Discussion: Crisis? What crisis? International organisations, crisis narratives and education policy debate Open Access

The theme of an educational “crisis” has become entrenched in global policy discourse, to the extent that a pressing need to “fix” education is today widely seen as axiomatic (Takayama, 2007; Zembylas, Baildon, & Kwek, 2022). Meanwhile, various sources of turmoil and disruption – political, environmental, economic, epidemiological – pose undeniable challenges for the provision of education as for other public goods. But the perceived urgency of “fixing” education is heightened by the widespread perception that it is to our schools and teachers – and ultimately to “youth” themselves – that we should look to save humanity from the myriad crises it faces. Not only is education expected to solve problems bequeathed by past crises; it is also expected to prevent future ones – by rendering learners “resilient” and capable of adapting and innovating their way past any obstacles life may throw in their path. Such views impose on education policymakers and administrators, educators and, most critically, on young learners themselves an enormous burden of expectation and responsibility.

At CESA's 2023 Hiroshima conference, this plenary panel discussed how notions of “crisis” are used by international organisations to shape the global education policy agenda, considering especially (but not exclusively) the course and aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Special reference was made to Asian contexts, notably to the case of Sri Lanka, where the legacy of civil war, economic dysfunction and disease have in recent years caused massive dislocation, and where international organisations have played a significant role in influencing the educational response.

In preparing their remarks, the panellists were asked to consider a number of guiding questions:

1. What are we talking about when we talk about “crises” in relation to education?

2. Where does the idea of “education in crisis” come from? Which actors have been especially crucial in promoting crisis narratives, and what have been their interests and agendas?

3. How and why do some actors or organisations seek to exaggerate the potential of education to solve “crises” (of whatever kind), and what are the dangers in this?

4. What agendas inform the growing emphasis on using education to foster various forms of “resilience”? To what extent is talk of “resilience” emancipatory or potentially oppressive?

5. In what ways is education policy discourse used to assign or deflect blame for actually existing crises – political, environmental, economic or otherwise?

6. How has the diversity of policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic revealed divergent assumptions about the essential purposes of education? What educational “solutions” were pushed by international organisations during the pandemic, why and with what consequences?

7. Is education in crisis and, if so, what is the nature of this crisis?

Vickers:

Yesterday, in our first plenary panel, we heard about specific disasters, natural and manmade, that Japan has experienced and about how education has been implicated in the responses to those disasters or crises. That discussion was very concrete and offered some important and practical lessons, particularly as regards to the potential of education to help heal or rebuild devastated and traumatised communities. In this respect, Japan certainly does have some inspiring positive lessons to offer. So, for example, the way the Japanese society and schools in particular responded to the COVID pandemic was quite exemplary by international standards. As a father of two school-aged children, I was quite grateful that my family found ourselves in Japan, rather than for example Britain, during the pandemic.

But it is important to also consider how education can cause or exacerbate crises, rather than just considering how it might help us to cope with or recover from them. So, for example, if we think about Japan's 2011 Tohoku disaster, discussed in the other plenary session of this conference, how did the education and training of the Tokyo Electric and Power Company and management and of senior government bureaucrats help turn what was originally a natural disaster, tsunami and earthquake, into a major nuclear disaster? Similarly, what was the role of education in contributing to the tragedy of the Okawa elementary school in the village of Kamaya, where 74 children were drowned because they were told to stay where they were, standing on the school playground, instead of climbing the nearby hill, which would have enabled them to escape the tsunami? Their mothers, who were desperate to get their children away from the school, drove there to take them away, but were told by senior men to calm down and stay put. As one journalist wrote: “it was another enactment of the ancient dialogue… between the entreating voices of women and the oblivious, overbearing, dismissiveness of old men” (Parry, 2017). If the exacerbation of this disaster was attributable to the maintenance of those values, of that gendered hierarchy and the obliviousness and entitlement of male leaders, to what extent can those values in turn be traced to the influence of education? This is not just something for us to reflect upon here in Japan but all over the world.

