ABSTRACT
Prestigious educational reforms such as those occurring in the pace-setting countries of the world (e.g., the United States and Great Britain) often function as a source model for national educational reform programs elsewhere in the world. What makes certain nations pace-setting sources and exporters of educational reform programs and other nations followers and importers of such programs is their relative positions in a world system of knowledge production and circulation. While advanced industrial nations are mainly involved in the production of knowledge, Third-World nations are mainly still concerned with the distribution and consumption of knowledge. In the “post-modern condition,” according to Lyotard (1979, 6), knowledge behaves analogously to money: “[T]he pertinent distinction would no longer be between knowledge and ignorance, but rather, as in the case of money, between ‘payment knowledge’ and ‘investment knowledge.’” In advanced industrial nations, the role of institutions of higher education is to create new skills (“investment knowledge”), whereas in the Third World educational institutions continue to supply the skills needed to fulfill the society’s present needs and to maintain its internal cohesion (“payment knowledge”).
