ABSTRACT

The opening chapter explored how education in Western civilizations lost its original identity as a practice in its own right and became largely subordinated to the more institutionalized interests in society. These were church interests at first, and for many centuries, but later more secular ones. The most recent turns in this story of colonization have been the international waves of educational reform of the last two decades. These have sought to realign education on a grand scale to the demands of a globalized economic order. As the twentieth century yielded to the twenty-first, this order had become fuelled by a profit motive quite shorn of the restraints previously placed on it by the Keynesian economic policies of most Western governments. Some might claim that this international realignment grants a historically new significance to learning, tailoring it now to a new range of strategic priorities. As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, they might also add that the new order of things has itself landed monumental economic and social crises at the feet of national governments and international agencies. But, in any case, where education is concerned, the realignment movement is more correctly seen as a new version of an already old picture. It does not grant a new significance to anything educational, although it may well do so to already colonized forms of learning.