million child deaths annually or 45 percent of all child deaths in 2011 (UNICEF, World Health Organization [WHO], & The World Bank, 2018). Undernutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria.[12]
Twenty percent of all children around the world are undernourished. And most of them are suffering from long-term malnourishment that has serious health implications that will keep them from reaching their full potential. Malnutrition causes stunting – when the body fails to fully develop physically and mentally – and increases a child’s risk of death and lifelong illness. A child who is chronically hungry cannot grow or learn to their full ability. In short, it steals away their future.[13]
Global poverty deprives millions of children of the basic resources for life: clean water, proper nutrition, safe shelter, and the proper supervision required for survival and positive human development (Ibid). In low-income countries, “almost five million children under the age of five die of malnutrition-related causes every year”.[14] Furthermore, “Severe acute malnutrition affects nearly 20 million preschool-age children, mostly from Africa and South-East Asia” (Ibid.) and “162 million children are stunted; 99 million are underweight and 51 million are wasted due to acute malnutrition”.[15]
Maternal and child undernutrition contributes to 45 percent of deaths in children under five.[16] As a consequence, life expectancy at birth in low-income countries is on average two decades less than in high-income countries.
Country comparisons reveal even more striking inequalities: the average life expectancy at birth in Chad is 54 years versus 82 years in Canada. In other words, the average Canadian born in 2019 is expected to live almost 30 years longer than the average Chadian born in the same year.
In terms of access to schools, the world continues to make progress. Basic primary education in schools is a normative ideal the world over. Indeed, UN data suggest that in the past two decades, the world has made “remarkable progress in participation in education. Enrolment of children in primary education is at present nearly universal. The gender gap has narrowed, and in some regions girls tend to perform better in school than boys and progress in a more timely manner”.[17]
The increased participation of children in schools is a laudable achievement, yet completion and quality education remain a challenge. Furthermore, millions remain out of school and illiteracy is remains rampant: 781 million adults over the age of 15 estimated to be illiterate, 496 million are women who make up more than half the illiterate population in all regions of the world.[18]
Concentrated disadvantage, poverty and malnutrition, unchecked climate change,[19] and marginalization shape the opportunities for children to learn. Taken together they represent a significant undertow towards meeting the millennial development goals of reaching universal basic education.[20]
Schooling as Usual
Schools in many parts of the world continue business as usual. In many low and middle income countries, ministries of education often uncritically borrow and copy materials from the developed world that are at once irrelevant to their own realities and controversial and anachronistic in the source countries—the testing craze is but a recent example. More problematic is that throughout the world most schools tend to share a general orientation toward an earlier era of social organization: the early industrial moment of mass production, with the promise of lifelong jobs, in the context of bounded and often homogeneous nation-states.
These formations are increasingly irrelevant to the realities of both the low and middle-income countries of the global south and the wealthier nations of the North. But schools are conservative by nature: they privilege established traditions, precedent, and long-honored pedagogies. Furthermore, they are both adverse and slow to change (see Hugonnier 2007). And when change happens inside schools, it is often reactive and slow to take hold. Howard Gardner has argued that education typically changes because of shifts in values (such as from a religious to a secular orientation); new scientific breakthroughs that reorient our understanding of the human mind and learning (such as the development of the new field of mind, brain, and education (see Damasio & Damasio; and Katzir, Immordino-Yang, & Fischer, 2007); or broad historical and social forces, such as globalization. Gardner further claims that there is a new tension between the glacial pace of institutional change in ministries of education and schools and the rapid social, economic, and cultural transformations brought about by the forces of globalization (Gardner 2007).
Education in the Global Era
It is by nurturing socio-emotional learning, the values and virtues of engaged citizenship, and by imparting the basic skills to prepare youth for a changing world of work that schools become meaningful vehicles for collective empowerment and positive social action. Schools must endeavor to inculcate in youth humane sensibilities, empathy, communication and collaboration skills, higher-order cognitive skills for critical thinking, as well as the metacognitive abilities to become productive workers, lifelong learners (SDG 4),[21] civic agents and stewards of our ever more threatened environment.
