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The article presents the author's commentary on the theories of development underlying the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank. The two main aims of education according to the paper are as follows: contribution of education to the achievement of social justice and role of education in economic development. The author criticizes the strategies derived from the new theories of development which link the achievement of economic development and social justice. According to him, it does not follow from the newer theories of development that equality will contribute to economic development. He also claims that the paper makes the methodological mistake of attempting to derive policies directly from descriptive social theory.

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations (IO's) deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs, and a source of legitimacy derived from authority beyond procedure and performance. This is called promissory legitimacy. Yet what happens when this promised future arrives and is problematic? How does an IO creatively strategise this shortfall? In this paper, we identify five strategies deployed by the OECD in its Future of Education and Skills 2030 programme aimed to re-negotiate a failed present and anticipate a new future. We also reflect on the ideational underpinnings of the OECD's new futures programme, and argue it is being mobilised to, on the one hand, get beyond the limitations of data governance, and on the other to help selectively shape a new cognitariat subjectivity engaged with immaterial labour in emerging post-industrial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes inspiration from the Indigenous Fijian practice of 'curui' – weaving or patching together – as a metaphor to explore connections between climate justice, gender equality, and education in Fijian policies and practices. The paper argues that neither gender equality nor education can be 'silver bullets' for the huge challenges that the climate crisis raises, particularly for small island developing states (SIDS) such as Fiji that exist at the sharp end of the crisis. The paper contributes close analysis of Fijian national climate change policies and development plans from 2010, identifying the ways in which these policies frame and discuss the connections between climate, gender, and education, and asking whether these policies acknowledge traditional ecological knowledges, and the extent to which they are aligned with notions of justice. It argues that connected approaches to education, centred in Indigenous knowledges and ontologies, have thus far been insufficiently included in Fiji's policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the World Bank's Education Sector Policy Paper, which highlights issues and trends in the development of education. It examines the relationship between education and development. The significance of education can be shown in the following ways: education as a basic need; education as an instrument to support programs designed to meet other basic needs and education as an activity that sustains overall development. Meanwhile, a set of problems that affects educational development include equality in educational opportunities; internal efficiency of educational systems; management of educational systems and source of funds for education.

The article focuses on developments relevant to education in Great Britain as of October 1973. Nigel Grant, reader in education at the University of Edinburgh, joined the Editorial Board of "Comparative Education" magazine. The eight session of the Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education was held in June 1973, which focused on "The Educational Needs of the 16-19 Age Group." UNESCO released its latest publication "Present Problems in the Democratization of Secondary and Higher Education." The Schools Council and the Standing Conference on University Entrance published the Working Paper 46, entitled "16-19: Growth and Response, 2. Examination Structure" and Working Paper 47, "Preparation for Degree Courses."

The article discusses some changes in the World Bank's Educational Policy Paper. According to the author, the 1974 and 1980 Educational Sector papers of the World Bank show some major shifts of emphasis in its attitude towards educational development in less developed countries. Some changes include: emphasis on the internal functioning of educational institutions; support on software faculties such as economics and management and recognition of the difficulties associated with manpower forecasting. Lastly, the paper suggests the development of educational policies geared towards a balanced educational system, where all school levels and all kinds of curricula have their place.

