THINKING VS COMMUNICATION COULD ENGLISH LEARNING BE A GLOBALIZED PRODUCT?

David Martin
scissorman999@yahoo.com
Publicado en Capital Letter No. 5
Mayo de 2004


Education is not seen as social development anymore, it is now a commercial product. If you have money, you'll get knowledge; however, knowledge seems to be useless when you are communicating. Have we been forgetting academy in our classrooms? If so, where is human thinking? Are we giving academic aspects when students demand communicative tools?


As philologists and language teachers, we know that the world wants to learn English for different purposes, but the principal reason is to communicate. We are living in a globalized tendency, we are living under alight culture whose main characteristic is to make life easier, faster and more exciting. If you are an English speaker, the doors of the world are open to you (friends, money, traveling, social status, educational benefits, etc.); however, are we learning English for academic purposes? Yes, but it could also be the contrary. Why? Today, a globalized education is almost a fact, it has just been "the passing on of knowledge from the social sphere to the sphere of production"1, the politic and economic visions are controlling the market and the market will determine how education will develop. Education as a market product means the slow death of those sciences, studies or researches which are not cost effective.


The great lie of Globalization is to make us believe that the entire whole world is globalized, globalization and light culture go band in hand, and Education must be standardized, fast, easy, and lqw cost as much as possible. Only the ones who control and rule the present and future are able to have the power, the economic power. Thinking is power also, and if people's thinking is controlled, everything is OK; and, what is that control method? Light Culture, oi course.


What about Communication? Communication is a Light Culture's tool; we can say that it is everywhere0, cell phones and personal computers are communication devices; besides that, what are the topics of this communication? Of course, they are not academic topics. Academic topics are in second line because of the light culture invasion. According to Muqtedar Khan2, "the chat rooms are the factories and cultural hubs of the future"; so, if there is no academy, will we be slaves of educational marketing? A_e we following a cultural movement which denies our thinking power? Only time will tell.


1 NEAVE G, Globalization: Threat, Opportunity or Both-!,. In GATS (WTO) and Higher Education Implications, November 2001. Internet.
2 KHAN M, Teaching Globalization in The Globalist. Washington, D.C. August 28, 2003. Internet.