We therefore need to think of the relationship between education and crises as double edged. That double edged quality, I think, emerged quite clearly from Manabu Sato's reflections (during the conference's first plenary) on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prof. Sato talked of how that crisis was used to press the case for accelerating the adoption of technology in educational settings, and the possible consequences of this for social inequality and democratic accountability. In this panel, we are going to discuss further the ways in which ideas or stories about crisis frame our conceptions of what education is for or what kind of education is possible. We will be focusing especially on how notions of crisis are used or abused by international organisations involved in the global governance of education, organisations such as the OECD and UNESCO. We will start with some short presentations by the panellists, followed by discussion amongst them that I will moderate. We will finish by opening up the discussion for questions and comments from the floor.

First of all, Fazal Rizvi will offer a theoretical overview of ideas or sources of crises, referring especially to Jurgen Habermas's notion of a legitimacy crisis. Maren Elfert will then discuss how the international organisations have used crises narratives to legitimate specific educational agendas. Audrey Bryan will talk specifically about the current discourse of “transforming education”, looking at how this has involved invoking fears of crises to justify promotion of an individuating, depoliticised vision of education for fostering individual resilience. Finally, Nishara Fernando will discuss the case of Sri Lanka, a society that has experienced a series of very real and wrenching crises; he will offer some concrete reflections on education's role in ameliorating or exacerbating these.

Rizvi:

Good morning everyone, and thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to share some ideas. I am going to relate my comments largely to the work of Jurgen Habermas, partly because just this month (November 2023) is the 50th anniversary of the publication of his very famous book, Legitimation Crisis (1973). Some of you probably know that Habermas has been involved in some controversy over remarks he made in the last week or so ^[1]. I do not want to engage with these today, because I want to focus on his ideas and the definition of crisis he came up with around 50 years ago. In doing so, I want to ask: To what extent is the theoretical template that he presented still useful or applicable to our current experience of crises or what he calls “current crisis tendencies”. Habermas never sees crisis as something that is absolute or final. Crisis is always seen by him in terms of tendencies or processes – of becoming a crisis or intensifying as a crisis – rather than as a one-off event.

Crisis occurs, Habermas says, when a system changes so significantly that it threatens the core values of a society along with the continued existence and identity of its members; when people feel that the normative structures that define their existence and their institutions become so unsettled and so unrecognisable that they feel the very basis of life to be rapidly changing or undermined. As this process intensifies, more and more people find their social context and sense of selfhood radically challenged. Likewise their political context or their relationship with the state, when they feel that the state is failing to manage or control unsettling social phenomena. In discussing the disruption of normative structures which leads to social intervention or rupture, Habermas makes a famous distinction between the “system world” and “life world”. It is when the system world, the institutions and the normative structures that frame our social life, starts clashing with our “life world” that a state of disintegration becomes possible. And when that state of disintegration looms, then we can appropriately talk about a crisis.

Habermas' idea of a legitimation crisis refers to the conjunction of problems with regulation and socialisation; regulation, from the point of view of the system world; and socialisation, from the point of view of the life world. Education lies at that intersection of the system world and the life world and plays a crucial role in defining or framing their relationship. In other words, you have a system that drives and defines the institutional and normative structures related to education, and then people experience it in a particular way. Crises emerge when there is misalignment of system world and life world, when the two cease to correspond in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Education is in large part always about the coordination of students' social experiences with their aspirations: the system has to invest in the life world of education to direct and motivate students to drive towards certain goals. When the aspirations that education is encouraging and the prospects and experiences of students become radically misaligned, then we have got problems and potentially a crisis in social legitimation.

Habermas says that there are three points of origins as far as the system and life worlds are concerned: the economic system, political system and socio-cultural system. He says that crises emerge in those systems in different ways. For example, political systems relate to rationality. When we stop believing that the system is rational, when we feel that it somehow does not cohere in rational terms or is so broken that rationality escapes it, that is what leads to a loss of legitimacy. And when in their life world or lived experience people lose confidence in the rationality or legitimacy of the political system, then they are not motivated to seek or construct meaning within the confines of that system. Essentially, Habermas argues that four types of crisis – of economics, rationality, (political) legitimacy and motivation – are profoundly interlinked. The latter crises of motivation operate at the more personal level of the life world and culture, while the former relates to the economic system; in between is the connecting tissue of political and educational institutions and practices. When that tissue fails effectively to connect economic structures with personal motivation, meaning and goals, the crises are the result.

