International Education - What's in a Name?

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ot far from my home is a public ele-mentary school that closed for a thor-ough remodeling and then re-openedamid fanfare with international in its

new name and dual language immer-sion as its focus.Several years later, the middle school

nearby added international to itsname, too, with global perspective as its focus.

Across town, a blighted city high school was divid-ed into small schools, and one of them became a glob-al studies academy. Two other city high schools haveadded the International Baccalaureate.

These are not unusual events. A new internation-al education movement actually a new wave of anold movement is under way in schools across thecountry. This movement consists of newly interna-tionalized public schools along with state coalitions forinternational education, an annual International Ed-ucation Week co-sponsored by the U.S. Departmentsof State and Education, an array of language initia-tives, the Goldman Sachs Foundations awards for ex-

emplary international schools, and more. Phraseslike the global economy, our increasingly intercon-nected world, and global citizens are rolling offmany tongues. Audiences hear these words and nod

their heads knowingly. International education ap-pears to be the new common sense.

But what does it mean? What forms is it taking,and what work is it doing? I have peered into the cur-rent wave from three angles: observing a handful ofpublic schools that have transformed themselves intointernational schools, interviewing movement ac-tivists who are helping to shape them, and examininggovernment and foundation initiatives.

NATIONAL SECURITY

National security is the justification for the new in-ternational education movement. To those who as-sumed that world mindedness, global citizenship, in-tercultural understanding, or something of that sort

was defining and directing the movement, this may

International EducationWhats in a Name?

International education signals very different ideas to different people.

When it comes to your school, what will you have it mean?

BY WALTER C. PARKER

IWalter C. Parker is a professor of education and an adjunct pro-fessor of political science at the University of Washington. His booksincludeTeaching Democracy(Teachers College Press, 2003) andSocial Studies in Elementary Education, 13th ed. (Allyn & Ba-con, 2009).

196 PHI DELTA KAPPAN Image Photos com

Todays wave is dominated

by nationalism.


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come as a surprise. Todays wave is dominated by na-tionalism.

International education as a national security ini-tiative has two key dimensions: economic and mili-tary. The economic way to secure the nation is to im-prove the nations economic competitiveness with

other nations maintaining it or regaining it if it al-ready has been lost. The military way is to strengthenthe nations armed forces, including its intelligencecommunities.

ECONOMIC SECURITY

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellingsmakes the economic argument for international edu-cation. Through the No Child Left Behind Act, weare committed to having every child in the United

States learn and succeed in our global economy.1

Shelinks school reform directly to success in todaysworld and defines that success in economic terms;school reform is a technology for accomplishing thatgoal.

The link is also expressed in a burgeoning numberof state reports. For example, according to North Car-olina in the World: Increasing Student Knowledge andSkills About the World, Improving international edu-cation is about providing students the best opportu-nity for success in the emerging workforce.2 Similar-

ly, the Asia Societys annual conference brings to-gether high-level delegates from two dozen states. . .to address a significant problem in American educa-tion: the wide gap between the growing economic andstrategic importance of Asia and other world regionsto the United States, and U.S. students limitedknowledge about the world outside our borders.3

In each of these, international education is intend-ed to address the key problem posed by globalization:the defense of the nations competitive edge in thenew worldwide economy.4 Schools are thesolution.Only schools can produce the enterprising individu-als who will be successful in this flat new world.5 Thisis the calculus of neoliberalism (free-market funda-mentalism), with its strategies of privatization, entre-preneurs, and free-trade agreements.6 Without it,America will lose its edge to Dublin, Beijing, or Ban-galore; or if lost already, never regain it.