Since 2000, girls' education has been an increasingly high-profile concern in international development policy. At the same time, there has been a trend towards the greater production and reliance on quantitative data, indicators and targets in national and international education policy. Scholars have raised concerns about the rise of 'performance-based' approaches to accountability in education, and potential counterproductive effects of this for social justice and equality. However, few studies have explored how this trend plays out in practice within international organisations, particularly in relation to the heightened focus on girls' education. This paper explores the implications of the increasing reliance on quantitative measures for policy actors and draws on a set of interviews with key stakeholders working in organisations concerned with gender and education to explore their divergent understandings of accountability processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the prospects for a transformative approach to measuring gender equality and girls' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a collection of papers comprising the special issue, Competing interests: Parents, Schools and Nation States. Drawing on the seven papers in the collection, and situating them in recent developments in the sociological field, the article discusses globally shifting relations between families, schools and the state across a range of nations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Australia, Germany, India, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA). The article proposes that the school is a crucial site for relations between family and state, and argues that a significant focus of the material and occupational investment of contemporary parents is the formal education of their children, re-shaping not only the relationship between parents and schools but also the nature of parenthood itself. In the contemporary context of global neoliberal education reform, parents are analysed both as local actors in schools and as subjects of national and international policy regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper theorises fragility of regional solidarities in light of the emerging ways in which two Arabian Gulf states, Bahrain and Oman, are undertaking their transition to a knowledge economy. The paper shows ways in which regional symbolic solidarity goals of common economic and educational development in the Gulf region are challenged by locally focussed priorities at the level of each nation state. These findings carry important theoretical implications as the time of transition to a knowledge economy seems to drive readjustments in thinking about what the 'Gulf-wide unity is for', prompting its repositioning from an alliance established to protect and facilitate regional development to a means supporting local ends. The paper therefore challenges the spatial focus in some theoretical frameworks used in analyses of the sociology of regional solidarities and calls for the need of temporal lenses in such analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of selecting students based on academic achievement into different schools at certain points in their educational careers is one that has long been contested in education. In this paper I consider the role selective schooling may play in driving families' demand for private tutoring – a phenomenon currently growing in many regions of the world. The paper explores the 'extreme case' of South Korea – a country with some of the highest spending on private tutoring globally and also a long history of selective schooling. Drawing on interviews with experts and key stakeholders in the Korean education system, the paper reports a number of findings. Interviewees for this project were in many respects critical of a 1970s 'equalisation' of Korean schooling, though they also viewed moves back towards selection as fuelling 'shadow education'. Concern about this has driven governments to curb selective schooling for a second time in Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue exploring parents' responses to neoliberal policy changes, especially shifting notions of risk and responsibility, this article provides a historical account of local and national policy initiatives in the contemporary United States that have increased risk and placed responsibility for this risk on the shoulders of parents (as well as educators). The opening section of the paper reviews major recent policy documents and initiatives in the United States, from the landmark 1983 report 'A Nation at Risk' to the current age of test-based accountability. In the following sections, the paper explores what two Chicago parents themselves had to say about risk and responsibility in public schooling. What, in their views, were the actual risks? What did they think their responsibilities were, as parents? What did they do in response to the shifting policyscape? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls' and women's education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and practice, less has been written about why and how girls' education came to be such a high profile feature of international policy frameworks. This paper draws on perspectives from transnational social movement theory, which has been used by gender scholars to explore the activities and significance of non-governmental organisations for agenda-setting at the global level. In this paper these perspectives are applied to the field of global education policy, through an analysis of evidence from international conferences, data on aid flows and interviews with key policy actors, to explore the factors behind rise of the global agenda on gender equality in education. In doing so, it suggests that the current dominant framing around girls' education, access and quality, may be explained by the relatively weak involvement of non-governmental women's groups in proportion to the strong involvement of multilaterals, bilateral agencies, national governments and more recently, private sector organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines 126 research articles from three comparative education journals to chart the development of knowledge within comparative education on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries. Thematic, theoretical, discursive, and methodological aspects of scholarship are linked with changing geopolitical realities in a systematic analysis of scholarship published since the late 1950s. A new framework of multi-layered colonialism is introduced to explore different features of the double disadvantage that comparative education knowledge production on post-Soviet countries has faced – Russian imperialism and Western academic colonialism. The paper contributes to comparative education knowledge creation by historicising our understanding of Western academic output and outlining a potential future direction in the development of knowledge on post-Soviet systems, policies, and practices of education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article comments on the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank. The paper explores the educational problems in developing countries. The author compares it with the 1974 paper of the Bank, claiming that the present paper is more clear in terms of recognizing the complexity of the social and political forces at work on the educational scene in developing countries. However, he criticizes the paper's view of the purposes of education. He suggests that it lacks diachronic perspective on the processes of growth and adjustment in the past.

