ABSTRACT
The expression East versus West tends to evoke a view of the diversity that resides within and across continents as a schism. Such diversity could be in areas such as trade, arts, culture, language, architecture, music, gastronomy, movies, education, political systems and many others. And it is also in these areas that we find elements of both East and West intersecting and producing new forms of knowledge and applications. A majority of papers concerning educational theories and research tends to view the topic from a Western perspective (such as from Australia, Europe, New Zealand and North America) as opposed to from an Eastern viewpoint (India, China, Japan, South Korea, among others). Of late there has been renewed interest in the West in exploring and analysing alternative approaches to learning and education from Eastern traditions that predate Western philosophical thought (Kumar 2012). For the purpose of this paper we will view the East as seen from the Asian perspective and the West as representing Anglo-Saxon countries. The terms globalising and internationalising will be used inter-changeably, although there are differences in the ways in which they are contextualised and defined. The article attempts to highlight the issues and raise questions by relating to the East and West schism, and where East and West meet through the process of globalisation, ranking and branding of education, and the use of the English language in the context of Singapore.1
