Final task. Organize your knowledge on the topic and present a report on one of the following points.

Organize your knowledge on the topic and present a report on one of the following points.

1. Globalization as manifest evidence of the complexity of our world.

2. A specific target(s) of globalization.

3. The most visible sigh(s) of globalization.

4. Will globalization prevent future wars/conflicts?

5. Divide a page in your copybook into 2 columns. In the first column mane a list of global foreign companies that have their offices in Russia. In the second column jot down only American companies located in Russia. Specify the city and the region in Russia. What do you think is positive about the expansion of American business in Russia?

6. Think of business culture. Give examples of how global companies take into account local secularities. Why do you think it is important?

7. Nowadays economists involved in world trade and globalization talk about the Americanization or Westernization of some national economies. Present your own vision of this problem.

· Americanization

· Westernization

· Glocalization

· Globalization

ADDITIONAL READING

Here you are suggested to read various texts on the topics studied in the Units to compose your own opinion on different problems and show it in the discussion.

UNIT 1

EDUCATION

Text 1

A MICKEY –MOUSE GENERATION

By Mikhail Delyagin

RESEARCH PROGRAMS DIRECTOR,

THE INSTITUTE

OF GLOBALIZATION STUDIES

We typically see them at electronics malls. We are met bycheerful " consultants”- young people who do not know anything, and do not want to know anything, about the electronic equipment that they try to persuade us to buy. Furthermore, most of the time they do not even have the slightest doubt that they could be wrong.

This is not a matter of chance or bad luck. The problem is the rapidly declining quality of higher education even at the best institutions of higher learning in Moscow — a quality that is an impediment not only to getting a good job but also to sheer survival.

We come across college and university graduates who are functionally illiterate (e.g., unable to understand a phone set instruction manual).

Another disturbing feature is intellectual infantilism — that is to say, the inability to evaluate a situation and find an independent solution. Here is just one typical example: A person has to email a letter to 30 addresses, but his computer freezes. There are many solutions here: e.g., send letters to 10 or five addresses or even one address at a time or use a different email service provider or another IPS or go to an Internet cafe. But you have to be a graduate of a modern Moscow college or university to keep on pushing the same button for five hours on end.

A simple search for information on Yandex(the Russian answer to Yahoo or Google. — Ed.) can be a problem. My experience is based on years-long observation of recent graduates who went to some of Moscow's institutes that are considered the world's best. These folks are already being facetiously referred to as Mickey Mouse clones, or more bluntly as " dead mice."

I believe that Russia's higher education system breeds professional unemployed, unburdened either by knowledge or skills or the knack of acquiring them. All it gives university degree holders is the confidence in their own exclusiveness: Socially maladjusted, they feel intellectually superior, the lords over other people. Cuba — a country with the best public health system in the Americas — stopped recognizing our medical degrees as early as the mid-1990s. Only several years ago, some countries were literally fighting for graduates from the best Russian institutes since their training quality standards were extremely high: Today, however, they are lower than India, for example.

At the same time this situation suits almost everyone: Parents pay for the dream of a bright future for their offspring; young men get draft deferrals, while girls prolong their youth. Transfer and acquisition of knowledge is very near the bottom of the list of priorities.

The problem is dramatically aggravated by the education reform, essentially designed to develop the commercial component of education and effectively denying low-income groups educational opportunities.

The underlying problem is disregard for education specifics. The quality of education standards should be ensured by the state, but it does not intend to take on this function: Liberal dogma minimizes its intervention. At the same time liberal fundamentalists regard education exclusively as part of the services industry, categorically denying its special character: Education (as well as healthcare) creates not simply added value but society's main productive force, which is more important than oil — human capital.

Far from rectifying the mistake, which is indeed worse than any crime, the reform in fact only exacerbates it. Corrupt financial flows are changing their routes, but not their scale. Aggressive stupidity is epitomized by the Unified State Test, which promotes fragmentary (clip-like) thinking instead of systemic thinking, forcing a student to learn disparate facts by rote and replacing creativity with dogmatism.

Today the " Gorbachev generation, " born in the era of the " Prohibition, " the rosy illusions of Perestroika, and a marked improvement in living standards in the 1986-1989 period, continues to enter the system. Beginning in 2008, however, Russia will start feeling the effects of the ongoing demographic catastrophe. It is only half the trouble that there will be no cannon fodder for the military machine, which refuses to modernize, or easy prey for the robber-like system of paid college attendance (I simply cannot bring myself to say " education").

The real trouble is that there will be no workforce.

The manpower shortage could be compensated by a viable education system — by providing better training and producing a better organized and more creative workforce. But the existing system of higher education only aggravates the demographic catastrophe with an intellectual catastrophe.

The only way of avoiding this is to stop destroying the higher education system under the guise of reforming it, to introduce strict quality control and stimulate creative, not narrow-minded, dogmatic thinking.

Text 2

NOT SMART ENOUGH FOR A PASSING GRADE?