This is plainly put in the influential report from theNational Academies of Science, Engineering, andMedicine, urgently titled Rising Above the GatheringStorm: Energizing and Employing America for aBrighter Economic Future. This excerpt frames the

problem (competition in a flat world) and the ur-

gency (impending loss of leadership) of finding a so-lution:

Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communica-tions and other advances, workers in virtually every sectormust now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away

in Ireland, Finland, China, India, or dozens of other nationswhose economies are growing. This has been aptly referredto as the Death of Distance. . . . The committee is deeplyconcerned that the scientific and technological buildingblocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at atime when many other nations are gathering strength. . . .Although many people assume that the United States willalways be a world leader in science and technology, this maynot continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds andideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptnesswith which a lead in science and technology can be lost and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed itcan be regained at all.7

Gathering Storm then moves to solutions. The firstamong four is K-12 education: Enlarge the pipeline

of students who are prepared to enter college and grad-uate with a degree in science, engineering, or mathe-matics by increasing the number of students who passAP (Advanced Placement) and IB (International Bac-calaureate) science and mathematics courses.8

MILITARY SECURITY

The military dimension to the national security ar-gument is framed as a communication problem: Wedont know our new enemies languages.

In 2003, Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) expressedthis in the National Security Language Act: We needto do more to make sure that America has the lan-guage professionals necessary to defend our nationalsecurity. . . . Changing our (armed forces) recruitingmethods alone will not solve the problem. To meetnew security needs, we need to create a new domesticpool of foreign language experts and we can only dothat by investing in the classroom. . . in foreign lan-guages of critical need, such as Arabic, Persian, Kore-

an, Pashto, and Chinese. Later came Congressional

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International education

as a national security initiative

has two key dimensions:

economic and military.


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The crisis story is that schools are failing miserably toeducate students for the new world order. The salva-tion story is that only schools can rescue the nation.It is a simple formula: Schools caused the crisis andschools can solve it.

There is no small amount of magical thinking inthe claim that schools can save society, since schools

themselves are embedded in society. Schools are notautonomous arenas outside the fray, steering societyin this or that direction. They are more its caboosethan its engine. Lawrence Cremin, the historian ofAmerican education, observed that this formula hecalled it a device has been used repeatedly acrossthe nearly two centuries of our education system. Thisformula was used by proponents of vocational educa-tion in the early years of the 20th century, by the post-Sputnik proponents of math and science education inthe 1950s, in the 1980s by the National Commission

on Excellence in Education, and now, apparently, by

Resolution No. 100 of 2005, which urged the U.S. toestablish an international education policy thatwould promote a world free of terrorism, furtherUnited States foreign policy and national security,and enhance [U.S.] leadership in the world.

In 2006, President George W. Bush himself intro-

duced the National Security Language Initiative, whichwould provide $114 million for the teaching of lan-guage for national security and global competitive-ness.9 In his speech, the President laid out a combinedfront for the war on terror composed of a language-proficient military and intelligence network, a lan-guage-proficient diplomatic corps that is able to con-vince governments in their own language, and a lan-guage-proficient American people who, all together, canparticipate with greater effect in spreading freedom.

So, at least two national security arguments are at

play in the current international education move-ment. Both are urgent one with economic threat,one with military threat and they overlap.

SCHOOLS ARE BROKEN

The popular belief that the school system is brokenalso fuels the international education movement. Ittirelessly broadcasts the claim that public schools arefailing (miserably) to educate students for life in thenew, flat world.

The national security and school failure discoursesare connected. Consider this statement from Opera-tion Public Education, a reform project geared totransforming Americas schools so as to respond tothe challenge of human capital development in theintensely competitive level playing field of the glob-al economy.10

Terrorism and the war in Iraq are high on the list of the na-tions concerns, but the greatest danger facing America is,as (former IBM chairman) Louis Gerstner recognized, thechallenge of human capital development. Our nations

public schools, the foundation for this effort, are still fail-ing far too many of our children despite an investment ofsome $500 billion annually.11

The author, an advisor to the Secretary of Educa-tion, continues by reminding readers that sadly,weve known about this threat for quite some time.His reference point is the 1983 report A Nation atRisk, which claimed that the mediocrity of ourschools was so profound that had it been imposed byan unfriendly foreign power, we might well haveviewed it as an act of war.12

This is an urgent crisis-and-salvation narrative.

198 PHI DELTA KAPPAN

There is no small amount

of magical thinking in the claim

that schools can save society,

since schools themselves are

embedded in society.