Introduces the February 2005 issue of the journal "Comparative Education". Place of theory in research; Potential of historical perspectives; Centrality of language and culture in education and nation building.

This paper reports on a rigorous literature review of research into medium of instruction in Ghana and India, whose language-in-education policies represent two contrasting models of use of local languages and the development of competence in English. The paper begins by briefly overviewing the language-in-education policy in these two countries and sets out the methodological approach underpinning this review. It then turns to the initial findings, which are discussed in two parts: the first categorises the three areas of research explored in the empirical studies reviewed, namely the effectiveness of language-in-education policies, problems hindering the implementation of these policies, and attitudes to these policies. The second provides an overview of the recommendations for how, given the obstacles in implementing the current policies, to better ensure the effectiveness of language-in-education policies in Ghana and India. Together these findings show that similar issues arise that contribute to challenges of providing equitable, quality education, and similar recommendations have been put forward as a result. This paper thus provides a valuable overview of key issues in the role of language-in-education policies in improving equity and quality in education in LMICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in low-fee private (LFP) primary schooling serving relatively poor clients is becoming well-documented. However much of this literature focuses on urban areas whose dense populations are favourable to market growth and competition. This paper goes some way to filling a gap in the literature on whether LFP schools are serving the needs of the poor in rural areas, taking the case of one Nigerian state. It contrasts the situation in rural areas with that of urban Ilorin, where private schools cater to over half of all enrolled children. The paper shows that private schooling is currently inaccessible to the poor, with only 3.3% of children in the poorest 40% of the population attending them, and only 13% of enrolled children in rural areas. The key message is that redoubled efforts are needed to improve government schools as providers of last resort to those bypassed by the market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to consolidate the major themes which emerge from the contributions to this special issue on democracy and education. It traces links between democracy in education and wider social formations, and charts possible directions for the processes of democratisation. It asks whether such moves are just a 'democratic face' to mask economic neo-liberalism, or represent real shifts towards social justice and equality. The paper looks first at the connections between democratisation of schooling and three dimensions of the social structure in a country: the political system and governance; wealth and poverty; and gender relations. It draws the obvious conclusion at this point that education is necessary but not sufficient to achieve radical change in these areas. Secondly, the paper synthesises nine of the emergent processes and avenues for democratisation in education: definitions of democracy; legislation and policy for democracy; decentralisation of education; teacher education; teacher unions and networks; governing bodies and parental participation; student associations and networks; partnerships with outside agencies; and research. The conclusion raises another set of questions about strategy within education, with so much clearly depending on the history of democracy (or its absence) in a country, and on what sorts of definitions, networks and allegiances are possible. Internationalisation and 'cosmopolitan democracy' will certainly become increasingly important in establishing the values involved, and comparative education has a significant role to play here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an author's introduction of the six papers discussed in the November 2005 issue of the journal "Comparative Education." Emphasis on the nature and quality of the values and attitudes promoted by citizenship education in Australia, Canada and England; Discussion on the nature and quality of values, attitudes and citizenship and comparisons of the three educational systems; Insights into the influence of market force culture on British and German academics.