Everywhere more is asked of education. It is the Camino Real for development and a driver of wellness. The data suggest that education – almost any form that nurtures and supports basic literacy – generates powerful virtuous cycles (Robert LeVine, 2007). UNICEF concludes: “An education is perhaps a child’s strongest barrier against poverty, especially for girls. Educated girls are likely to marry later and have healthier children. They are more productive at home and better paid in the workplace, better able to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS and more able to participate in decision-making at all levels. Additionally, this … furthers Goals 2 and 3: universal primary education and gender equality”.[22]
Globalization defines our era. Broadly conceived, it is “what happens when the movement of people, goods, or ideas among countries and regions accelerates” (Coatsworth, 2004, p. 38). The three “M’s” of globalization give shape to its most current iteration: (1) markets, (their integration and disintegration); (2) media, the information, communication and social media technologies that de-territorialize labor, put a premium on knowledge intensive work, and stimulate new longings and belongings, as well as hatreds and divisions; and (3) migration, the mass movement of people on a planetary scale. While globalization is neither new nor exceptional, the rate and the depth of global change is novel. Globalization – new economies, new technologies and new demographies – represents the most significant challenge to school systems since the origins of mass public education.
Global change is creating new challenges but also new opportunities. Routine manual and cognitive tasks will continue to be hollowed out by automation. It is also true that dramatically increased automation, robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Assisted Design will require workers with new skills to complement and further refine productive work. As some categories of work become anachronistic, new kinds of work shall come to life. The returns to education will continue to accrue disproportionately to highly skilled workers but low skill work is far from disappearing. Indeed “the digital era has catalyzed labor market polarization – that is the simultaneous growth of high-education high- wage and low-education/low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-skill jobs”.[23]
[D]igital automation tends to displace middle-skill workers performing routine codifiable tasks, such as sales; office and administrative support; and production, craft and repair occupations. Figure 5 shows that in 1970, these middle-skill occupations accounted for more than a third (38 percent) of employment. By 2016, this share had fallen to less than one-quarter (23 percent) of employment. To be clear, this decline is not due solely to digitalization, as international trade added substantially to the displacement of middle-skill production and operative jobs during the 2000s.
Ironically, digitalization has had the smallest impact on the tasks of workers in low-paid manual and service jobs. Those positions demand physical dexterity, visual recognition, face-to-face communications, and situational adaptability. Such abilities remain largely out of reach of current hardware and software but are readily accomplished by adults with moderate levels of education. As middle-skill occupations have declined, manual and service occupations have become an increasingly central job category for those with high school or lower education.
Thus, unlike the era of equitable growth that preceded it, the digital era has catalyzed labor market polarization – that is the simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage and low-education, low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-skill jobs. This lopsided growth has concentrated labor market rewards among the most skilled and highly-educated workers while devaluing much of the non-specialized work that remains.
This imbalance contributes to the vast divergence of earnings between college- and non-college-educated workers in recent decades (The Work of the Future, 2019, p. 22).
Kai-ming Cheng (2007) argues there has always been a synergism between schooling and local socioeconomic realities. But economies are now global in scope. There is a rapidly expanding internationalization of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Local economies are ever more integrated into complex webs of global relations. First, new global networks of production, fueled by increasing levels of international trade, foreign direct investment, migrant remittances, and capital flows – now approximately a trillion dollars each day – set the pace for socioeconomic life in every continent of earth. Second, production is increasingly deterritorialized as growing categories of work can be done – within clear limits[24] – nearly anywhere on earth. As Levy and Murnane argued a decade ago (2007), tasks that are rule-based and easily broken down into constituent units can be offshored or outsourced: data for a tax company based in Boston are entered and synthesized in Bangalore, X-rays for a hospital in Brussels are read and analyzed in Buenos Aires – at a fraction of the cost. New communication networks, especially high-speed, low-cost connections and the digitization of data, are putting a premium on knowledge-intensive work.
Furthermore, global supply chains, “the vast network of factories, warehouses, and shipping conduits through which products flow” are changing the shape and place of work the world over.[25] Over the past three decades the insertion of China, India, and the Russian Federations into the global system of production and distribution has added well over a billion workers to the worldwide labor force (Freeman 2014). As a result, today there are 300 to 400 million educated Indians, Chinese, and Russians competing for jobs with graduates from the elite research universities in the Western world.