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the international education movement. To contendthat problems of international competitiveness can besolved by educational reform, Cremin wrote, espe-cially educational reform defined solely as schoolre-form, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is atbest a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct at-

tention away from those truly responsible for doingsomething about competitiveness.13

MARGINAL VOICES

While national security and school failure may to-gether dominate the movement, they dont push oth-er meanings and programs off the curriculum planningtable. Percolating at the edges and closer to the groundof school practice are other interpretations of both theproblem and the solution. Among them, I found three.

One,global perspective, gives international education atransnational cultural meaning; another, cosmopoli-tanism, gives it a transnational political meaning; anda third, student body, gives it a cultural meaning again,but in a decidedly student-centered way.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

The first of these emerged in the 1960s during anearlier phase of excitement about international edu-cation. In 1965, Congress passed the International

Education Act. In 1969, the U.S. Department ofHealth, Education and Welfare published an influen-tial report that called for developing the capacity ofstudents to view the world system as a whole, tocomprehend the interrelatedness of the humanspecies quaspecies, and to think in ways that are freefrom the influence of ethnocentric perceptions.14

That waves high-water mark came in 1978 withthe publication of Robert Hanveys An AttainableGlobal Perspective, which argued for a transition frompre-global to global consciousness. That meantunderstanding that we live in an interconnected worldand developing what Hanvey called perspective con-sciousness. Hanvey suggested that students needed tolearn about political, ecological, economic, and cultur-al connections by studying problems that cut acrossnational boundaries. Perspective consciousness isthe awareness on the part of the individual that he orshe has a view of the world that is not universallyshared, that this view of the world has been and con-tinues to be shaped by influences that often escapeconscious detection, and that others have views of theworld that are profoundly different from ones own.15

The Reagan administration dealt a direct blow to

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this era of international education in the 1980s, adecade that saw fierce contests over the meaning ofinternational and global in schools. A 1986 U.S.

Department of Education report, Blowing the Whistleon Global Education, accused the movement of paci-fism, anti-capitalism, and capitulation to foreign en-

emies.16

The global perspective today has shifted our expec-tations for multicultural education from emphasizingknowledge, recognition, and respect for diverse cul-tures within the U.S. to applying the same standards tocultures outside the U.S. The slogan celebrate diversi-ty is taken out of the national container and extendedto peoples everywhere. This approach is intended totackle the cultural provincialism and exceptionalism ofAmerican society along with high school graduatesslim knowledge of the world.

Heres an example of how this discourse shows upin todays movement. Teachers at one new public in-ternational middle school embrace global perspec-tive as the school mission. On the schools web site,

they display their objectives. Both perspective con-sciousness and the interconnectedness of the worldsystem are evident:

1. Global Challenges: Examine and evaluate glob-al issues, problems, and challenges (e.g., students un-derstand that global issues and challenges are interre-

lated, complex, and changing, and that most issueshave a global dimension).

2. Culture and World Areas: Study human differ-ences and commonalities (e.g., students understandthat members of different cultures view the world indifferent ways).

3. Global Connections: Analyze the connectionsbetween the U.S. and the world (e.g., students can de-scribe how they are connected with the world histor-ically, politically, economically, technologically, so-cially, linguistically, and ecologically).

COSMOPOLITANISM

Another argument for international education bold-ly shifts the territory to world citizenship and, in so do-ing, raises questions about allegiance and belonging.

In contrast to putting the nation first, cosmopoli-tanism puts humanity and Earth first. In a brief es-say that has drawn wide attention, University ofChicago ethicist Martha Nussbaum proposes a cos-mopolitan education for students in American

schools. She wants to transform civic education sothat children are taught not that they are, above all,citizens of the U.S. and stewards of its interests, butthat they are, above all, citizens of a world of humanbeings.17

To identify oneself as a citizen of the world breaksthe old habit of loyalty to a nation and being definedprimarily or solely by local origins and membership.That frees us, she argues (quoting Seneca), to dwell in-stead in two communities the local community ofour birth and the community of human argument andaspiration that is truly great and truly common, inwhich we look neither to this corner nor to that, butmeasure the boundaries of our nation by the sun. 18

If the global perspective approach to internationaleducation takes culturaleducation beyond the nation-al container, cosmopolitanism does the same forpo-liticaleducation. It tackles not only the problems ofAmerican provincialism and exceptionalism, but alsonationalism. World citizenship, after all, is more a po-litical than a cultural concept. In most states, studentsare required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (to thenation, of course). The cosmopolitan school board

member will ask why students arent pledging alle-


The global perspective

emphasizes knowledge,

recognition, and respect

for diverse cultures

outside the U.S.


