Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education—Introduction

This chapter outlines the relationship between globalization and education by presenting several potential factors linking the two aspects. First, existing evidence on the evolution of national school systems is presented. Secondly, an interpretative framework to connect global socioeconomic and political forces with local and national educational developments is discussed, based on migrations, trade, evolving institutions, colonialism and the activity of missions. Next, this framework is used to present the individual chapters of the book, with a broad geographical scope including countries in the Southern and Northern European periphery, North America and Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The last section sums up the main results and briefly presents remaining gaps that future research should fill.