The borrowing and transfer of policies, ideas and practices from one system to another may in part explain the convergence of educational systems. Using text documents as research material, this paper examines the adoption and transfer of Bologna Process (BP) ideas in the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) and in the Cameroonian higher education (HE) system through the lens of policy borrowing and transfer, and policy convergence, in order to understand the justification for such transfer at the local level. In 1999, in what is known as the BP, 29 ministers of HE signed the Bologna Declaration with the intention of creating a European HE area. In 2005, the heads of state of the CEMAC region signed the Libreville Declaration with the intention of creating the CEMAC Space for Higher Education, Research and Professional Training through licence, master and doctorat reform. The justification for the adoption of BP ideas in the CEMAC region was attributed to the convergence of educational systems. The need to legitimise the harmonisation of the degree structure and to adhere to international standards for international recognition of certificates and graduates was found to be the major justification for the reform in the Cameroonian HE system. This paper draws attention to two aspects: first, how the BP, a European model of harmonisation, has spread beyond Europe and is influencing reforms in other parts of the world, including Africa; and second, how borrowed models are justified at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Catholic schools in Scotland have been fully state-funded since the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. Under this Act, 369 contemporary Catholic schools are able to retain their distinctive identity and religious education and the teachers have to be approved by the Catholic hierarchy. Similar to the position of other forms of state-funded and partially state-funded faith schools in Europe, the position of state-funded Catholic schools in Scotland has been contested. This paper initially locates the debate and discussion about Catholic schools in Scotland in the history and development of the wider faith schools debate in the UK, particularly England and Wales. The paper outlines the key themes in the debate on faith schooling in England and Wales identifying the similarities between the debate in Scotland and England and Wales and the distinctive features of the debate in Scotland. The paper will then focus on a critical examination and analysis of two key themes concerning state-funded Catholic schools in the Scottish context. The first theme is the debate over the continuation of government funding of Catholic schooling as it is effectively government funding of religious beliefs and practices for a particular Christian denomination. The second theme is more unique to Scotland and has some tenuous links to the debate on faith schools in Northern Ireland: the claims that Catholic schools are the root cause of sectarianism or contribute to sectarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather information on school leavers' and graduates' pathways after compulsory education. Using documentary data collected systematically the paper describes the main focus, the research design and the sampling frame of the school leavers' and graduates' information systems (SLGIS) arriving at several different typologies. This paper gives an overall picture of what sort of research is conducted within the area of school leaving and graduation and points out the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches. Beyond these, the paper gives an indication of how the school leavers’ and graduates’ data are used within the different European contexts and points towards the next steps of this meta-research: case-studies on how the school leavers' and graduates' data are applied at the national and the institutional level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical policy analysis and network ethnography of Teach for Bangladesh (TfB). We demonstrate that TfB is a localised version of a global teacher education policy - Teach for All/America (TfAll/A). Santos, Boaventura De Sousa [2002. The Processes of Globalisation. Translated by Sheena Caldmell. Eurozine: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais and Eurozine, August, 1-48] has written about the ways some national policies travel globally. He calls these ‘globalised localisms’. When they touch down and are taken up in another national context, he calls this a ‘localised globalism’. We see TfB as a ‘localised globalism’. This paper is focused on documenting and analysing the policy network that has enabled a globalised localism, TfAll/A, to be taken up as a localised globalism in Bangladesh through TfB. We see this as the emergence of network governance in a developing world primary schooling context. The analysis shows how pivotal to TfB is the boundary spanning networking of its founder, who connects the global to the local, the private to the public, and the provision of social services to philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journalHikakukyoikukenkyu(Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-language literature. Drawing on a review of the Japanese-language literature and semi-structured interviews with 25 JCES members, this paper identifies a particular intellectual tradition within JCES, often referred to as the area-studies approach to comparative education. This approach, often practised by JCES researchers specialising in developing countries in Asia, has long constituted the mainstay of comparative education scholarship in Japan. This paper traces the formation of this intellectual tradition, and focuses on its complex relationship with the dominant paradigm of ‘paradigmatic’ English-language comparative education scholarship. The paper shows how ‘other’ comparative education societies – such as the JCES – can be looked to as a resource with which to ‘provincialise’ the way comparative education research is conceptualised in English-language