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giance to the larger civic community: humanity. Aschool may express this by quietly dropping themorning national pledge; another by adding a second,cosmopolitan pledge; and another by stronger formsof global environmental education, teaching a courseon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or in-

troducing students to the International Red Crosscurriculum on international humanitarian law.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENT BODY

A third marginal approach returns the meaning ofinternational education to culture but, in contrast tothe global perspective, focuses squarely on the cultur-al composition of the schools student body. Somepublic international high schools serving high-needstudents in resource-starved urban areas have created

a form of international education built on the demo-graphic tapestry of the student body. Immigrant stu-dents, many of them refugees, add a new kind of di-versity to the schools already diverse populations.School leaders creatively seize the opportunity andclaim theirs are international schools because theyhave an international student body.

Culture fairs showcase students home cultures.English language learning is advanced as a centralmission of the school and is, in effect, reframed as in-ternational education. The stresses on such schools

financial, the discourse of school failure, institution-al racism contribute to this reframing. Internation-al education can be deployed to mobilize new re-sources and media attention and, as one parent ac-tivist told me, to attract market share back to thepublic schools.

The main emphasis of the approach, as a districtsuperintendent said, is making students and teach-ers aware of the diversity within their midst and find-ing ways to help them value that and trace that towherever it originated. He continued:

Being a magnet for so many different kids to come togeth-er seems to me to be an advantage. . . . You cant avoid it.The kids are going to experience it on the playground,theyre going to experience it in the classroom, in the lunch-room, on the bus. Theyre going to see kids who are differ-ent from them. It becomes almost a way of living. Eventhough kids may never leave this city, the world has cometo them.19

SOLUTION ON THE LOOSE

International education today is a broad move-

ment containing a disparate mix of meanings and mo-

tives. It is being deployed to bolster the nations eco-nomic and military defenses, to liberate multicultur-alism from its national container, to promote worldcitizenship, and, in some urban schools, to take ad-vantage of a vibrant immigrant population. These area handful of the alternatives curriculum planners will

encounter when they consider how to international-ize school programs. The first two add up to a na-tional security discourse, which is backed by no less

than the federal government, major foundations, theNational Academies, and the popular belief that theschool system is broken. The other three aim in dif-ferent directions and are peripheral by virtue of lack-ing this kind of institutional power to advance theirgoals. I have painted these five only in the broadeststrokes, and no doubt there are plenty more.

The multiple discourses at play under the name in-ternational education, some powerful, some weak,

provide a golden opportunity for educators to decide,state by state and locale by locale, how best to preparechildren and youth for a changing world. They canspread out the alternatives, weigh them against one an-other, and determine which one or two, or some hy-brid, shall stand as international education.

Deeply held values are woven into each of the al-

NOVEMBER 2008 201

Some high schools

have created a form of

international education built

on the demographic tapestry

of the student body.


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ternatives, including conflicting understandings ofpatriotism and competing visions of what schools arefor. Disagreement is inevitable. Voting against HouseBill 266 in Utah, which would have provided morefunding for the IB program in Utahs schools, Sen.Margaret Dayton said she is opposed to the anti-

American philosophy thats somehow woven into allthe classes as they promote the U.N. agenda. Align-ing herself with the first of the two national securitydiscourses and against cosmopolitanism, she clarified:I would like to haveAmerican citizenswho know howto function in a global economy, notglobal citizens.20

Sen. Daytons antipathy to IB is in stark contrast tothe National Academies support for it, but both op-erate within the strong discourse of economic com-petitiveness.

Is international education anchored somewhere?

