ABSTRACT
The chapter seeks to show the “limitations and the risks of a global governance project” in the field of education policies carried out by the OECD. Recalling the origins of this organization, it assumes Yong Zaho’s bafflement of how a “non-novelty” such as PISA, afflicted by serious conceptual and methodological frailties, and preceded by other, more solid, surveys, could have become this mighty regulatory instrument. The answer can only be given from the analysis of how a small organization like the OECD became the key organization in the legitimation of the global educational reform movement (GERM), which feeds the education policies of countries and economies since the late 20th century. The source of this power – this is the hypothesis put forward – lies in the way in which the OECD was able to use the Human Capital Theory, and its update as Knowledge Capital Theory, in the assertion of neoliberal globalization as hegemonic answer, not only in the economic field but also in the social and cultural fields. Besides resting on extremely fragile methodological assumptions, this simplification may be leading to an extremely ironic situation: the political claims that aim to assume (and foster) PISA results as the prime indicators of the reality of education systems are, after all, the cause of the decline and stagnation of the quality of students’ learning in many of those countries and economies. And this makes the limitations of the OECD approach and the required humanistic alternative all the more evident.