academia, and to cross-culturalise the field of comparative education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last decade, education has been advanced as a new and legitimate core of the humanitarian crisis response. ‘Education in Emergencies’ (EiE) developed into an institutionalised field of humanitarian practice, advocacy, and scholarly work. Identifying how emergency discourses have been critiqued to operate as ‘social imaginaries’, in this paper the ‘emergency imaginary’ as it develops in the particular discursive context of EiE is analysed. We scrutinise how emergencies are represented in this EiE-discourse by pointing to the socio-ideological and economic drivers of conflict, how the interconnections between education and these drivers are pictured, and the educational changes subsequently advocated for. We conclude that, while EiE has been called a ‘new field of academic and policy research’, the discourse might reiterate prevailing power relations, leading to an adverse portrayal of crisis-affected communities and a legitimation of a global status-quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of low-income countries, the role of donors in public policymaking is of great importance. Donors use a combination of lending and non-lending instruments as pathways of influence to shape policy directions in aid-recipient countries. This paper reports some findings from a doctoral study on the role of the World Bank in the recent higher education (HE) policy reform process in Ethiopia. It focuses on the nature and impact of non-lending assistance by the Bank to the Ethiopian HE subsystem. Based on an interpretive policy analysis of sector reviews and advisory activities of the Bank, and selected national HE policy documents, the following findings are highlighted. First, as a ‘knowledge institution’, the World Bank produces, systematises and disseminates knowledge through policy advice, policy reports, analytical sector reviews, and thematic conferences and workshops. Second, knowledge aid from the Bank not only has a profound discursive effect on shaping Ethiopian HE policy reform priorities in accordance with its neoliberal educational agenda but also undermines the knowledge production capacity of the nation. The paper also argues that, for an effective education policy support, the Bank needs to shift its modality of engagement from knowledge aid to research capacity building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reflects on the identification of relevant aspects of education for measurement purposes. It begins by reviewing some detailed lists of educational capabilities from disparate literatures. It then considers how ordinary South Africans perceive education by drawing on two open-ended surveys, and attempts to reconcile their views with different education lists. The main finding is that most abstract lists need to say more about the practical side of education (skills, information and knowledge for everyday living). They also need to embrace a more joined-up view of education that can incorporate linkages between different aspects of education and between education and other aspects of well-being (including mental states and material things). The final part of the paper makes the case for embracing the complexity and imprecision involved in measuring education and briefly sketches a methodological framework that can achieve this end. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, “[An] historical culture … rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored”? British influence on Irish education since 1922', which appeared in Comparative Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449–462. Limond's overall thesis is that ‘a post-colonial overhang affects Irish policy-makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices’. This paper contests three main aspects of Limond's exposition. First, in his analysis of the period 1831–1922, he fails to place sufficient emphasis on the extent to which the educational system was favoured by the Catholic Church, which operated in a manner which served not only its own interests, but also those of the middle classes of Irish Catholic farmers, merchants and business people. Secondly, he does not sufficiently indicate the extent to which the structure of Irish education from the early years of independence until the mid-1960s, and associated curriculum changes, were very different from the situation in Britain at the time. Thirdly, while he is correct in stating that, since the 1960s, Ireland has imported certain ideas on educational policy and practice from Britain, he neglects to demonstrate that there were also other sources, and that they were probably more dominant than the British ones. Hopefully, as a rejoinder, the paper will be read in a positive light by indicating how the historical study of Irish education within a comparative context is a neglected area of scholarship, and thus stimulate researchers to address the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates some of the economic outcomes of education in Pakistan with a view to understanding if education can act as a vehicle for labour market success. Data from a purpose-designed survey of more than 1000 households in Pakistan are utilised. Earnings functions are estimated for agricultural workers, the self-employed and wage earners to estimate the returns to the ‘quantity’ and the ‘quality’ of schooling in different occupations, by gender. The paper also estimates the returns to knowing ‘English’ in the Pakistani labour market separately for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital and functionalist paradigms underpin the stance taken by most governments to education policy. These models have also had a profound effect upon the determination of education priorities in the poorest states and, indeed, upon aid policy. This paper argues, on the basis of evidence from the papers in this volume and from the wider research literature, that the outcomes of education for individuals and for society depend more upon national and