The short answer, based on the window that I openedhere, is no. It would be a gross oversimplification toassert that international education today is nothingbut a continuation of national defense education un-der a misleading name. It is partly and strongly that,to be sure, but more accurate is to portray the move-ment as plural and discordant. There are multiplemeanings and practices underwritten by multiple ide-ologies, and there is plenty of hype. International ed-ucation in U.S. schools today is a solution on theloose; international education solves a variety of prob-

lems, serves an array of masters, and expresses diverseand sometimes conflicting values. There is no coher-ence to the movement, only an illusion conjured bythe common use of a name.

That nationalism plays a starring role really shouldntsurprise readers who, like me, were expecting themovements centerpiece to be something different. Ashistorians have made abundantly clear, public schoolseverywhere have regularly served national purposes.21

In a nations early years, the school system typically isdevoted to developing a national community unifiedby common beliefs and customs. Later, the systemturns to reproducing these in subsequent generationsand making adjustments that are deemed necessary.International education is caught up in this pattern.As economist Kenneth Boulding observed during the1960s wave, the challenge is to

develop an image of the world system which is at the sametime realistic and also not threatening to the folk cultureswithin which the school systems are embedded; for if edu-cators do not find a palatable formula, the folk will revoltand seek to divert formal education once again into tradi-tional channels.22

Only with some clarity about the various and at

times conflicting aims of so-called international ed-ucation can educators make wise decisions. Examin-ing these alternatives should provide a starting point.

1. International Education Week 2005 Announced, accessed onlineat http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/Archive/2005/Nov/09-19221.html, no

longer available.2. North Carolina in the World, North Carolina in the World: Increas-ing Student Knowledge and Skills About the World (Raleigh: Center forInternational Understanding, 2005).

3. www.internationaled.org/statesinstitute.

4. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21stCentury(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

5. Brian J. Caldwell, The New Enterprise Logic of Schools, Phi DeltaKappan, November 2005, pp. 223-25.

6. David Harvey,A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005).

7. Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Cen-tury, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing Amer-

ica for a Brighter Economic Future(Washington, D.C.: National Acad-emies Press, 2005), pp. 1-2, www.nap.edu.

8. Ibid., p. 6.

9. www.state.gov/r/summit/.

10. Theodore Hershberg, Value-Added Assessment and Systemic Re-form: A Response to the Challenge of Human Capital Development,Phi Delta Kappan, December 2005, pp. 276-83.

11. Ibid., p. 276.

12. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation atRisk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C., 1983),p. 1.

13. Lawrence A. Cremin, Popular Education and Its Discontents(NewYork: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 103.

14. James M. Becker,An Examination of the Goals, Needs, and Prioritiesin International Education in U.S. Secondary and Elementary Schools(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Wel-fare, 1969), pp. 268, 271.

15. Robert G. Hanvey, An Attainable Global Perspective (New York:Center for Global Perspectives, 1978), p. 5.

16. Gregg L. Cunningham, Blowing the Whistle on Global Education(Denver: Regional Office, United States Department of Education,1986).

17. Martha C. Nussbaum,For Love of Country?(Boston: Beacon, 2002),p. 6. See also Joel Springs inventive cosmopolitan proposal inA NewParadigm for Global School Systems: Education for a Long and Happy Life(Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007); and the study by KatharyneMitchell and Walter C. Parker, I Pledge Allegiance To. . . Flexible Cit-

izenship and Shifting Scales of Belonging, Teachers College Record,2008, pp. 775-804.

18. Nussbaum, op. cit., p. 7.

19. Walter C. Parker and Stephen P. Camicia, The New Internation-al Education Movement in U.S. Schools: Civic and Capital Intents,Local and Global Affinities. Paper presented at the annual meeting ofthe American Educational Research Association, New York, April 2008.

20. Quoted in Ben Fulton, Students Say Good Things About IB,SaltLake Tribune, 23 February 2008, pp. A1, A6.

21. Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of EducationSystems in England, France and the USA (London: Macmillan, 1990).

22. Kenneth Boulding, Education for Spaceship Earth, Social Edu-cation, November 1968, p. 650. K


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International Education - What's in a Name?