Constructing Education for Development

International Organizations and Education for All

Colette Chabbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780815338291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136543319
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Recent research has advanced the understanding of how global processes have led to standardized ideas about modern schooling. Chabbott provides an insightful examination of how the processes of international development have effected the role of education at a global level since World War II.

1
Introduction

In the last half of the twentieth century, much of the world embraced two new fundamental human rights: the right to development and the right to education. Since they were first asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945, transforming these rights from principles into facts has become imperative for most governments. Subsequently, despite radical differences in financial and administrative means, history, culture, and climate, governments the world over have rationalized this imperative into fairly standardized national development goals, development plans, and frameworks for using education to accelerate socioeconomic development and help distribute its benefits equitably.

The 1990 World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) was both a product of and a further catalyst for this standardization process. On the last day of the WCEFA, 1500 men and women representing 155 governments, 33 intergovernmental organizations, and 125 nongovernmental organizations rose, some with tears in their eyes, to accept by acclamation the World Declaration on Education for All, a nonbinding statement that asserted every human being has a right to a quality basic education. By this each delegate agreed to adapt a common Framework for Action into a National Plan of Action to ensure that within the foreseeable future all citizens would receive a quality basic education.

In several respects, this conference is typical of a number of world conferences convened in the 1990s. First, it provided a stage for enacting some of the world's highest ideals. Second, it attempted to marshal the resources and influence of both governments and nongovernmental organizations. Third, the conference declaration and framework for action were adopted knowing they required funds far in excess of what governments had been able or willing to commit to date.

As such, the WCEFA was clearly not a case of national governments taking rational, measured steps to address the specific needs and unique interests of their particular nation–states in the context of their resources. Rather, it was, in large part, the product of the global environment and a world culture that gave rise to the nation–states themselves and to the international organizations that organize events like the WCEFA. This world culture is not a democratic amalgam of many cultures, rather it is a distillation of Western Enlightenment ideas about progress and justice and the unique role that science plays in promoting them. These ideas have given legitimacy to a host of new human rights, such as the right to development and the right to education. At the same time, these ideas also have given rise to a whole new set of government responsibilities. Among these responsibilities, the development imperative looms large. This imperative demands both governments and international organizations promote progress in social and economic conditions in less industrialized countries and justice in the equitable distribution of the rewards of this progress.

This book explores the rise of a development–oriented world of nation–states and international organizations, a rise that accelerated and intensified throughout the post–World War II era. Throughout this era, espoused beliefs about appropriate development goals, appropriate means to translate these goals into policy and practice, and appropriate ways to target recipients for the benefits from development activities were increasingly rationalized and standardized. This standardization is, in large part, the work of both international development organizations and international development professionals who articulate and carry packages of“correct”principles,“appropriate”policies, and“best”practices to national governments and local nongovernmental organizations alike. By the last decade of the twentieth century, these organizations, professionals, and principles had taken on a life of their own: setting agendas, establishing priorities, and mandating action somewhat independently of both the nation–states that funded them and their stated beneficiaries. The current world culture that drives this process is itself so institutionalized it is practically invisible to most Westerners. Comparing the state of international cooperation and human rights in 1940 with those in 1990, however, throws world culture into sharp relief.

In contrast with the 155 governments represented at WCEFA, fewer than 54 independent countries comprised the world in 1940; scores of colonies and protectorates would not become independent nation–states for another 20 or more years and were not vested with the power to represent their own interests in international forums. In 1940 there were only a handful of international governmental organizations and the predecessor of the United Nations—the League of Nations founded in 1920—lay in ruins. In contrast with the view so central to the WCEFA—that all countries might advance simultaneously and cooperatively—in 1940 several of the world's largestindustrialized countries were acting on a different assumption: that progress in their own countries could come only at the expense of others.

Hundreds of women participated in the WCEFA, but in 1940, women in many countries had no civil rights independent of their families and very few women were appointed as delegates to international conferences. In contrast to the individualistic and universalistic assumptions at the core of WCEFA, the inhabitants of colonies and protectorates in the first half of the twentieth century enjoyed few, if any, de facto civil or political rights.

By 1940, compulsory primary education laws had been enacted in over 80 percent of the independent countries in the Americas and Europe (Ramirez & Ventresca, 1991), but few colonial powers felt obliged to extend publicly funded mass education to their colonies in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean. However, some colonial powers, such as Britain in India and France in Algeria, did educate a small group of colonials to serve as colonial administrators. These colonials were sometimes members of a local elite, but in many cases they were chosen because, to European eyes, they appeared more intelligent than the rest of their race, or at least more docile, and ready to adapt to the colonial order. By comparison, independent, critical thinking and intellectual autonomy were hallmarks of the quality mass education endorsed at the WCEFA.

