An overview of educational discourse, especially in the UK, might review current trends, the latest, fashionable moves in writing on education policy at its various levels: the strands of the discursive strategy of educational policy. Thus, in the last 15 years of educational publication in the UK and in the World Yearbooks of Education, there has been writing on education and transitions, the control of the teaching profession, education and post-modernity, education and globalisation.
Some of this writing is spotting trends, ideally at an international level, internal to education: the regulation and de-professionalisation of the teaching profession; the shift to a shorter first degree; a concern at all levels with standards. Another strand seeks to identify wider social trends, such as the transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union following 1989 and 1991 (Coulby et al., 2000) or the economic process of globalisation (Coulby & Zambeta, 2005), and to analyse the ways in which they impact on education, or indeed are impacted on by education. Again the perspective of this strand is beyond one state and the systems examined within it may be quite other than that within which the analyst works. An even more ambitious strand seeks to isolate philosophical shifts either within academe or beyond and to show how these either help to understand the role of educational institutions or influence the ways in which they are shaped. Whilst the writing on post-modernity and education might be the most obvious example here, this strand would also include earlier Marxist writing and those concerned with the impact of ‘values’ on education and of education on ‘values’ (Cairns et al., 2001). This trend-spotting aspect of the educational literature is particularly prominent among those writing in comparative or international education. This is appropriately the case since such analysts are well placed to spot the ways in which similar concerns, policies and structures are emerging in different states: the shift to more vocational subjects at secondary school level, the growth of English as the first foreign language, the charging of fees for university education. Moreover, ideally, comparative and international commentators will be well placed to pick up the social and philosophical trends which are emerging within and beyond their state of location and to relate these to educational policy.
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Coulby, D. (2009). Fundamentalisms and Secularisms: Education and La Longue Durée . In: Cowen, R., Kazamias, A.M. (eds) International Handbook of Comparative Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6403-6_24
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