The same mind under changed skies: the global nomad

The term 'global nomad' has the popularity of a received idea in the international school community, while 'global' is a catchphrase on everybody's lips. Does the term correspond to a widespread reality or to one that has been manufactured by a new knowledge monopoly? Does the catchphrase merely veneer with glamour a social class on the move? To what extent is globalism just the emperor's new clothes?

The mutual suspicion of settled and nomadic peoples is as old as Cain and Abel. ‘Global nomad’ appropriates a fashionable New Age connotation. Nomads such as Romany, Australian aborigines or Sahara Tuareg travel from place to place, often on foot, often unwelcome. Few of these true nomads are enrolled in our international schools. Many are not in schools at all.

The new global nomads are affluent. They travel by plane, their tickets paid for by whatever corporation, embassy or international think-tank employs their parents. Security guards man the global nomads’ homes and schools. It is to be expected that this class will seek to justify its well-being. They are the winners, materially and technologically. They are the possessors of the new god of information on a global scale.

The first global nomads were armies and pilgrims. These soldiers and wandering scholars were sent, either by God or his earthly powers, to do his will. They were monks who could read and write, and many of them, between the fourth and twelfth centuries, were Irish. The Irish peregrini journeyed on missions of peach as far north as Iceland and Greenland, as far east as Jerusalem and Kiev. They established centres of learning abroad – in Angouleme, Paris, Salzburg and Vienna – the first international schools. Latin was the lingua franca, the curriculum was ordained from above and the monks moved around a lot. They taught the sons of local nobles with the odd scholarship boy thrown in. This is not remarkably different from the network of today’s international schools, a kind of Dark Ages ECIS (European Council of International Schools).

With European colonialism, global nomadism took on a new colouring. British colonialism in the nineteenth century swelled the boarding schools of the Home Counties, and the products of these public schools served to maintain the empire. The motto of Sydney University expressed contentment with the colonial bind: Sidere mens eadem mutato, another version of Horace’s imperial thought: ‘The same mind under changed skies’. The literature of the Roman Empire inculcated the mandarins of the British Empire, in a kind of relay race across time. The French mission schools established the basis for today’s Francophonie. Thus the relationship between language, power and communication, so crucial to globalism, is inherited from an earlier imperial paradigm.

Now that the Cold War is receding, we are in a position to examine the strategies used by both sides to lay claim to the dominant ideology, the ‘consensocracy’. In Who Paid the Piper, the CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stoner Saunders presents damning evidence of the extent of ideological laundering: Hollywood, the intelligentsia, the visual and performing arts, the publishing world: no area was left untouched by cultural strategists. ‘The idea was to create a slogan, a political catchword that most people would have the impression had arisen spontaneously but which in fact had been intentionally introduced into culture,’ explains cultural historian Christopher Simpson about the role of the CIA. The new York School of Abstract Expressionists, for example, was promoted, disseminated and funded by organs of the CIA, as an expression of Western cultural liberalism to counteract Soviet control of the arts. The influential magazines Encounter and Partisan Review were also CIA funded.

This ought to alert us to the continuance of such cultural manipulation in our post-modern world. The corporate internationalism that we cater to in our international schools is busy selling the new triumphalism. Part of this triumphalism is the global idea. ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.’ Globalism, with its emphasis on technical wizardry, tends to obscure the true nature of what is being sold.

Today’s empire is multi-national, business and knowledge based. It is no longer, properly speaking, Western. As I used to tell my students in Japan: America is East of here. The new media have taken up the mission to globalise in their own image. CNN is a product of the Gulf War; the Internet is also of military origin, and English its dominating tongue. Managerialism also seems to have its roots in the education systems of the United States Military Academy of 1817. As a consequence, partly, of media hype, we are saturated with metaphors and iconography that tell us we live in a global village. The other side of the world is only a click away. ‘Only connect,’ as E. M. Forster urged. We click and connect.