The unequal distribution of human rights in 1940 was in no small way related to the widespread acceptance of eugenics, the study of physical and mental differences between ethnic groups. Prior to World War II, many respected researchers pursued the goal of improving the human race by planned genetic selection and population control. The genetic superiority of some races and the inferiority of others were central tenets of Axis ideology in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, these assumptions were shared by many in Allied countries, including the United States. In 1940 the notion that all human beings are in some way equal, that each is endowed with a similar potential for learning, and that nation–states should foster the potential of each citizen through a universal, common education system, would have appeared patently misguided to many political and intellectual leaders.

The WCEFA, of course, is neither the cause nor the culmination of the radical reorganization of the world that took place in the 50 years between 1940 and 1990. However, WCEFA's origins and evolution illustrate the process by which new ways of thinking came to be institutionalized at the global and national level. These new ideas included a radical expansion of who qualifies as a full human being and what his or her potential might be; what constitutes a nation–state and what its responsibilities might be with respect to promoting human potential; and what role education might play in mediating this process. The purpose of this book is to unpack the process by which these new ways of thinking became embodied and taken for granted innew international organizations, in new nation–states, and in recent international education agreements and national education policies.

Moreover, the widespread acceptance of certain ideas about the nature of human beings has not necessarily lead to their actualization. For decades prior to WCEFA, many less–industrialized low–income countries had proclaimed similarly ambitious education goals, and they reiterated them on a regular basis in international conferences. This began in the 1940s and 1950s, when few development planners in newly independent countries suspected how costly universal primary education and adult literacy might be. By the time the high cost became more widely understood, public commitments had been made and would not be retracted. From the 1960s to the present, few governments in less industrialized countries nor donors in industrialized countries have proved willing or able to provide funding commensurate with public pronouncements on the right to education. This pattern persisted into the 1990s; despite the efforts of several powerful participants, the WCEFA documents do not directly address funding. Few, therefore, were surprised when the World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000 documented disappointing progress in achieving education for all in most less–industrialized countries and deteriorating conditions in others. What should surprise us is that the Dakar conference nonetheless produced another ambitious declaration and framework for action, including, this time, specific target dates for achieving universal primary education and literacy.

Some might say the WCEFA and the more recent Dakar Declaration and Framework are best understood as one of an ongoing series of efforts on the part of the less industrialized countries to establish a claim for more development aid from industrialized countries. Others might argue that the WCEFA and the Dakar conference are simply more instances of the industrialized countries, through their aid policies, dictating development and education priorities to the less industrialized countries. More idealistic observers, on the other hand, might counter that only by setting high goals do people—or governments—discover what they are capable of, and that the pressure created by high goals has, on occasion, called forth the means to achieve them.

This book does not attempt to adjudicate these arguments, nor does it focus on the specific conditions that led one nation–state or another to endorse the WCEFA agreements, though such studies might be useful. Instead this book highlights aspects of the global environment that made the outcomes at the WCEFA practically a foregone conclusion and it draws attention to a previously neglected influence in this process: the global environment in which these agreements and nation–states emerged.

This global environment has three important features. First, it is permeated by an ever expanding development imperative. Since World War II, the scope and targets of this imperative have expanded to cover both more eco–nomic and social activities—from agriculture and large–scale infrastructure development to family planning and education—and more subgroups of the population—women, the disabled, minorities. As a result, over time, more activities and subgroups of society become linked to development and thus become potential targets for international development activities.

Second, isomorphism is the rule; over time, principles, policies, and practices everywhere tend to adopt the same form and language. As noted earlier, despite great variations in history, social structure, and economic resources from country to country, and within countries from one locality to another, standardized blueprints or models of how to“do”development tend to emerge and prevail. This does not mean that all development activities end up looking exactly the same everywhere. Instead, idiosyncracies persist from one place to another, at the same time basic ingredients prevail in all settings, with local variations. Over time, the realm of potential development principles, policies, and practices is increasingly scripted, and deviation from that script becomes less likely. This tendency towards isomorphism comes into conflict with Enlightenment ideas about the uniqueness of individuals and, by extension, their collectivities. This conflict creates much of the generative tension in development discourse.

