ABSTRACT
This chapter explores historically how the idea of the child's development becomes a stabilized part of thinking about children and the measurement and assessment of institutional performance. It focuses on the ways the notion of development is attached to a specific form of conceiving childhood in which time plays a central role. The chapter discusses the developmental child, or adolescent, inscribes the hopes and the fears of the future. It explains the rationalization of development according to time and performance, which is part of the grammars of schooling and testing since the 19th century, provides ways of governing the present. The chapter highlights that development and numbers are not only development and numbers; there are cultural thesis embodied in them that act in the making of the normal and the pathological, and the ways we relate to them. In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s saying, global competencies are divided into 'dimensions' and 'components' that can be measured.
