Rabindranath Tagore’s School at Shantiniketan was an interesting read that prompted many points of consideration related to local / global education. One key stand outs from the reading is the following passage:

[T]he schools in our country, far from being integrated to society, are imposed on it from the outside. The courses they teach are dull and dry, painful to learn, and useless when learnt. There is nothing in common between the lessons the pupils cram up from ten to four o’clock and the country where they live … It is clear, therefore, that although we might succeed in copying to perfection the externals of the European school … we shall only be burdening ourselves with tables and benches, rules and curricula … We must put the European model entirely out of our minds, if only for the reason that the European history and European society are different from our history and our society.

While I do think that education must be adjusted in many regions to fit more within the socio-cultural world of the students (I lived in South Africa for 11 years and this is an issue of enormous debate at the moment), it must be considered as a potential drawback in our increasingly globalized world. With this being said I also tend to think in terms of migration and how many people are not actually able to leave their country of origin and utilize the “globally recognized” education they received. Again, going back to Rabindranath Tagore’s School at Shantiniketan and his education that fits within the society, this is important to consider as migration itself should be viewed as a limited opportunity unavailable to all as, “Women who represent the poorest of the poor in rural areas often lack the resources to migrate” (IOM, 2012:1). While I clearly don’t have definitive answers to this conundrum there are regions that are shifting away from a globalized form of education to a more local one and it will be interesting to see the long term results (several African nations have decided to teaching in local languages in opposition to English).

IOM International Organization for Migration. 2012. Rural Women and Migration Fact Sheet. https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/published_docs/brochures_and_info_sheets/Rural-Women-and-Migration-Fact-Sheet-2012.pdf