Justice and fairness in education: The role of international organizations in constructing equity as a global education value (1934-2019)

• In Event: Not just the usual suspects: 100 years of UNESCO IBE’s shaping global governance of education (Part II)

Proposal

In 2015 at the United Nations, 193 States formally endorsed equity in education as a global education value. Sustainable Development Goal 4 promised to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” and formal international monitoring of SDG target 4.5 has been systematically addressed under the label “Equity”. And while SDG 4 addresses concerns that had emerged under the previous international agenda (Sayed et al., 2018), new questions also arise when international education agendas prescribe and disseminate norms and values on concepts for which a global understanding has yet to be reached. Equity differs from other education dimensions as it appeals to frame and quantify education against justice and fairness, concepts of political philosophy. Despite its features, the concept emerged as a formal element in the main governance arrangement presiding over international education and this did not happen in a vacuum but is rather the product of almost a century of intergovernmental and international cooperation in education during which States and international education stakeholders contributed to what has been later termed the “interpretive struggle” (Hajer, 1995).

The expression “equity in education” is relatively recent and only surfaced in the 1970s while discussions on justice and fairness in education typically referred to “equality of educational opportunity” or “educational inequality” since the 1900s and the 1920s respectively (Montjourides, 2022). The International Bureau of Education (IBE) contributed early on to this elevation of justice and fairness in education as a global aspiration (Hofstetter & ERHISE, 2021). Early International Conferences on Public Instruction (ICPI) engaged for instance with policy questions pertaining to mitigating difference in educational opportunities between rural and urban areas (1936) or equality of opportunity for secondary education (1946). And throughout to the last ICPE in 2008 various features of today’s conception of equity in education have progressively appeared in international recommendations.

This research highlights how international organizations in general, and IBE in particular, have influenced the formation of today’s concept of equity in education since the early years of international intergovernmental cooperation, and further discusses how popular legitimacy of international education agendas may be affected. Two main sources are used. On the one hand, officially adopted and endorsed recommendations of the convened by the IBE since 1934 as well as more recent policy prescription found in modern arrangements of intergovernmental cooperation in education such as the Millenium Development Goals, Education for All and the Sustainable Development Goals are used as the reference framework for how governments have thought and promoted justice and fairness in education. On the other hand, the scholarship on equity in education has also been explored to characterize how the academic landscape on equity in education has evolved and how the relative position of the intergovernmental position on equity in education may or may not be perceived as legitimate by academics who have made large gains in international agency in the past three decades and can now influence the authority and therefore the success of international education agendas.

Author

• Patrick Henri Pierre Montjourides, Unesco