ABSTRACT
The effects of learning from foreign educational experiences are often unrecognisable or not immediately visible. This is partly because the appreciation of foreign wisdom requires lasting effort to transform the conventional values of recipient societies (Cheng, 1998). Also, as will be discussed in this article, this is because impulses for, and the objectives of, international educational traffic are increasingly complex, and its outcomes encompass arenas outside education. Cross-national educational interaction is no longer an exclusive feature of academic interest, but has become a key issue in international relations. This new conception of educational mobility has been particularly noticeable since the end of the Cold War. The traffic
*Assistant Professor, University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Doctoral Program in Modern Cultures and Public Policies, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8571, Japan. Email: mshibata@sakura.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp
of people, commodities and information is blocked less and less by the barriers of state political ideologies, and has begun to hinge on new notions of boundaries. Nowadays, free trade blocs are formed by agreements among ‘neighbours’, sharing economic advantage and basic values such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. Such shared values play a powerful role in the redefinition of ‘us’ and the legitimisation of regional societies. The vigour of cross-national educational transfer in the past two decades, as will be argued, has effectively been used for the formation of new identities of individual nations and for the promotion of new aspirations for the regional alliances of these nations.
