Educational Research for the Dialectic Process of Globalization and Localization

Abstract

Since the Enlightenment, educational research has been conceived as the creation of objective educational knowledge to regulate educational practice employing scientific method analogously to the method used in natural science. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), an English Enlightenment educationist, claimed that ”Observation and experience, which has so much advanced our knowledge in physics, may, perhaps, with equal success, be applied to the science of education.” Experimental method had been also emphasized in the scientific ideal of educational research advocated by E. C. Trapp (1745-1818) and Imm. Kant (1724-1804). The creation of objective educational science has been deemed as embodied in the ”modernity project” of western world. As the process of modernization reached its zenith during the last few decades, the whole world has been virtually constructed as an electronic, universal, timeless and technical global system. Western technocratic rationality has brought the supreme domination of the principles of cultural and social construction, such as rationality, order, efficiency and unity, to a global scale. Educational research based on western rationalistic logic has been conducive to making the educational practice in the world more and more uniform. In other words, education is becoming more and more globalized. Simultaneous with globalizing tendencies in education, strong localizing forces are promoting revitalization of local cultures. The so-called scientific research derived from western experience has been criticized as implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism neglecting the local needs. According to many decolonising methodologist, indigenous forms of knowledge should be taking into serious accounts in doing educational research and implementing educational practice. However, globalization and localization are not divergent processes. They are actually complementary ones. According to Giddens, globalization is really about the transformation of time and space and increasingly engages not only large-scale systems but also local bodies and individuals. Accordingly, the local is integrally tied to the global, and the global to the local. From educational perspective, problems are arising: what forms of educational knowledge can contribute to the harmonization of globalization and localization? What kinds of educational research can produce such forms of knowledge? This paper addresses itself to the issues of educational study confronting the challenges of the dialectic process of globalization and localization.