82.5
Social Justice on Sale in the Globalized Education Supermarket
This paper is aimed at enquiring into the very demanding idea of social justice against the impacts of marketization and globalization on education. In order to do so the consequences of injustices resulting from the effects of global capitalism and the influences of education markets will be briefed firstly. Then the mission and myth of social justice relating to education reform will be detailed. Since the achievement of justice in a certain society often entails an injustice done to other societies especially in the era of globalism, the barriers and borders of social justice should not be neglected.
As regards globalization, the competition and cooperation of both domestic and international senses represented in higher education have shown relationship with the market principle. Educational systems, especially universities, facing the era of global economy characterized as “knowledge-based” have been required “to produce a workforce more adequately prepared to meet the challenges of globalization” (Rizvi and Engel, 2009). Under these circumstances, education policies for social justice will be challenged against their societal borders, not to say their practical barriers from within.
In this paper the idea of “global democracy” proposed by some authors such as D. Archibugi (1998), I. M. Young (2000, 2007), N. Fraser(2009), D. Held (2008, 2010) shall be borrowed and reconceptualized to help go beyond social justice. In doing so, some cases of education reform or education policies pertaining to social justice together with a few international conferences focused on the issue of education and social justice are to be analyzed to reveal the central problem of taking social justice as granted.
Keywords: social justice, global democracy, education markets, globalization