What Kinds of Democracy in Education are Facilitated by Supra- and Transnational Agencies?

Abstract

In recent years, political rhetoric in many parts of the world has tended to take a reductionist view of education and educational research. It often seems that the pivotal challenge in education is how to help pupils acquire basic skills such as literacy and numeracy in order to become competitive in the job market, in business and industry. Thus, the key purpose of educational research is to produce evidence for the ‘best practice’, ‘that works’. Issues like social justice, democracy and critique seem to have lost importance on the political agenda. However, education and educational research can not and should not be reduced to simplistic paradigms. Therefore a number of colleagues were invited to take a broader view of the issue – taking, as our point of departure, the view that educational systems in European countries are influenced in complex ways by supraand transnational agencies through regulation (for example from the European Union [EU]) or, for example, via discursive forces (from agencies like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]). We felt that it would be interesting to call attention to, and discuss, what those influences mean to the development of democracy within the fields of education and educational research. In this editorial I shall frame this discussion and, at the same time, introduce the articles by discussing these issues. First, I discuss the influence of supraand transnational organisations and agencies. Second, I consider the social technologies that are employed by these and other organisations. Third, I reflect on the influence these two phenomena have on democracy in and around education and educational research. The articles report on discussions in England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Denmark and their view is different in terms of sectors of the education field: university, basic education, lifelong learning.