Developmentalism as colonial residue: historicising the onto-epistemic foundations of the global education policy field

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article historicises the global education policy (GEP) field’s developmentalism and the psychological and political inequalities that it naturalises. Building upon de- and postcolonial theory and science and technology studies, it illustrates how GEP studies tend to overlook the field’s developmentalist premises, which naturalise the norms and values of ‘the West’ as universal outcomes. Through a self-reflexive critique of the author’s own research of transnational school reforms in Kenya, it historicises the developmentalist premises that anticipate the kinds of individuals necessary for future growth and prosperity. Whereas in the past this developmentalism facilitated colonial governance by deferring the rights of the colonised, today it governs the present by correlating learning outcomes among marginalised populations with promises of increasing their political capacity. GEP studies can benefit from scrutinising how developmentalism continues to condition political equality on the acquisition of psychological norms and values, as this forecloses alternatives to what education could and should be.