ABSTRACT
The globalization of education and schooling (terms that will be used interchangeably here) has four major dimensions. It began in medieval times, particularly from the eleventh century onward, with (1) the revitalization and bureaucratization of the Western Church and the accompanying establishment of a decentralized European "system" of education for the production of clergy and secular officials. That dimension will be treated only briefly in favor of more recent developments. In the nineteenth century we find (2) international comparisons and rivalries between countries involved in the initial construction of mass schooling, a process of mutual imitation that gave schooling a largely uniform structure among these competing countries. In the twentieth century, educational globalization intensified with (3) the spread of the state as the dominant political form everywhere in the world, with the consequence that the construction of national educational systems became a ubiquitous endeavor, along with the establishment and growth of transnational or global organizations concerned with education. These organizations, especially UNESCO and the many nongovernmental bodies associated with UNESCO, came to constitute a normatively authoritative "global center" for the discussion and implementation of educational ideas and organizational models. Hand in hand with the latter two dimensions we find (4) growing social scientific interest in education, producing analyses of the history and operations of schooling in many countries and studies of the effects of schooling on phenomena such as economic growth, stratification, and political behavior. In recent decades much of the social scientific research has been incorporated inro the work of global educational organiza-
tions and thereby has become part of the globalization process itself.
