Assessing the impact of globalization on South African education and training: a review of the evidence so far

Private Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and national development: The South African reality

“…The latter was particularly useful in developing a framework for the 'developmental priorities' of the government, which provided an important starting point for the conceptual framework undertaken for this work. It complemented earlier work undertaken for the Geneva-based RUIG research network exploring the role of globalisation and its impact on education and training in South Africa (results of this work are published in Akoojee & McGrath 2004 In addition, expertise gained in the sub-Saharan studies into public (and private) further education and training was strengthened by my involvement in a co-funded British Council/HSRC/Joint Education Trust seven country comparative study into vocational education and training (VET) provision in Southern Africa. It identified key trends in TVET provision in the region and was subsequently published as a research monograph (Akoojee, Gewer & McGrath 2005).…”

“…Burbules & Torres, 2000;Robertson et al, 2002;Torres, 2002). It is clearly a significant force both at the level of discourse and phenomena and is "complexly intertwined" with other major contemporary discourses, such as neoliberalism and the knowledge economy (Akoojee & McGrath 2004, King & McGrath 2004.…”

“…The world order had been rapidly transforming since the late 1980s. Thus when political emancipation came in 1994, South Africa was totally unprepared (Akoojee & McGrath 2004). Catapulted onto the world stage by the euphoria of freedom and armed with a democratic constitution considered one of the most progressive in the world, the government had not only to transform political organs, but also had to ensure that social and economic aspirations were responded to.…”

“…Nonetheless, there are a range of structural problems and a poor performance on poverty, inequality and unemployment that needs to be addressed. These are identified in the following section, which draws in part from Akoojee and McGrath (2004) and provides the economic context for development.…”

Constructing school knowledge after the Wall: the case of textbook publishing in the former German Democratic Republic

“…Critics sometimes ignore provisions in the theory regarding the conditions under which world culture is likely to be more penetrative of social organisation, policy, and practice (Ramirez & Meyer, 2002). Many rich case studies have traced the impact of globalisation processes on particular aspects of education on sub-units of the world such as the nation-state, state or local jurisdictions (see Akoojee & McGrath, 2004) while case studies in which local customs or belief systems prevail to at least some extent, producing hybridity (see Jungck, 2003;Luk-Fong, 2005) or what Robertson labelled 'glocalisation' (1992). A useful image of hybridity is to think of it as a palimpsest, on which traces of the old and local can be found in contemporary, globalised practices (Dussel et al, 2000).…”