Finally, in this global environment, loose coupling between values espoused and action taken is endemic. This decoupling is easy to interpret as dysfunctional, as an attempt by dominant national or local groups to derail more equitable development outcomes. Nonetheless, this loose coupling may reflect a healthy resistance to isomorphism, the assertion of local values and practices over world culture, skewed though it may be towards local elites.

Much of the development studies literature recognizes these three features of the global environment and explains them in terms of an imbalance of power between nation–states, an imbalance of power between elites and less advantaged groups at various levels, or as indicative of poor planning and management. In contrast, this book emphasizes the important role that organizational relationships and bureaucratic culture play in establishing and maintaining a global environment in which isomorphism and loose coupling are natural outcomes, particularly in sectors with difficult to measure output, such as education. The next two subsections of this chapter introduce world–culture theory and institutional analysis, the logic and the analytical approach, respectively, that undergird this argument. The fourth subsection introduces some terminology conventions intended to make reading about agency, organization, and institution, at once both subjects and theories, somewhat less confusing.

World Culture and Organizations

Traditional scholars of international relations often analyze changes at the global level in terms of competition for resources between actors, primarilynation–states, who are constrained mainly by their self–interest and their power with respect to other actors. In contrast, world society scholars, among others, argue that nation–states are just one among several actors at the global level, including international organizations. Moreover, these scholars emphasize that the repertoire of action or role for each of these erstwhile actors is severely constrained and heavily scripted by an overarching cultural framework (Mead, 1934; Goffman, 1959) or world culture (Thomas, Meyer et al., 1987). Though this world culture places much value on purposive action flowing from rational alternatives and individual choice, it also defines what constitutes“rational”alternatives and choices in a relatively narrow way for any given actor, thereby limiting the scope of his or her legitimate purposive action. Rather than focus on differences in interest and power between actors as an engine for change, world society scholars are principally interested in where these roles and scripts come from and how they become institutionalized.

Identifying World Culture

The historical fault line underlying the shifts in the way the world conceptualizes human rights and education—as described above in the contrasts between conditions in 1940 and 1990—lies in the eighteenth century Western Enlightenment. In broad terms, the Enlightenment triggered a series of rationalist critiques of previously accepted social doctrines and institutions, a process that continues to challenge older social arrangements up to the present day (Marshall, 1994). In the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideas and values favoring the scientific method were associated with a“rational”approach to social problems. These ideas spread as Western technology and bureaucracy expanded into more and more areas of modern life in Western countries and their colonies (Berger, Berger, et al., 1973). At the same time, Enlightenment ideas delegitimated premodern traditional collectivities— family, race, clan, kingdom—and established individuals with free will as the central unit of society. This culture of rationality materialized in two critical ways. First, scientific explanations increased both in scope—covering more areas of social life—and in authority. In the modern Westernized world, traditional religious belief, that looked for salvation outside humanity, was replaced by faith in the intrinsic power of rational human beings to bring about universal material and social progress in all domains (Wuthnow, 1980; Keohane, 1982; Aronowitz, 1988; Ramirez & Lee, 1995). Second, rational purposive action, or organization, to promote progress through science became obligatory. Those in positions of authority were responsible for rendering, based on scientific evidence, rational decisions that would be implemented by rational means, such as formal organizations.

World society scholars do not assert that the present world culture is the only possible one, nor that it necessarily represents the culmination of humanity's best efforts to date. Rather they argue that this particular culture, based in the Western Enlightenment, is simply the de facto operative world culture and that it faces no credible rivals at this time. In the eyes of these scholars, the present world culture is, quite simply, the dominant empirically measurable one.

Studies of World Culture

World society scholars measure the global origins and spread of Western Enlightenment ideas over time by the appearance of those ideas in the statements of international organizations, the ratification of international agreements, the convening of international conferences, and other collective action institutionalized at the international and national level. The subjects of their studies range from laws regulating homosexuality (Frank & McEneany, 1999), to the establishment of Ministries of Science (Jang, 2000), the promulgation of population growth policies (Barrett, 1995), and the dramatic increase in the number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations around world cultural norms, such as the environment and women's rights (Boli & Thomas, 1999).

All of these authors approach their subjects with a long–range perspective. This is because institutions, once established, take on a life of their own and become taken for granted; they often outliv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Acronyms
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Setting the Stage
• 3 Discourse
• 4 International Development as an Organizational Field
• 5 Educational Development Professionals
• 6 Conferences to Universalize Education,1945–1990
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix A Protocol for Identifying International Development Organizations
• Appendix B Major Postwar International Conferences on Mass Education
• References
• Index