In Habermas' analysis, crises may arise at different points and in different forms when elements of the system world cease to function as expected. The economic system may fail to produce the requisite quality of consumable values, or growing inequalities may convince people that the system is not working for the majority. The administrative and political system may cease to persuade citizens of its rationality, while the socio-economic system fails to generate the requisite quality of action motivating meaning (e.g. in the form of remunerative employment). It is significant that Habermas developed this theory in 1973. At that time, inflation had gone through the roof around the world, and indeed people had really begun to consider that the post-war system as it had developed in the West, based largely on the social democratic traditions of Keynesian economics, was falling apart. It is that crisis that contributed during the following decade to the growing fashion for neoliberalism. In other words, a growing sense that the Keynesian system had lost legitimacy was reflected in and reinforced by a dropping off of belief in its rationality and efficacy. That was the system that experienced crisis then. What is the nature of the crisis that we are now confronting? This is where I will finish off.

Contemporary indices of crisis suggest that today we are witnessing a whole range of tendencies that are at least as significant and troubling as those that confronted the world in 1973. Many aspects of our contemporary condition can helpfully be analysed using Habermas' template of motivation, legitimation and rationality crises. Economically, we are seeing shifting modes of production, and consumption. The nature of the economy itself is rapidly changing, transforming the nature of work, employment and labour relations. The rise of “precarious work”, displacing “confident (or secure) work” is contributing to soaring levels of economic inequality. People experiencing growing inequality are increasingly questioning the legitimacy of established systems of all sorts. This has spawned various political and geopolitical tensions. Increasingly ubiquitous datafication and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work, governance and politics. This is leading to loss of confidence and trust in the regulation and coordination capacity of nation states and international organisations. International organisations, while retaining some influence, lack confidence in their ability to steer or mould systems of global governance; they are no longer as significant as perhaps they were ten years ago. And this has led to certain cultural changes in the life world, reflected in the rise of nationalist and populist sentiment, declining confidence in the “traditional media” and educational institutions (a post-truth climate, if you like), and intensification of identity politics. So there are a whole range of changes underway in our system world and life world, while the relationship between the two is disintegrating before our eyes. I think it is possible to use Habermas' template, his theoretical architecture, to help us understand how the interlinked crises of legitimation, motivation and rationality are all contributing to our current predicament. When all of this is coupled with perceptions, which Habermas did not discuss, of an existential crisis due to climate change and environmental degradation, then we see another issue turbocharging crises of legitimation and motivation, especially amongst the young. People may feel inclined to say: “What is the point? I am not going to get a good job anyway even if I get a master's degree”. Or: “What is the point if in ten years’ time, the world may not even exist?”. These are motivational matters. These are matters that arise out of lack of confidence in the rationality and legitimation of the established system.

Elfert:

I would like to talk about international organisations and their crisis of legitimacy. I have been doing some thinking about the legitimacy of international organisations in the governance of education. I have been inspired by Beckert's (2020) seminal paper about “The Exhausted Futures of Neoliberalism”, where he writes about the legitimacy that political authorities long gained from the promises of neoliberalism. However, he emphasises, these promises have not been fulfilled, they have not come to pass. The legitimacy of international organisations active in the field of education policy such as UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank, is built on promises that these organisations make concerning the future. These promises are always based on an analysis of the present situation, which is often presented as a crisis. The crisis narrative is a key strategy used by international organisations seeking to justify their agendas.

In education policy, such narratives have a long history. One example is Philip Coombs' book The World Educational Crisis, published in 1968. Coombs portrayed a world education crisis scenario in terms of an increase of the educational needs, lack of resources etc. Coombs was the first Assistant Secretary of State for Education in the Kennedy administration. In 1963, he then became the first Director of UNESCO's newly-founded International Institute for Educational Planning in Paris. His book was very influential. It was presented at the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education held in Williamsburg in 1967, and was translated into nine languages. That Williamsburg conference played a key role in making education central to the international development agenda, and also identified UNESCO with this move. UNESCO positioned itself as a key champion of educational development in poorer countries, just as the OECD had previously established itself as the agency with a remit for delivering education policy advice to industrialised countries. This was an early example of how sounding an alarm over a perceived crisis could be instrumental in shaping the architecture for the global governance of education.

