Unfair Equality: The Cultural Challenges of an Imported Interior Design Curriculum

Abstract

As our planet slowly turns into a global village where interconnectedness is inevitable, education finds itself in a very competitive market to attract and produce the fittest graduates who can survive in today's economic political setting. This competition has brought international educational delivery into developing countries. Recognizing such a reality, this research aims to explore the success level of educational borrowing from the West in serving its intended purpose of an accelerated advancement for developing countries. Does this import place developing countries’ students as peers on even grounds with students from developed countries? More specifically this study seeks to highlight whether an imported interior design curriculum internationally relocated presents more equal opportunities for quality education to students in the Middle East. The question is investigated by following students receiving an international interior design education in their own country in the Middle East and questioning their experience and its alignment with the educational culture that they bring with them from the secondary level as well as the alignment with the local interior design culture of that country. Both the gathered data and the literature review support that culture is a key feature influential in education as well as in interior design, a factor so powerful that it may cause the failure of the educational transfer and thus challenge the fairness of the equality in education that was originally sought when the program was borrowed in the first place.