ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the key features of the history of education and development and the roles of key education and development actors and the influence they have had on international education policy. In September 2010, an Act of Parliament in India established the Nalanda University, to be built a few kilometres from the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The scheme had already received promises of financial support from the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean governments. Decolonisation, industrialisation and nation-building across much of the globe in the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by popular pressure for educational expansion. Education was central to building the required skilled workers for the new socialist economies, all of which were coming from contexts of economic backwardness. The Millennium Development Goals have been misconstrued and distorted to make them fit with the orthodox policy framework.
