Continuation With globalisation, quality education is also gradually being more commercialised, making it more inaccessible for the majority.

The processes of globalisation have not solved the problems of inequity and inequality in educational provision even in the industrialised world. In developing countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, access to quality education is being subjected to the dictates of market forces and hence to a greater extent, becoming the property of those who can afford it. In these countries, the good schools and “good” teachers are concentrated in the rich urban areas. To add salt to the injury, the education system itself gives more priority to these urban schools in terms of resource allocation, supervision and teacher allocation.

Even where privatisation or community-supported schools are encouraged countrywide, rural schools hardly get the required material or pedagogic resources to measure up to the expectations of the national curriculum. This is because ill-trained and ill-motivated teachers in these areas usually fall back on less effective teaching methods and easily deviate from the national curriculum. It is an open secret that in most of West Africa for instance, teachers move from rural schools to urban centres to run away from the harsh realities that have become the embodiment of the village school.

Even at administration level, and in the name of globalisation, the role of education administrators is shifting. For instance, when we talk of the school headmaster now, there is no longer this vivid image of that elderly, ordinary, simply dressed disciplinarian educator sitting behind an ordinary table in a small office or walking along the school corridors peeping through classroom windows with awe to see if sessions are on or not. Rather, we have this dreary picture of a young person in black suits and ties, locked up in an unnecessarily large office and appearing or disappearing like a phantom at will; and usually inaccessible because he/she is either busy with consultants and ‘experts’ or is on the phone or Internet. Doing what? Trying to balance the school budget and/or busy studying the details of lucrative contracts.

The “globalised” headmaster has now been transformed into an unapproachable business executive whose sole responsibility is to make more money at the expense of satisfactory results for the school. This shifting role of education administration weighs heavily on education policy as it has to grapple with the question of defining what new roles education officials will have in the face of revenue generation, competition and marketisation of educational provisions on one side and the ever-increasing complaints about quality and standards on the other.

Globalisation is indeed a doubled-edged sword, bringing some good (e.g., information revolution, advanced communication, easy information dissemination, and economic growth) on one side while causing devastations on the other. As the world becomes more globalised, more and more young people particularly in the developing world are arguably becoming more and more alienated instead of being integrated into a booming world economy. For instance, with an increasingly globalised world, education systems in the developing world have failed to abate the disappearing of cultures and local languages - buried by the swift dominance of English as the global language.

The dominance of western media in developing countries completes the rout! There are growing concerns amongst traditional communities of the drastic changes in lifestyles (especially of youths) and the adoption of value systems that are alien to the virtues of such local communities. In many quarters of the developing world therefore, people are disheartened by the way universal and liberal education systems have encouraged the growing Westernisation of the young population and thus creating theatres of lawlessness on the one side and identity crisis and alienation on the other. This is not to say the West is synonymous to disorder, but the indiscriminate perpetuation of foreign values by our youths without fully understanding the effects of such values on their lives and on their communities has become a great cause for concern for many.

While globalisation analysts champion the cause for perpetual freedom in a global village, they blatantly ignore the inherent divergence of world cultures and the different interpretations and perceptions of what kind of education people aspire for their children. For instance, in most of traditional Africa for example The Gambia, children are seen as an integral part of a whole family unit bounded by set of laws and ethics that tie them closer to the “whole” which they are supposed to comprehend, appreciate and internalise as they grow.

They have little or no option to opt out of that “whole” and even as grown-ups they are supposed to continue to uphold to values that have a greater sense of responsibility and allegiance to the family. They are brought up to see the importance of the “whole” before the “self.” This somehow differs with how liberal theorists and defenders of globalisation perceive of the role of the growing child. Such proponents of universality and freedom identify children as moral beings in their own right who cannot be tied to the culture and commitments of their parents and the family and thus advocate for the supremacy of the “self” over the “whole.” Any prescription such advocates of individuality and independence propose in education policy is surely going to drive a knife into the value systems of others (like ours!). It is therefore baffling that we still continue to rely entirely on the foreign voice to design for us want we want for our children.

The reform agenda in education is one in which Western experts encourage countries to ditch outdated educational systems in favour of more accountable, all-inclusive and economic-driven ones. We are relentlessly being told that massive reform in education is a necessity if we are not going to be left behind by the speed and space of globalisation. However, while these prescriptions may have succeeded in bringing homogeneity in economies and cultures in many parts of the world, they have certainly not done so in fulfilling the heightened expectations and tastes of people in education.

As teaching and learning methods are being re-defined and advanced technology is being introduced in the delivery and retrieval of information, combined with the increasing number of stakeholders in the education terrain, education policy now has a greater task than ever before in addressing the unique challenges of individual countries rather than wallowing in the assumption that policy prescriptions for Country A can easily suffice for Country B. Despite the call for more policy borrowing orchestrated by the processes of globalisation, education policies must be home-grown if they are to fix the development jinx of developing countries.

