Education and the state

Education and the state

In this transition towards a globalization of education the state should change its focus. It is urgently necessary to grant the greatest possible freedom to national educational systems so that they can find their own way forward, stimulating international competition wherever possible. Sooner or later countries will begin to "buy and sell" education. This already happens indirectly through the mass media, but the interchange will be more genuine and effective in the case of the services without frontiers provided by digital education. These new international educational services are set to flourish in a most spectacular manner. Countries that refuse to open their frontiers to this new exchange of ideas and knowledge will inexorably fall behind. The state should guarantee and encourage this right of their citizens to travel unhindered through the new territories of the digital world.

Thus with the passage of time, in the same way that open television filters into the most totalitarian of states, the most progressive education will penetrate all the regions of the globe, following the paths of telecommunications, tourism and transport, among others. Timetables and spatial restrictions will diminish, and each person or group will be able to opt for the courses that are most suitable to them. The freedom to learn and the freedom to teach must be preserved in their entirety, as guaranteed but not always as observed in practice by the constitutions of modern nations.

This will lead to the progressive disappearance of "captive" territories within the educational map. Students and their families will seek teachers and professors from the entire world network of education and will select those that best meet their demands and needs (and vice-versa?). Programs that exist in a certain region will be simply ignored if they do not satisfy family demands and the student's intellectual appetite. No one will be able to stop this from happening. Many of those who currently work to create educational programs at municipal, provincial or international level believing they can control the contents of learning down to the smallest detail will be overrun by events in a global education.

There will be no room in the globalized world for a "single mind" in education, for any program directed by ministries, for curricula imposed by a given educational doctrine. The new society of knowledge will overcome all these barriers, leading to a society that will be digital, global and free. There are reasons to believe that we are not proposing a utopia. Preparation will be needed. Few are those who are aware that the Berlin wall of education, which keeps states and individuals isolated, has already fallen