Crisis narratives were invoked with growing regularity in the 1970s and 1980s by actors keen to frame education in narrowly economistic terms, as a generator of “human capital”. The World Bank’s 1974 Education Sector Working Paper posited an educational crisis in “developing countries”, marking a turning point in the Bank's transition from a funder of education to a shaper of policy claiming an intellectual role. The crisis scenario received yet another significant boost in the 1980s, with the publication in the USA in 1983 of the “Nation at Risk” report, which depicted the American education system as a source of national failure, hampering the country's economic growth and technological progress. The report spurred – or legitimated – a push by the US authorities for the development of international comparative indicators. That agenda was taken up with alacrity by the OECD, ultimately yielding the PISA programme, which has been crucial to positioning the OECD as the hegemonic policy shaper in education. Crisis scenarios are regularly invoked whenever the results of international student assessments or other strategic reports by international organisations are released. One recent example is the strategic plan issued by the Global Partnership for Education, entitled The Learning Crisis is a Teaching Crisis. Illustrating the legitimating role played by crisis narratives, the Common Core Initiative in the USA, introduced in 2010, was proclaimed as part of a mission to save the US education system from crisis. That framing legitimated the entry of non-state actors into the education sector, exemplified by the role of the Gates Foundation in rolling out and implementing the “Common Core State Standards” across the USA.

So, what are these crisis narratives generally designed to achieve? Euan Auld and Paul Morris have developed a heuristic schema, a framework, of how strategic narratives often take the form of a play in three acts (Auld & Morris, 2021). Act One is the setting, a representation of how things are and have been as well as an imaginary delineation of how things might or should be. And then there is Act Two, comprising diagnosis of the crisis (with ascription of blame) as well as a prescription outlining the urgent action needed to open up the path to salvation. Finally, Act Three constitutes the “dénouement” of the story, that can take either a “fortunate” or “fatal” form. This rather paranoid way of framing policy makes it difficult to challenge or criticise the proposed agenda because, after all, who would not want a better world? In a later paper, Auld and Morris apply this framework to the promotion of privatised techno-utopian agendas as a response to COVID (Morris, Park, & Auld, 2022). While the crisis narrative has a long history in education, its prevalence appears to be increasing and accelerating. Several recent reports by UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank as well as other actors in the global governance of education have presented the future as crisis prone, unpredictable, uncontrollable and risky. Rather than asking questions about what brought into the situation or about the role of international organisations in not preventing them, the responsibility is being placed on the individual learner who needs to acquire a crisis prone skill-set in which resilience takes a central role.

In a recent paper, Michele Schweisfurth (2023) analyses the phenomenon she terms “disaster didacticism”, which she likens to disaster capitalism, in a reference to Naomi Klein's (2007) book, The Shock Doctrine. A World Bank staffer, Harry Patrinos, said in 2018 that a crisis is a decision point, an opportunity. The head of the OECD's education and skills directorate, Andreas Schleicher, wrote in his book, World Class, that reform is more easily undertaken in crisis conditions (Schleicher, 2018). At the moment, the digitalisation of pedagogy is presented as a panacea to the learning crisis, exacerbated by COVID (unarguably a crisis), as we heard from Professor Sato yesterday. International organisations have partnered with Ed Tech companies, as we see with UNESCO's Global Partnership for Learning and the World Bank's Digital Development Partnerships. And following the precedent of PISA and similar exercises, measurement has come to be presented by international organisations as instrumental to attempts to fix what they portray as the “learning crisis”.

