Globalizing Education from Christian Missionaries to Corporate Finance: Global Actors, Global Agendas, and the Shaping of Global Childhoods

Abstract

Schooling has a prominent role in the lives of children around the world. The form that schooling takes reflects a series of global processes that have been operating over more than two centuries. European schooling was spread globally first by missionaries, intent on winning converts, then by colonial authorities seeking to produce compliant workers and subjects. In the twentieth century, international organizations promoting “development” began to play a role in shaping education, and, in recent years, transnational corporations and the finance sector have become involved, viewing education as a means of generating profit. These various actors and motives have always been complex and interconnected and the schooling children experience has never been an expression of a singular planned objective but rather the outcome of a series of complex, interrelated, and often contradictory processes. This chapter begins by outlining the approaches children’s geographers have taken to schooling and education globally. It then explores four key sets of actors and processes that have contributed to the globalization of education: missionary activity, colonialism, intentional development, and corporate capitalism. Finally, conclusions are drawn for research by children’s geographers.