"The schoolyard gate: schooling and childhood in global perspective".

Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, "The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective"

This essay asks first whether schooling is truly a global phenomenon and then, if so, how global schooling affects children's experiences and cultural conceptions of childhood. World culture theorists argue that Western-style schooling is global not only because it touches most children in the world today but because its diffusion has been seen, since the 1950s, as inevitable. Granted, classroom experience varies tremendously from country from to country and from the global North to the global South; indeed, it seems as though many children in the North would prefer to escape from school while many children in the South clamor to get in. Schools around the world thus have little in common except a vaguely similar form: age-graded, co-educational, "egg-carton" classes in which teachers rely mainly on lecture-recitation and seatwork. Nonetheless, I propose, the flimsy common form of global schooling has an impact on children's experiences--on what they learn, how they develop socially, and how they are sorted into adult statuses. It also shapes our conceptions of childhood, I suggest, by introducing new traits such as "maturity" and by leading adults to divide childhood into micro age grades.