Education and globalisation: a Latin American perspective

This paper examines the historical relationship between education and globalisation in Latin America. This is no straightforward task. Hegel's vision of a continent without history and the rapacious expansion of Western culture from the sixteenth century profoundly transformed Latin America, and in turn stimulated a search for a distinctive 'Latin American way'. This search can only be successful if it is eschews the binary oppositions - between conqueror and conquered, European and Latin American, backward and modern, native and foreigner - that have characterised the historiography of the continent. Instead, the paper argues for an interdisciplinary history as the necessary starting point for a new engagement with both the past and the present.