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Excellence, Talent and Education in a Global Perspective

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Cultivating Excellence in Education

Part of the book series: Educational Governance Research ((EGTU,volume 12))

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Abstract

This chapter explores excellence in general and talent in particular as a globalized phenomenon in education. Education today takes place in a global setting, which makes it meaningful to analytically talk about a global education space. The notion of a ‘global education space’ lends attention to national education systems being permeated by many similar components, such as marketisation, testing, accountability and rankings (Kelly 2018; Plum 2014; Smith 2016). Although education systems deliver different responses as a result of contextual conditions, a core trait of global education today is that education policies generally are introduced in reference to international developments, standards, and priorities (Lindblad et al. 2015; Rizvi and Lingard 2010) and that there is a strong tendency to depoliticize education policy solutions (Gunter 2018).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For presentations and discussions of the different schools, concepts and approaches currently being used in education policy studies, see Mundy et al. (2016) and Verger et al. (2018).

  2. 2.

    It is thought-provoking that Spelling, who was a former educational psychologist and professor at the Royal Danish School of Education, looking back at his many years of work, wrote in 1992: “The worst aberration of the intelligence research and theories was the IQ. I admit that I have calculated thousands of IQs in the past, but today I regret every single one of them, if they were used for the evaluation of a child. (…) The IQ was a dangerous weed in the garden of pedagogical psychology.” (Spelling 1992, p. 267).

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  1. Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Annette Rasmussen & Christian Ydesen

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Rasmussen, A., Ydesen, C. (2019). Excellence, Talent and Education in a Global Perspective. In: Cultivating Excellence in Education. Educational Governance Research, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33354-6_8

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