Global patterns of mobile capital and mobile production are stimulating and accelerating internal and international labor migration. International migration has grown rapidly since the turn of the millennium. According to the most recent United Nations data, the number of international migrants worldwide reached “258 million in 2017, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000”.[26] In 2017, “two thirds (67 per cent) of all international migrants were living in just twenty countries. The largest number of international migrants (approximately 45 million) resided in the United States of America. Saudi Arabia, Germany and the Russian Federation hosted the second, third and fourth largest numbers of migrants worldwide (around 12 million each), followed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (nearly 9 million)” (Ibid.). Today women “comprise slightly less than half of all international migrants. Female migrants outnumber male migrants in Europe” (Ibid).
The largest international corridors of labor migration are in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.[27] In terms of emigrants in 2017, “India was the largest country of origin of international migrants (17 million), followed by Mexico (13 million). Other countries of origin with large migrant populations include the Russian Federation (11 million), China (10 million), Bangladesh (7 million), Syrian Arab Republic (7 million) and Pakistan and Ukraine (6 million each)”.[28]
Most labor migrants are internal migrants staying within the confines of their nation-states. The insertion of China and India into the global system of production has generated massive internal migration chains as workers continue to flow to the new production center in coastal China and elsewhere. “The estimated number of internal migrants (migrants inside of their country of origin) is 763 million”.[29] The largest chains of internal labor migration occur in Asia: by 2015 China had an estimated 280 million internal migrant workers, and in India well over 320 million people – over a quarter of the country’s population – were internal migrants between 2007 and 2008 (UNICEF 2016). The number of international and internal migrants today “is more than a billion people – every seventh person in the world is a migrant”.[30]
Globalization and labor migration on a planetary scale, challenge the deep structures of the nation state and interrupt the taken for granted Herderian ideals and longings for alignment and coherence qua language, identity, region and das volksgeist.[31] Globalization increases inequality (Picketty 2014) and emerges as a multiplier of labor migration in a variety of ways. First, the integration and disintegration of markets stimulate migration because where capital flows immigrants will follow (Sassen 1988, Massey et al. 2002). Second, new information, communication, and media technologies stimulate migration by producing new structures of desire, tastes, and consumption practices (Suarez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard 2004). Third, globally integrated economies, especially in high- and middle-income countries, are structured around a predilection for foreign workers – both in the knowledge-intensive sectors and in the least desirable sectors of the economy (Piore 1980, Cornelius 1998, Saxenian 1999). Fourth, the affordability of mass transportation puts the option of migration within the reach of millions who, heretofore, could not do so. Fifth, globalization has stimulated new migration because it has produced uneven results – wage differentials, when controlled for cost of living differences, continue to grow in many of the best-traveled South-North migration corridors. Globalization weakens the traditional structures and strictures of the nation state. Demographic and environmental factors also play a decisive role in mass migrations today and moving forward.
Labor migration is key to the economies and societies migrant leave behind. Remittances to developing countries have been rising steadily reaching USD 529 billion in 2018. These funds are more than three times higher than the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to these countries. (Ratha et al., 2019). Global remittances were projected to increase by another 10.3 per cent in 2018 and were later estimated to have increased by 9 per cent” (Ratha et al., 2018a; 2019).
In absolute figures, two of the top five countries that received remittances in 2017 and 2018 – India and China – are in Asia (ibid.). Mexico, the Philippines and Egypt were the next highest recipients of remittances in 2018.[32] But “in relative terms, the top 5 countries that received remittances as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018 are … Tonga (35.2%), the Kyrgyz Republic (33.6%), Tajikistan (31%), Haiti (30.7%...) and Nepal (28 %) (Ratha et al., 2019). As a share of GDP, these countries were the top five recipients of remittances in 2017 too” (Ratha et al., 2018b).
Chinese, Indians and Mexicans in the United States, Turks in Germany, and Filipinos and Egyptians in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the economic lungs of the countries they leave behind. Their remittances are the economic oxygen keeping countless individuals, families, and communities in their home countries from asphyxiating.
With global migrations come new challenges to schools. The children of immigrants are the fastest-growing sector of the child and youth population in a variety of advanced postindustrial nations, including Australia, Canada, and the United States as well as Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. These new demographic realities have significant implications for education and schooling in sending, transit, receiving, and returning countries.
