Global Technology

The aim of this book has been to provide students, educators, and administrators alike with valuable insights into the disruptive, yet beneficial, transformation which will occur in the global education system during the next three to five years and beyond. Although these trends will not happen immediately, their impact will be far-reaching and global in nature.

Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an "Asian culture" of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.