Page 92 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 79

The context of global interdependence is especially important for this
generation of students because only individuals and nations working together
will solve many of today’s challenges. The leadership of the United States
in the world depends on educating a generation of young people who are
capable of navigating an interdependent world and collaborating across
borders and cultures to address today’s great problems.
(US Department of Education 2010)

The Convergent and Divergent Nature of Educational
Technology Policymaking

It should be clear from these brief descriptions that state educational technology
policymaking has long fed into and reflected a range of national political concerns.
Educational technology has therefore offered a consistent means for nation states
to bring economic and societal issues to bear on the structural processes of
contemporary educational provision and practice. As such, it is understandable
that educational technology policymaking often appears to fulfil a function of
supporting the ‘extra-economic embedding’ of capitalism as an economic system.
As Dale (2005, p.121) describes, capitalism is reliant on the educational systems of
the countries in which it operates to provide the necessary conditions of its
continued expansion – i.e. addressing the ‘core problems’ of “supporting accumu-
lation, ensuring societal cohesion and legitimation, that permanently confront
capitalist states”.
Seen in this light, then, all of the education technology policies reviewed in this
chapter are perhaps best understood as symbolic interventions on the part of various
types of capitalist state – offering a persuasive yet non-committal means for the
governments of the UK, US, Japan, Chile and Singapore to maintain legitimacy as
economic states and act as a high-profile means of keeping ‘on message’ with a
number of broad political themes. These observations are certainly not restricted to
the five countries highlighted in this chapter. As Robin Shields (2011, p.93) con-
cludes with regard to the national educational technology efforts of successive
governments in the far less economically powerful state of Nepal:

While government policies on education consistently stress the need for ICT,
there is an inconsistency and incoherence in their rationales for doing so.
Instead of an authentic, self-identified justification, ideas such as economic
competitiveness, ‘computer literacy’ and social equity are borrowed from the
continually changing global discourse on ICT and development. These terms
and concepts endow the national education system with a certain legitimacy
and respectability, showing that it is progressive and modern while simulta-
neously avoiding the need for a national strategy on ICT in education that
can stand up to close scrutiny.