From EFA to Scholasticide: The Rise and Fall of the Global Liberal Education Order

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Global Governance and the Neoliberal Capitalist Order

Proposal

This paper will trace the rise and fall of the Post-Cold War Liberal Order and its relationship to education. The paper will explore the downward spiral of post-Cold War US hegemony from its triumphalist and upbeat uni-polar incarnation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, where talk of (educational) freedom, democracy and peace was upbeat and widespread (Fukuyama, 1992) to its current 2024 iteration, where democracy has decoupled from capitalism, authoritarianism is widespread, war is prevalent, capitalism is fragmenting, and neoliberalism is failing to deliver broad enough benefits – even in its own Western heartlands (Novelli, 2023). This current decay is best displayed educationally through the prism of the Western-funded and supported scholasticide taking place before our eyes and our ears: on social media, radio and television (UNHR, 2024). Whilst Gaza is symbolic of imperial decay, the schoolboards of Florida are banning books and repressing teachers (Ferris & Robbins, 2023); while the prisons of Turkey, India and many more states are filled with educators – reframed and reimagined as enemies of the state (see Special Issue: Nestore & Robertson, 2022). Drawing on debates in International Relations and Political Science on the decline of US/Western hegemony and the emergence of a multi-polar world (Peters, 2023), this paper will explore and apply this framing in relation to the global governance of education, charting, and thinking through, the complex relationship between US-led Western hegemony, the rise of a multi-polar world and global and national educations systems, processes and practices. Whilst narrating over three decades of global education history, I will drill down into two events (Badiou, 2013): the 1990 Jomtien, Education for All meeting – which forged a pathway towards a post-Cold War education future – and the ongoing Scholasticide in Gaza, where education systems and education actors, have been subjected to a Western-funded Israeli led slaughter on a scale, and with a ferocity, not seen for many decades. The paper will reflect on the implications, and the connections between these two events and ask the question of what lies next for the Global Governance of Education? It will also explore the possibility of reimaging educational alternatives beyond the contemporary authoritarian turn, and the composition of the social forces potentially able to stem the tide of this current educational barbarity. Drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) insights, at an earlier time, that ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ , I will reflect, through a critical political economy of education approach, what this all means for education in the twilight of US empire.

Author

• Mario Novelli, University of Sussex