Learning to Plunder: Global Education, Global Inequality and the Global City

Most research and policy discussions of education in the global city have focused on the ways in which globalization and the emergence of global or globalizing cities can create social, economic and educational inequality locally, within the global city itself. Global cities, however, are, by definition, powerful places, where the core institutions, structures and processes of the global economy are constituted and controlled; as such, they are places where decisions and actions taken locally can have significant and often destructive effects all over the globe. This article presents a case study of a series of partnerships between public institutions of education and the global corporate mining sector in Toronto, Canada to serve as both example and metaphor of how global city education often helps to create, exacerbate and legitimate inequalities and injustices, not just locally, but regionally, nationally and globally, between the city and the rest of the world.