What can we learn about global education from historical studies of the OECD?

• In Event: The OECD’s Defining Role in Education: Its Historical Rise, Global Impact and Comparative Perspectives

Proposal

To some philosophers of history – like Leopold von Ranke (1795-1896) – learning from history is highly problematic. The past is irreversibly gone and can never again be invoked. But if we see time and experience as something extending across the past, the present and the future, then history becomes a reservoir of communalities like for instance organisations populated by human beings with lived experiences of timeless themes such as love, power, competition, recognition and the passing on of legacies. It is from such a philosophical position that this paper focuses on the ques-tion of what we can learn about global education from historical studies of the OECD. Clearly, the archives of international organisations constitute a rich source of new historical knowledge with contemporary relevance; the OECD archive is no exception. In the social sciences, Charles Tilly (2011) has argued that “every significant political phenomenon lives in history and requires histori-cally grounded analysis for its explanation”, and Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes that every social ob-ject must be understood as a historical one and that it is imperative to historicise the research object in question in order to achieve understanding (Steinmetz 2011).
Following this line of thinking, a diachronic research perspective has several things to offer to our contemporary understanding of global education:
1) Increased awareness of the precursors of contemporary programs and developments
Example: The International Education Indicators project (INES) launched in 1988 as a pre-cursor to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
2) Knowledge about the trajectories and path-dependencies coming from the past, which of-ten define spaces of new opportunities.
Example: Education officially came on the OEEC/OECD agenda right after the “Sputnik chock” but the distinct approach to education adopted by the organization had much earlier roots in ideas about education as an economic production factor, an object of optimization, and the source of a nation’s human capital.
3) It also enables us to focus on continuities and ruptures as an analytical lens.
Example: The OECD has been consistent in linking education with economic concerns, but it was not until the United States threatened to withdraw financial support for CERI in the early 1980s that intense work on the development of standardized indicators was launched (Addey 2018).
Working on these research levels requires in-depth case-study analysis and it requires access and often even cross-checking and working across different archives. At the same time, it often also requires that the researcher draws on other disciplines – like sociology, policy analysis and political science - in an eclectic manor. But it enables us to move beyond methodological nationalism and into the fields of global and transnational history and open up the black box of the OECD and see how it has been working, the struggles and crises it has gone through, and just how it has been able to achieve such power in global education today.

Author

• Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University