Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyzes and challenges OECD's educational agenda and its main tool, namely, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). It focuses on the way in which OECD presents its best-known product and underlying conception of knowledge, schooling, education and society. Through the analysis of OECD's documents, the book shows that the emergence of new modes of life, as well as of new modes of knowing and experiencing is out of the boundaries of PISA's framework. The book highlights that diversity, difference and variety are features necessary not just to education, but to growing and living. It argues that through PISA, OECD formulates a simplistic interpretation of culture and knowledge, that is, a one-dimensional one. PISA also tends to erase what is distinctive of schooling, namely, the creativity and unpredictability that may emerge within that particular kind of relationships between teachers and students.