Neo-colonialism through education: the entanglement between education export and the so-called “global learning crisis”

• In Event: Examining the Role of Global Educational Policies & Practices

Proposal

Transferring education from one country to another is not a new phenomenon. The Jesuit priests, for instance, disseminated European education across the Portuguese and Spanish colonies worldwide around 500 years ago. Even before that, knowledge was transferred within Ancient Greece, the Vedic civilization, the Roman Empire, the Chinese dynasties, and the American pre-Hispanic civilizations, to name a few. The association of business and education is not new either. Private education was established before public education in most regions of the globe; e.g., since the dawn of the 17th century in the American continent.
More recently, however, education has been permeated by far-reaching and multilevel forms of governance that combine economic imperatives, neoliberal premises, technological developments. Education became a commodity, an industry - the global education industry – and an asset (Appadurai 1986; Ball 2004; Parreira do Amaral et al. 2019; Verger et al. 2016, 2017; Birch & Muniesa 2020; Komljenovic 2021).
The production and circulation of knowledge (and education) is not neutral (Risvi 2020; Ozga 2009). It relates to systems of power, dominance, and hegemony. The pre-colonial production and circulation of knowledge consisted of different movements relying on organic and ad hoc initiatives instead of systematic mechanisms (Risvi 2020). Modernity, in turn, carried out more systematic and uni-directional flows of social technologies of knowledge production and circulation, which emerged along the establishment of formal public systems of education and were embedded in colonial practices (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2011). These effects persist, for instance, in the discourses on economization of education that still flow from the colonial center to the peripheral parts of the world (Santos 2007; Risvi 2020). Primarily Eurocentric, such flows also center in the USA since the 1920s. Worldwide, thus, the legitimate knowledge manifests the types of knowledge produced in the so-called Global North. The colonized has continuously incorporated particular ways of seeing the world (and education) that is sympathetic to the colonial (and hegemonic) interests. This keeps happening through different instruments and mechanisms, from the legitimation of global political agendas and indicators such as OECD’s PISA, to practices of transnational education and education export.
In this paper, I aim to understand and provide a wider picture of what education export represents in relation to global production and circulation of knowledge. I examine the discursive practices of education export, focusing on the contradictions manifested in its motivations, functions, and goals. The empirical case is Finnish education export, which is a more recent and lowered-scale phenomenon when compared to other big players in the field like the UK and the USA but has successfully built up on Finland’s ‘PISA miracle’ and on the benchmark and branding of its educational system (Simola 2005; Schatz 2015; Schatz et al. 2017). Finland became a reference society in education, whose projection is desired by many other countries, education systems and institutions (Takayama et al. 2013; Parcerisa & Verger 2019; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi 2019). Finnish education exports range from early-childhood and basic education, to vocational and HE, and encompass school services, teachers’ training, edtech, foreign students’ attraction to Finnish higher education institutions, consultancy, and international education programs. Both in the spheres of policy and practices, Finnish education export comprises an ecosystem that goes beyond education and involves stakeholders and actors from both public and private sectors in different fields and industries, aiming for increasing financial turnover and impact on Finnish GDP.
I analyze data from political documents (n=15) and interviews with Finnish government authorities, education experts, and edu-preneurs involved with Finnish education export (n=14). The discursive practices of Finnish education export are embedded in the exceptionalism of Finland (as a Nordic country) within the global knowledge economy and the superiority of its education system (and society) as proved by many global indicators. These dimensions corroborate the commodification and decontextualization of education (Simola 2015). Despite the absence of colonial roots in Finland, discourses of otherness and differentiation are expressed through the idea of helping countries to overcome the so-called global learning crisis, in a normative, self-centered and colonial perspective, to which Finland would be a savior . Salvation is offered via education exports, which create a blurred intertwinement between the processes of development aid and cooperation and the business transactions in education, particularly in the so-called Global South.
This study contributes to research on production and circulation of knowledge, education governance and marketization of education, aiming to decolonize global educational policies and practices through the analysis of a compelling empirical case (Finnish education export). It offers a novel perspective to look at global developments in the field of Comparative Education.

Author

• Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido, University of Helsinki