ABSTRACT
The rise of a knowledge-based economy (KBE) driven by a new sense of economic competition and enterprise has re-framed ambitions for public schooling. This chapter aims to traverses specific “pressure points” that maintain the focus on classroom teachers and their teaching as the knot that binds them to student performance. A KBE differs from earlier traditional economic imaginaries in that it is marked by an ‘economics of abundance, the annihilation of distance, the de-territorialization of the state, the importance of local knowledge and the investment in human capital’. Schools have responded to the era of skills and a KBE via the curriculum they provide. Comparison in education, as in most social sciences, is about the “total analytical picture” that takes the particular in similarities and differences and extrapolates them to the universal. De Lissovoy categorizes the contemporary political and economic era of which skill development is part as one of ‘pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation’.