local contexts, on history and on culture, than such models typically allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of numerous definitions of quality, consensus on what constitutes quality is less clear and contested. Using South Africa as a case study, this paper explores the current conceptual thinking and debates about education quality. Specifically the paper reviews selected South African policy texts to identify how some of the global dimensions of quality map onto South African policy discourse. The paper begins by reviewing some of the conceptual work in the area and concentrates on identifying and exploring some of the dimensions of quality. This is followed by a brief contextualisation of policy development in South Africa leading to an analysis of key issues and debates in discourses about quality present in selected education policy texts. The concluding section identifies, through the South African experience, some of the global challenges and ways forward. The paper notes the many challenges present in South Africa's attempts to balance equity, diversity, right and participation in delivering good quality education. This experience resonates with that of many other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources – an eduscape– the paper focuses on family practices shaped by global policy flows and the return impact of families on the translation of these policies into local school formations. Under scrutiny are the decentralising or devolutionary directives, linked so often to choice and competition, which took hold in Western jurisdictions in the 1980s, the influences of which are still strongly felt. The conceptual links spread to a mobile 'second modernity', implicating many a family in movement associated with choices they are obliged to make, and which are often correlated to family achievement and success. The observations reported here are framed conceptually by an interest in the synthesis of Beck's individualisation thesis and Bourdieusean practice approaches in order to portray and comprehend social being and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author demonstrates how the Japanese media interpreted the PISA 2003 findings in a way that resonated with the specific cultural, political, and economic context of the time and how the Ministry used the findings to legitimise otherwise highly contentious policy measures. Questioning the conventional interpretation that the PISA 2003 shock caused the Ministry to redirect its controversial yutori (low pressure) curricular policy, the paper reconstitutes the Ministry as an active agent that capitalised on an external reference (PISA) to re-establish its political legitimacy in a time of increasing neo-liberal state-restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introductory statement to the articles published within the issue. One article explores the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Another paper focuses on higher education policy and student mobility. The articles, in general, discuss the European Union agenda in education and training.

Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology for analysis, this paper sets out the nature and form of the challenges directed to the compulsory schooling sector by the knowledge economy that is contained in key policy and related documents put out by the OECD, the World Bank and the UK government. The OECD and the World Bank’s policy agendas are increasingly important in setting policy and programme agendas for the developed and developing countries respectively; however there are important differences between the two institutions regarding how education should be redesigned. The World Bank’s redesign of education favours the market and individualism as the means for developing knowledge and skills for the knowledge economy. The OECD, however, while concerned with human capital formation, rejects the market model in favour of an institutionally embedded liberalism to overcome the problems posed by tacit knowledge. The UK, on the other hand, has promoted the idea of personalized learning. The paper suggests that this idea is particularly problematic for developing a system of innovation for the economy that is dependent on high levels of social interaction. The first half of the twenty-first century will, I believe, be far more difficult, more unsettling, and yet more open than anything we have known in the twentieth century. I say this on three premises; none of which I have time to argue here. The first is that historical systems, like all systems, have finite lives. They have beginnings, a long development and finally, as they move far from equilibrium and reach points of bifurcation, a demise. The second premise is that two things are true at these points of bifurcation; small inputs have large outputs (as opposed to times of the normal development of the system, when large inputs have small outputs); and the outcome of such bifurcation is inherently indeterminate. The third premise is that the modern world system as a historical system has entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in 50 years. However, since its outcome is so uncertain, we do not know whether the resulting system (or systems) will be better or worse than the one in which we are living, but we do know that the period of transition will be a terrible time of troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain, and the ability of small impacts to affect the outcome so great. