Harmonizing the Educational Globe. World Polity, Cultural Features, and the Challenges to Educational Research

Abstract

The general thesis of this paper is that the motives of the currently dominant global educational governance are rooted in a specific cultural milieu in the time of the Cold War, more precisely in the late 1950s, heading to a harmonious world. The more specific thesis is that a series of failures in the achievement of this harmonized globe led to reforms in educational governance, leading eventually to the development of instruments like large-scale assessments, such as PISA. The concluding thesis of the paper is that precisely because the idea of global governance is rooted in a specific culture, its instruments run the risk of only affecting formal structures of education in other cultures rather the inner activities of the ‘educational fabric’.