ABSTRACT
In this chapter we address political and educational science relevant questions about the influence of educational (neoliberal) governance in the European Union (EU) on the development of national educational policies and practices. The identified question is examined by theoretical dispositions of new modes of EU governance as governance of goals, comparisons, problems/crisis and knowledge (e.g. Grek, 2009; Nordin, 2014; Ozga, 2011) and discursive institutionalism (e.g. Schmidt, 2008; 2012) as a promising ‘multifaceted set of concepts to explore the lending and borrowing of transnational education policies and their application at the national and local levels’ (Wahlstörm and Sundberg, 2018). Applied theoretical framework explains how policy discourses can perform coordinating and communicative functions and lead to institutional change. Concretely, it contributes to understanding how certain EU (neoliberal) policy models (involving cognitive scripts, categories and ideas about EU strategic goals and solutions to identified policy problems) shape identities, structures and behaviours at the national level of EU member states (e.g. Alasuutari, 2015). As such the chapter tries to recognise ‘how the global discourses of neo-liberalism have been made possible through the re-articulation and re-contextualisation of local historical contestation and politics’ (Takayama, 2009) and provides an understanding of how neoliberal cognitive and normative discourses (Schmidt, 2008) motivate national level actors to comply with the EU agendas instead of protecting the sovereignty of the national educational space. The theoretical dispositions are demonstrated in the case study of Slovenia, which presents an interesting case of studying interference between traditional post-socialist values and the Western EU (neoliberal) model of education.