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the indigenous sources available in Ethiopia as a resource for philosophy and philosophy of education. In the process it makes a small contribution to the ongoing debate among philosophers as to whether there is a distinctive African philosophy. The paper illustrates, first, what is sometimes referred to as the ‘deep knowledge’ underlying more day-to-day beliefs in Ethiopia (or more specifically in this case those of the Amhara-Tigre cultural complex) and their application in ‘educational magic’ and, secondly, the 17th century philosophical writing of Zara Ya'eqob and Walda Heywat, which is remarkable for its Enlightenment-style attachment to reason and argumentation. Two more directly educational indigenous sources are then explored: the educational thought and practice of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and non-formal education in villages. Finally, the paper considers the relevance of these sources to contemporary educational development and suggests that they merit continuing attention and reference both from the point of view of preserving cultural identity and continuity and also, more pragmatically, because there are ideas, values and practices in the tradition which have continuing relevance for Ethiopians grappling with educational development issues today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baiga are a small tribe inhabiting the forested regions of Central India. They are known for their extensive knowledge of forests and healing. A local pedagogic tradition supports the transmission of this knowledge from expert practitioner-gurus to their chelas or novices. The knowledge system is local and oral. The pedagogic tradition and socialisation which supports its transmission is marked by these qualities as also the subsistence level of production and the lack of centralised authority in the organisation of the tribe, and in children's lives. This paper explores the disjunction between this and formal schooling whose pedagogic practices and curriculum presume a literate tradition: where knowledge is decontextually presented in texts and children are already socialised to accept pedagogic/adult authority. In the present Indian context where there is a growing emphasis on incorporating indigenous knowledges into the school curriculum, the paper raises questions on the epistemological feasibility of such an inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the differentiated forms of education provision, this paper intends to inquire into the causality governing the relation between the use of vouchers in education and an increased enrolment segmentation or student sorting. It does so through a comparative analysis of the quasi-market reform in Chile and the quasi-monopoly system in place in Argentina. Although from a national perspective these two countries have faced very different decentralisation reforms, they have presently arrived at similar states of their education system in terms of their enrolments' socio-economic segregation. The paper shows that vouchers are not an independent variable but an intervening one within the determinants of socio-economic segmentation. The evidence from Chile and Argentina shows that enrolment segmentation is not a consequence of the introduction of vouchers, and the causal relationship between these two variables is not a clear one. That is, the family school choice decisions brought about by the introduction of systems such as vouchers appear endogenous to a series of factors that determine such choice; factors that that are evidently important in the determination of socio-economic enrolment segmentations in non-voucher systems. This article questions the validity of the highly predominant empirical analyses which take student socio-economic characteristics and school choice decisions as independent determinant variables of student results, and intends initiating further thinking of what really lies behind the inequities in education in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from a range of secondary data sources, this paper succinctly overviews patterns of access to good-quality education in Turkey over the last 15 years. It also maps the policy context within which issues of access, quality and equity are examined. As a result of effective supply and demand side strategies, enrolment ratios beyond the primary level have also risen, with the average lower secondary enrolment currently standing at over 90%, and gender disparity has also been achieved at this level. Yet, educational expansion was less successful in the least developed eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey, particularly for girls. Turkey has also given a higher priority to the quality of education, in line with this global paradigm shift towards learning. However, learning levels remain low and largely unequal across regions, ethno-linguistic groups and socio-economic status. School segregation widens inequalities based on students’ socio-economic status, which should be taken into account in the aftermath of the new education reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article – and the special issue it introduces – contributes to the expanding scholarly literature on the global governance of education, with a particular focus on its future-oriented and 'promissory' dimension. Inspired by Beckert's (2020) concept of 'promissory' legitimacy, a key contribution of this special issue is to critically analyse past and contemporary promissory narratives of the major international organisations and other global actors concerning the future of education. We focus on three overarching themes that emerge from the contributions to this special issue: Problems of legitimacy in the global governance of education; a shift towards multistakeholderism, which we explore through the lens of 'the neuro-affective turn'; the use of crisis narratives as an instrument of global governance, and geopolitical shifts and the decline of the liberal world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the legitimacy of international organisations (IOs) as self-proclaimed representatives of humankind, which was unfounded from the outset, is waning. To substantiate that claim, we undertake a critical inquiry into the legitimacy of the promissory visions pursued by IOs in the field of education across three historical periods. The first traces the rationalistic educational planning and idealistic 'one world' projects of the post-World War II period. The second examines the era of globalisation, when the discourse that legitimised the educational visions of IOs shifted towards