But schools in many countries of immigration have been slow to respond to the challenge of managing the transition of immigrant youth. Maurice Crul (2019)[33] and Rita Süssmuth (2007) offer important insights into Europe’s uneven record of managing the education of new immigrants and the transition of their children to the labor market. In the United States, the proverbial country of immigration, nativist anxieties and restrictionist policies push back against new immigrants with measurable detrimental effects on their children.[34]
Schools the world-over are struggling to develop innovations in student-center learning to nurture the new competencies and sensibilities better aligned to 21st Century economies and societies.[35] In the 4th Industrial Revolution problem solving, articulating an argument and deploying verifiable facts or artifacts to substantiate and communicate it, learning to synthesize, learning to learn,[36] thinking about thinking (metacognition), and working and networking with others from different backgrounds will be favored in the opportunity structure.
Students must also be prepared to work ethically with peers who are likely to be from different national, linguistic, religious, and racial backgrounds (Boix Mansilla & Gardner, 2007; Hugonnier, 2007; Levy & Murnane, 2007; Oakes & Saunders, 2008; Suárez-Orozco & Sattin, 2007, Suárez-Orozco 2019). Fluency in multiple languages and intercultural skills to live, learn, and communicate with colleagues, peers, friends and neighbors, often from different countries will have a premium (Suárez-Orozco & Michikyan, 2016; Sussmuth, 2007).
Yet the ethos in most schools is anachronistic relative to the new realities animating the world of youth. Precious few schools today are organized to nurture the habits of mind and heart needed to engage in an ever more complex world.
Too many schools systems continue to teach sclerotic facts and struggle to cope with the increasing ambiguity, complexity, and linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity that defines the reality of cities large and small around the world. The work of education in the twenty-first century will be to nurture and stimulate cognitive skills, interpersonal sensibilities, and cultural sensibilities of children and youth whose lives will be engaged in local contexts and yet will be suffused with larger transnational realities. These must be explicit priorities for education. We must redouble efforts to create, assess, and expand new models of education that are better synchronized with the economies and societies of today. We need to articulate a systematic approach to education consciously tailored for a new era of global convivencia.[37]
Summary and Reflections
In this paper, first we examined some relevant data on education the world over. We established that significant progress continues to be made in terms of access to schooling the world over. But we must do better: today approximately 262 million children and youth are not enrolled in primary and secondary schools. Second, we examined concentrated disadvantage, poverty and marginalization as the grave undertow threating to drawn millions of children. Millions of children lack the basic resources for life, “almost five million children under the age of five die of malnutrition-related causes every year”.[38] and “Severe acute malnutrition affects nearly 20 million preschool-age children, mostly from Africa and South-East Asia” (Ibid.) and “162 million children are stunted; 99 million are underweight and 51 million are wasted due to acute malnutrition”.[39]
To disrupt these obscene inequalities massive global investments in sustainable development – clean water, infrastructure, roads, new schools – need to be prioritized. Institutions need to be set and strengthened to create and nourish new teacher preparation programs, public health programs, and community-based programs for adult literacy. New technologies – when carefully calibrated with proven curricula and supported teachers can create new virtuous cycles even in remote corners of earth.
Third, we examined the new normal: everywhere more is asked of education. It is the Camino Real for development and a driver of wellness. UNICEF concludes: “An education is perhaps a child’s strongest barrier against poverty, especially for girls. Educated girls are likely to marry later and have healthier children. They are more productive at home and better paid in the workplace, better able to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS and more able to participate in decision-making at all levels. Additionally, this … furthers Goals 2 and 3: universal primary education and gender equality”.[40]
Fourth, we outlined the broad features of a conceptual model framing education in the current era of globalization. We examined the three “M’s” of globalization: (1) markets, (their integration and disintegration); (2) media, the information, communication and social media technologies; and (3) migration, the mass movement of labor on a planetary scale.
Fifth, we argued that the forces giving the 4th industrial revolution its kinetic momentum, inter alia, automation, robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Assisted Design will create demand for new skills to complement the technological advances in the workplace. We outlined the nature of said new skills. The claims that the current version on the ongoing technological revolution augurs the end of work seem premature at best, alarmist at worst. So schools will continue to search for better synchronicity with the changing nature of human work.
