240044 SE VM3 / VM5 - Global inequality in education. Theoretical and practical approaches (2021S)

Objectives

The course provides an in-depth examination of education and development policies in the context of social and educational equality/inequality in the Global South. These policies are to be better classified and critically reflected against the background of theoretical positions.

Content

Education systems serve, among other social goals, social allocation, that is, the assignment of people to social hierarchies. In practice, education systems have served and continue to serve much more often to reproduce social inequality than to reduce it. In the Global South in particular, the elitist-structured colonial education systems often passed on extreme educational inequality to the postcolonial systems. Not least for this reason, universal access to education and educational equality have been a goal of many decolonization and social reform movements. Nevertheless, educational inequality proves to be extremely persistent.
Theoretically, the seminar will refer to approaches from the sociology of education (Bourdieu, as well as more recent analytic work on social reproduction, e.g. McCowan 2016) from dependency theory (Carnoy/Samoff 1990) as well as globalization-critical approaches in the sociology of education (Robertson 2011, Verger et al 2018).

The seminar will analyze the social causes of this phenomenon as well as the role of different actors using the example of some historical and recent attempts in the Global South to establish educational equality through specific education and development policies (Cuba, Tanzania, Venezuela, ...).