ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complexities of young people's understanding of, and attitude towards, other countries. The effects of knowledge on understanding are very complex and often inadvertent. They are a mixture of stereotypes and generalisations, of precise details and profound prejudice. Cultural antipathies and images are formed as rapidly and as effectively as a sense of mutual understanding and tolerance. Globalisation is sometimes seen as a kind of sweeping understanding, a broadening of educational experience. It is at other times seen as the inexorable spread of western values in all their levels, as the march of capitalism and McDonald's across all borders. Perhaps the greatest underlying motive force behind the unexamined belief in the powers of international communication, the impact of the internet on education, and the inevitability of globalisation, is the atavistic hope that all this knowledge will lead to greater understanding, that the technologies will themselves transform society.