But the idea that schooling should factory belt delivering workers ready and relevant to today’s systems of production and distribution is vulgar and misses the nature of what schools do best. Schooling as we now understanding it – first imagined by the Greeks – must endeavor to educate “the whole child for the whole world”.[41] Education must serve children and youth for “doing” and “living” well – the flourishing Aristotelian ideal of Eudemonia. Education must also be able to prepare youth for an ethical life of civic engagement, belonging, and participatory and transformative citizenship. And today more than ever schools must give children and youth all the tools – from sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and from ethics – to emerge as warriors fighting unchecked climate change and environmental dystopia, the existential threat of our times.[42]
Education is more important than ever before in human history and we now have a much fuller understanding of the causal pathways by which education generates better health, a more muscular citizenry, and patterns of status mobility.[43] A strong corpus of sociological, demographic, economic, and psychological research has mapped the effects of education – measured most often by years of schooling on individual socio-economic mobility (human capital), social cohesion, (social capital), and health and wellbeing. The preponderance of evidence, for sometime now, is hardly surprising: schooling tends to generate powerful virtuous cycles. Perhaps the most exciting of these findings is the general nexus between schooling, literacy, and health outcomes throughout the world (see LeVine 2004; Bloom 2004).[44]
Above all schools at their best make children love life and embrace its fullness. I return to the teachings of the Holy Father Pope Francis:
The mission of school is to develop a sense of truth, of what is good and beautiful. And this occurs through a rich path made up of many ingredients. This is why there are so many subjects – because development is the results of different elements that act together and stimulate intelligence, knowledge, the emotions, the body, and so on. If something is true, it is good and beautiful; if it is beautiful; it is good and true; if it is good, it is true and it is beautiful. And together, these elements enable us to grow and help us to love life, even when we are not well, even in the midst of many problems. True education enables us to love life and opens us to the fullness of life”. Pope Francis, Address with Italian schoolteachers, parents, educators, pupils and other workers, May 10, 2014.
END NOTES
[1] Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., George Spindler, and Louise Spindler, eds. The Making of Psychological Anthropology II. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
[2] See Cheng in Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Learning in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[3] https://bitly.com
[4] https://bit.ly/2t3X7mQ
[5] https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-wait-100-years-bridging-the-gap-in-global-education/
[6] James Banks, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Miriam Ben-Peretz, eds. Global Migration, Diversity, and Civic Education: Improving Policy and Practice, v-243. New York: Teachers College Press & The National Academy of Education, 2016.
[7] In Europe, the failure to properly educate the children of Muslim immigrants became clear as the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study sent shockwaves as countries such as Germany confronted their poor records in educating their neediest pupils – those originating in refugee- and immigrant-headed homes (see Crul 2019; Hugonnier; Süssmuth; Crul; Wikan, 2010). In the United States, the enduring racial achievement gap, as well as the very uneven educational trajectories of the children of Latin American, Caribbean, and some Asian immigrants – now the fastest growing sector of the U.S. child population – augurs trouble ahead as the new economy is increasingly unforgiving of those without the skills and credentials required for functioning in the knowledge-intensive sector of the opportunity structure, and as a high-school diploma has yielded steadily diminishing returns (see, for example, Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova 2007; see also Myers 1998). The results of these general trends are painfully obvious in multiple measurable ways: from the high dropout rates among immigrant, ethnic, and racial minorities in many wealthy countries, to stark differences in achievement patterns between native and racialized minorities (see Crul 2919; and Süssmuth, 2010).[8] https://bit.ly/2ITwZSW
[9] Suárez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
[10] https://bit.ly/2lqoA1M
[11] Head Start of the US Department of and Human Services defines school readiness as, “… foundational across early childhood systems and programs. It means children are ready for school, families are ready to support their children's learning, and schools are ready for children. Head Start views school readiness as children possessing the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for success in school and for later learning and life. Physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development are all essential ingredients of school readiness. Managers, teaching staff, caregivers, family advocates, and families can learn more about creating enriching and supportive learning environments for young children ages birth to 5”.
