Thursday 28 May 2009

Teachers imparting ideology

There is a recent research paper (available here) on the role of foreign education in promoting or reducing democracy in a student's home country. The paper finds that students travelling to democratic countries for education is often followed by increased democracy at home, and the paper uses various analytical tests to show that a forward causal link is a strong candidate for explaining the results. The results indicate that students travelling to a less democratic country often leads to reduced democracy at home.

The change in democracy is presumably only part of the influence exerted by the host country on the source country. Other influences may relate to social norms or political allegiances. The author presents examples of where powerful countries have set up educational exchanges with the explicit aim of ideological promotion, often by changing the views of future political leaders. I think it may encourage cynicism by students if they and all their classmates are from “strategically important” countries.

I do not know whether students are affected by the teaching or the general experience of spending time in a country. Two possible mechanisms are broad ideological influence or by technological training (students return home knowing more about a political system and they want to apply something they know about rather than something they do not). If the latter mechanism is the most important, then teaching may be more important than general influence since many or most teachers are appointed as technocrats rather than ideologues. Many teachers including me would be uneasy with a role of ideological promotion for the state.

"Education as ideological alignment" is one possible reason why states sponsor international students, but there are other possibilities. Foreign students have been found to be associated with increased economic innovation in their destination country (described here). This explanation seems to be equally compatible with a self-serving view of country educational funding. A country may also have humanitarian motivations.

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