Martin Amis, that bad-boy global nomad, has recently written about his brief sojourn in an international school in Spain in the early 1960s. ‘...casual and cosmopolitan and above all coeducational, featuring the daughters of businessmen and diplomats: wonderful, terrifying and inconceivably distant young women ... We could order a beer at the cafes in the town square after school; and once, with a friend, we had a brandy each before school (where we would be known, thereafter, as Los Tres Coñacs). Amis goes on to extol the sexual education of international schools but makes no mention whatsoever of academics.

There are more than anecdotal links between global nomadism, our international school network and multinational corporations. Do international schools simply cater to capitalism’s late twentieth century flowering as the mission schools of earlier centuries worked hand in glove with colonialism. Are we the educational equivalent of Starbucks?

Companies and parents increasingly see education in terms of investment. In Thailand, for example, ‘between 1996 and 2000 a total of 26 new (international) schools have been established.’ ‘Some schools owned by Thais were established just for the needs of their own children, more like a play centre for rich kids,’ says Prayoon Maipoka, head academic at the Special Schools Division of the Thai Ministry of Education. Thus trickle-down education follows the trickle-down economics of developing countries.

Similarly, the language of schools is increasingly the language of business. In the British model one is constantly monitoring, assessing, performing, planning, targeting and attaining: the jargon of middle management rather than the language of the academy. ‘Performance-related pay’ threatens. This is a culture of men in suits obsessed with measuring and ranking. All of us are conscious of the silence that greets the assertion that a student is lazy or not bright. It is as though the direct use of language brought a smell into the room. It offends the technocrats. The one unmentionable word, of course, in our network of private international schools, is money. As teachers, we are the piper to the corporations. There has been a take-over here, and consequently a make-over in language.

Noam Chomsky highlights the contemporary collusion between media and the dominant culture, which more and more is the culture of business. ‘It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.’ This could equally serve as a definition of education, especially as we see it mediated by the new technologies. It is no accident that the new coinages reflect a blurring of boundaries between media, technology and education: ‘infotainment’ where it is difficult to distinguish what is valuable and what is pabulum for the moneyed elite.

What is the value of culture in a global society? Traditionally culture arose from being in the same place for a long time – inextricably linked with settlement. This definition automatically relegates nomadic culture to a lesser sphere. Culture could be seen as a collective bias, and so both inimical to and part of the political correctness that sometimes renders a soporific dullness to our mission statements and school prospectuses – those Benetton advertisements of the education world.

In espousing the global nomad as a kind of new man, are we the puppets of this new imperialism? Does the international education network merely serve the interests of multinationals – the institutions who pay the piper? Are our international schools only for the ‘diplobrats’ with their gizmos, where we equip them for the first class departure lounge? Is globalism just increased levels of Americanism? These are questions which regularly occur at IB conferences and in the staff rooms of our schools.

Horace’s imperial dictum may be as apt today as it was two millennia ago: the same mind under changed skies, albeit a corporate mind, a connected mind, a mind with half a dozen languages all translatable into big bucks. At a recent IB conference in Marbella, Spain, the Director general asked the 600 or so assembled teachers and heads how many of them were the products of the IB programme itself. No hands went up. Our global nomads seem not to be heading into the international teaching profession. I wonder why not? They must have bigger fish to fry. Surely this is an ominous sign.

Bibliography

Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman, Vintage Books, New York, 1993.

Irish Cultural Influence in Europe, An tAthair Tomás Ó Fiaich, Cultural Relations Committee, The Government of Ireland, 1971.

The Global Soul, Pico Iyer, Bloomsbury, London, 2000.

Who Paid the Piper, the CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stoner Saunders, Granta Books, London, 1999.

Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said, Vintage, London, 1994.

Experience, A Memoir, Martin Amis, Hyperion, New York, 2000.

Gearing for Globalisation, The Nation, Bangkok, December 21 2000.

Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, Vintage, London, 1994.