the promises of the 'global knowledge economy'. The third discusses the contemporary trend towards emergency governance and crisis narratives. While the narratives of progress shifted, a pattern that has emerged is the move towards globalism and uniformity. Drawing on insights from philosophy and historical studies of world-empire, we argue that the world-making experiments conducted by IOs were destined to be unsuccessful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China's use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national 'branding' in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI. We analyse the Chinese state's engagement with UNESCO's education work in the context of shifts in budgetary and political influence within the organisation, and of a growing 'securitisation' of education within China itself. We show how Chinese engagement with UNESCO's educational agenda reflects both domestic political considerations and the 'major country diplomacy' of Xi Jinping, as manifested in the 'Belt and Road Initiative' and intensifying strategic competition with the USA. We conclude by discussing the implications of rising Chinese influence within the organisation for UNESCO's capacity for articulating a coherent and consistently humanistic vision for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's commentary on the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank regarding the criteria and methods of generating education cooperation projects for external funding. It refers to the World Bank's Education Policy Summary which states "A review of Bank experience suggests that methods of generating educational projects have not been adequate." The author claims that the paper fails to consider a number of special features of foreign assistance which apply to all sectors including education. Meanwhile, some of the criteria of generating education cooperation projects are as follows: it should be clearly requested by the recipient country and it should be carefully related to the recipient country's resources as well as to it needs.

The article presents the author's commentary on the World Bank Educational Sector Policy Paper regarding the role of language in education. He claims that the issues surrounding language policy and the problems raised in implementation of this policy are discussed in the paper in a confusing manner. Instead of focusing on the more complex dimensions of both language policy formulation and implementation, the Paper refers to many isolated aspects of the policy. The author also argues that the paper fails to connect the role of language to issues of educational planning and development.

The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO's Education for All agenda was replaced by Education 2030, which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low- and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (PISA-D) and positioned the new assessment as a means of tracking progress on the post-2015 goals. The organisation maintains that PISA-D was introduced primarily in response to the demands of the international community, especially low- and middle-income countries, and that the assessment was developed in partnership with them. This paper investigates those claims through an analysis of the arrival of PISA-D in Cambodia, situating the analysis within UNESCO's shifting agenda and the strategic visions of the OECD and World Bank that first emerged in the 1990s. The result is a very different picture to the portrayals of local agency, demand, consensus and partnership that adorn the official websites and pamphlets of global agencies and much academic research, raising serious doubts about education governance post-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the situation of non-governmental religious schools in Germany. The available empirical data demonstrate an increasing demand for these schools in recent decades. In this paper, possible causes of this development are discussed. First, the given constitutional framework for religion in governmental and non-governmental schools is presented. The particularity of the German school system comes into view: not only the churches but also the state – as an expression of its neutrality towards religion – maintains religious schools; furthermore, denominational religious instruction is also given in governmental non-religious schools. Second, the phenomenon of religious school selection will be considered: in which educational domains are non-governmental religious schools increasing? Where are they decreasing? Third, hypotheses explaining these developments – such as the special educational profiles of non-governmental religious schools, the wish for social distinction, avoiding problems of governmental schools, and better performance – are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the nature and quality of the participation that characterises the Bank's consultations with external actors and examines the extent to which the Bank is responsive to such feedback when it comes to defining its policy preferences and strategies in the education domain. It draws on a case study of the participatory process that was organised around the definition of the last World Bank Education Strategy (WBES2020) and focuses on the participation of three European aid agencies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Department for International Development of the UK. This paper acknowledges that a significant effort was made to promote the inclusiveness and transparency of the participatory process, yet it concludes that the conditions for promoting quality participation and substantive policy change were not provided. Furthermore, the way international aid agencies produce and use knowledge limits their role and influence in the context of the Bank's consultations. Hence, by not contesting the Bank's policy ideas substantially, the agencies contribute inadvertently to reproducing the Bank's predominance in the education for development field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]