This does not in any way leave room for countries to remain complacent and intransigent when it comes to adapting to the wave of changes especially those resulting from deep-seated economic and technological changes. Inevitably, as circumstances change, education itself must change by responding to new socio-economic and political trends surrounding it. Any attempt to adapt new values in the absence of wider and indeed local input in policy is bound to fail.

While the development decades of the 1960s and 1970s failed to bring about meaningful development for many developing countries, they certainly succeeded in setting the pace for popular participation in the affairs of the state. The decades witnessed the emergence of NGOs with genuine populist dogmas that could arguably be said to be neither West nor East. Some of these NGOs - coming up mainly with Marxist or interventionist philosophy - pushed and still continue to push for a more humanist approach to development, insisting that indigenous people, rather than foreign experts, have the answers to their predicaments.

Influential international NGOs such as Action Aid, Oxfam, as well as numerous civil society organisations have registered huge success stories in the fight for capacity building among local communities. These organisations have been competent advocates for human capital development by consistently maintaining pressure on national governments, international agencies and corporations to live up to their commitments of giving the people what belongs to them – power. They are also seen to be encouraging people-based development initiatives and actively linking local groups with the international community thereby facilitating borrowing and adaptation of foreign knowledge that could be adapted for local use. It is fitting to argue that most NGOs, by their modus operandi, carry policies, facilitate human development and global governance grounded on indigenous knowledge.

A combination of all these contributions of NGOs is gradually enabling local communities especially in developing countries like The Gambia to start having a stake in the development of national education policies. As a result of the creation of an enabling environment for local communities, all over the world, decision making in education policy is gradually taking a broader dimension, even as the power of globalisation continues to stifle the voice of the masses in favour of the “experts.”  Thanks to the work of NGOS and civil society organisations, as well as pro-active local education experts, a lot of people are now participating in the policy debate.

Such a tendency is increasing the tensions in education policy and practice because the wider the participants in the education landscape, the more difficult consensus building will become. But that is healthy for education as it opens up a theatre for critical thinking and popular participation as well as contestations and counter-contestations on issues of educational importance within the country.

The last but not by far the least important impact of globalisation on education policy and practice is migration. Massive migration is certainly one of the inevitable trends of the globalised world. As the economic gaps widen, the desire of dispossessed people to move in search of greener pastures is sure to rise. That is why rural-urban drift in developing countries continues to increase at an alarming rate. There is also evidence of substantial migration of trained people from poor economies to wealthier countries of Europe and North America. In these countries, it is not uncommon to see highly-skilled personnel (nurses, teachers, engineers, lawyers etc)  taking up menial jobs such as supermarket labourers, cleaning operatives, factory stewards, bar attendants, security guards to make a living and send remittance back home. Other people migrate to run away from wars.

In The Gambia for instance, there is a large population of people who ran away from the ethnic and political wars in the southern Senegalese province of Cassamance, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other areas in the sub-region and have now settled in the country. Coming initially as either transient workers or refugees, these people eventually settle and get a new status and gradually begin to form pockets of minority groups. Whether they are political or economic refugees, the swelling minority groups within any nation-state certainly pose daunting challenges for education policy makers as the educational needs of these people have to be incorporated into policy. Is that a threat to education itself? Yes, to some extent, because, coming mainly from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, the needs and aspirations of these minority groups somehow differ from the mainstream set-up of host countries. Education policy therefore has the unenviable task of putting these different aspirations into a single and unified national agenda. The cost and challenges involved in doing exactly that are enormous.

In conclusion, let us emphasise that with globalisation, came the rise in the use of a wide range of advanced technologies in the delivery and retrieval of information in the teaching and learning environment. Any viable education system must respond to such developments. For instance, if teachers are to remain employable, education policy and practice must be constantly changing so as to meet the demand of the new indulgence in information technology and the wide range of media in teaching and learning.

The new ways of acquiring knowledge means that the teaching profession now requires not only the famous pupil-centred pedagogies, but radical adaptation to the varied new skills in education particularly with the wide range of local techniques and multimedia in the teaching and learning environment. This is a daunting challenge for developing countries most of whom have already been overtaken by the space of developments that have characterised the modern classroom.

The good news is that the space of policy borrowing and adaptation is increasingly recognising the fact that the ultimate architects of any education system are the people for whom it is designed for. That is why campaign for globalisation must have a human face. It must respect home-grown talents. The processes of globalisation must respect the inherent indigenous expertise and encourage the adaptation of foreign inventions, initiatives and value systems to suit local needs.

In short therefore, globalisation with a human face means that if policies and practices are to work for the benefit of the people, they have to be designed by the people for whom they are intended. This calls for the foreign “experts” to do more listening than talking and leave a window for the local ‘expert.’ too.  If that happens, the perils of illiteracy and poverty will become history in our part of the world and education will thrive in the emergent dispensation of globalisation.