[12] https://bit.ly/2xFSmoO
[13] https://bit.ly/1z8JJNC
[14] https://bit.ly/2lqoA1M
[15] https://bit.ly/2lqoA1M
[16] https://bit.ly/2eZavBP
[17] https://bit.ly/2yiqaEU
[18] https://bit.ly/2yiqaEU
[19] https://bit.ly/2eZavBP
[20] https://bit.ly/2IpbieF
[21] “The ambitious Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 embraces lifelong learning to enable all young people to thrive today and into the future. Achieving this goal calls for the development of a breadth of skills that combine academic disciplines with 21st century skills such as collaboration, digital literacy, and problem solving. Sadly, SDG 4 is not on track to be achieved by 2030, and the most marginalized and vulnerable segments of society are at risk of being left behind”. See https://brook.gs/2mlGiEc
[22] https://uni.cf/2WQ1LWT
[23] https://bit.ly/2kuR8GZ
[24] See https://nyti.ms/2owMJEZ
[25] “A few years ago, while teaching a class about global labor at the University of California, Los Angeles, I tried assigning my students the task of analyzing the “supply chain” – the vast network of factories, warehouses, and shipping conduits through which products flow – by tracing the components used in their electronic devices. Almost immediately, I hit a snag: it turns out that even companies that boast about ‘end-to-end visibility’ and ‘supply-chain transparency’ may not know exactly where their components come from. This ignorance is built into the way supply chains work. The housing of a television, say, might be built in a small factory employing only a few people; that factory interacts only with the suppliers and buyers immediately adjacent to it in the chain – a plastic supplier on one side, an assembly company on the other. This arrangement encourages modularity, since, if a company goes out of business, its immediate partners can replace it without consulting anyone. But it also makes it hard to identify individual links in the chain” (Posner 2019). https://bit.ly/2VWLrPk
[26] United Nations 2017, p. vi https://bit.ly/2TJx4B6
[27] According to the most recent UN data, “over 60 per cent of all international migrants live in Asia (80 million) or Europe (78 million). Northern America hosted the third largest number of international migrants (58 million), followed by Africa (25 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (10 million) and Oceania (8 million)”.
[28] United Nations 2017, p. vii https://bit.ly/2TJx4B6
[29] International Organization for Migration, 2018 https://bit.ly/2OB5CQh
[30] International Organization for Migration, 2018 https://bit.ly/2OB5CQh
[31] Von Herder, “developed the concept of romantic or organic nationalism, a form of ethnic nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy from historic cultural or hereditary groups. The underlying assumption is that every ethnicity should be politically distinct. Herder’s ideas on the subject were expressed in his theory of the Volksgeist (Hamilton 2019 https://bit.ly/2WORxl2 )”.
[32] https://bit.ly/2noUpoB
[33] See Maurice Crul in Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, ed. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis, ix-395. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019. See Rita Süssmuth in Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Learning in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[34] See Suárez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. La infancia de la inmigración. Madrid: Ediciones Morata, 2003 and Suárez-Orozco, Carola, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova. Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.
[35] See Brookings, 2019 https://brook.gs/2mlGiEc
[36] “Going to school means opening your mind and heart to reality in all its richness and various dimensions. If one learns how to learn – this is the secret, learning to learn – this will stay with you forever”. Pope Francis – see https://bit.ly/2obs1dH
[37] Exemplary models abound, see, inter alia, Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., and Carolyn Sattin, eds. Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era. New York: New York University Press, 2010; Immigrant Children Can Succeed: Lessons from Around the World, edited by Bertelsmann Stiftung, 46-59. Gurtesloh, Germany: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2008; and Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Learning in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; See also https://brook.gs/2mlGiEc
[38] https://bit.ly/2lqoA1M
[39] https://bit.ly/2lqoA1M
[40] https://uni.cf/2WQ1LWT
[41] See Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., and Carolyn Sattin, eds. Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
[42] See V. Ramanathan and M. Suárez-Orozco, “Climate change: Students, finally, are on fire” https://bit.ly/2mI4uAF
[43] See Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Learning in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[44] See the essays by David Bloom (2004) and Robert LeVine (2004) in Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., and Desiree Qin-Hilliard, eds. Globalization: Culture and Education in the Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.