Globalisation in Education: Process and Discourse

The article draws on comparative analyses meant to investigate both the degree and the dimensions of the ‘internationalisation’ of educational knowledge in societies that differ considerably in terms of civilisational background and modernisation path. In so doing, the article seeks to put forward two essential ideas. These refer, first, to the importance that educational discourse plays in shaping the educational reality of the present-day world. In this sense, in educational research as in social science in general, the (increasingly numerous) analyses of the socio-economic processes bringing about world society have to be complemented by (hitherto under-represented) research into the semantic construction of world society. Secondly, taking the above analyses and their conceptual design as an example, the article is meant to underscore the theory-dependency of our observations on, and of the resultant knowledge of, phenomena and processes of globalisation.