Globalisation and Education Policy Issues: Gender Inequality and Education—Changing Local/Global Relations in a ‘Post Colonial’ World and the Implications for Feminist Research

This chapter discusses how particular educational discourses such as lifelong learning, emerging out of period of transition produced by ‘fast capitalism’ and emergent knowledge economies in the late twentieth century, have had material and social effects through their uptake in policy and practice. There are two dominant educational discourse arising from a globalised context. One is a promising one about new economies and opportunities in which education, as a key site of social change, individual and collective mobility, mediates and magnifies the tensions within and between post-modernity and the social relations of gender. The unitary developmental subject of modernist educational discourses is being supplanted by forms of identity or subjectivity that are fluid and hybrid for some, in a constant state of being and becoming in an ongoing production through biography inflected by race, class, gender, culture and sexuality. The other less optimistic discourse focuses on sedimented and enduring patterns that foreground gender and racial inequality. This realist discourse charts how contemporary globalisation and the neoliberal policies justified by globalisation have produced in many instances greater inequality and widened existing polarities between rich and poor in de-industrialising developed countries.