My argument here is that stories of crisis now typically drive policies that are not emancipatory but ultimately regressive. Rather than taking claims of crisis for granted, we need to examine how crises are often narrated or constructed in order to drive education reforms that prescribe universal top-down solutions in the name of “efficiency” and “what works”, deflecting any criticism of established hierarchies of power and knowledge. Crisis narratives also serve to legitimate the appearance of new actors in the landscape of the global governance of education, such as philanthropic foundations and private corporations, whose educational promises are often aligned with particular interests or agendas. These actors make promises that are often motivated by profit considerations and promote a technocratic, narrowly utilitarian approach to education that exacerbates inequalities.

Bryan:

I am going to be talking about a specific illustration of some of the ideas that Maren has just presented to you. Let me remind you of Winston Churchill's famous line “We should never let a good crisis go to waste”; this is probably a good place to start. This sentiment applied to the contemporary historical moment is nicely illustrated by this New Yorker cartoon which depicts some rather powerful-looking men and a woman in suits. It reads: “While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit”. I have chosen this cartoon as the entry-point to my discussion of crisis discourses because I think it really captures something of the psyche or architecture of the evolving global governance landscape to which Maren just referred. My presentation centres around the mobilisation of the crisis narratives at the United Nations Transforming Education Summit which took place at the UN Headquarters in New York in September 2022. I am specifically interested in how the crisis in education is discursively constituted, in whose interests and with what effect.

Bob Lingard and Professor Rizvi suggest that policy narratives always represent problems or crises in certain ways and from a particular point of view, in order to give legitimacy to specific proposals and solutions. With this in mind, I want to briefly consider the framing of crisis narratives within the Transforming Education Summit which was promoted by its organisers as a turning point for global debate over education policy, a milestone for achieving sustainable development through quality education, and a conceptual and political platform for transforming education. Over two thousand stakeholders participated in this Summit and the stated purpose was to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda, to mobilise “action, ambition, solidarity, and solutions”. The Summit's starting point was the characterisation of education as experiencing a dramatic triple crisis of equity, quality and relevance. In a paper on the deradicalisation of development education and global citizenship education in a new global governance landscape, Yoko Mochizuki and I coined the phrase “crisis transformation” to challenge the taken-for-grantedness of crisis narratives in education and to consider how crisis discourse is mobilised to legitimise a digital revolution, reconfiguring public education as a marketplace for the goods, platforms and services of private corporations (Bryan & Mochizuki, 2023). Allied to this is a skillification agenda, designed to fulfil the needs of an increasingly digitalised “brain-based” economy that places a premium on cerebral or human-centric skills. In our paper, Yoko and I suggest that the Transforming Education Summit represents a major amplification, consolidation and solidification of private philanthropists' grip over education, not least because this summit was the first time that major philanthropic actors, who describe themselves as the “Education Philanthropy Community”, issued a joint statement articulating their role in policy advocacy, partnership building and knowledge brokering for “evidence-based” policymaking. The statement by philanthropic actors supporting education, signed by such heavy hitters as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Barbara Foundation, the MasterCard foundation and the Lego foundation, was welcomed by the UN as a strong signal that private foundations are eager to leverage their influence, resources and tools for transforming education.

The Summit itself, in the report summarising its “outcomes” (UN, 2023a), encourages further mobilisation of private foundations and the private sector in cooperation and coordination with member states. Entirely absent is any recognition of the risks associated with increased private sector involvement in education, such as those identified by Robert Arnove over 40 years ago, when he suggested that philanthropic foundations undermine democratic societies because they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth with the capacity to shape the public policy agenda in their interests (Arnove, 1980). One of the key features of philanthropy's heightened ambition in global educational governance concerns efforts to advance neurologically-inflected notions of “competencies”, which are portrayed as instrumental in generating a productive, mentally healthy, resilient, and skilled workforce of happy – and crucially employable – citizens. One of the discussion papers informing the summit (UN, 2023a) defines transforming education as a matter of empowering learners with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to be resilient, adaptable and prepared for an uncertain and complex future, while actively and creatively contributing to human and planetary well-being and sustainable societies. That is one of the very few places where any real attempt to define “transformative education” is actually made in the documents associated with the summit.

The figure of the ideal learning citizen, imbued with social-emotional skills, such as optimism, personal agility, positivity, hopefulness, resilience, flexibility and other forms of affective “capital”, looms large in the reimagining of education performed by the UN and other international organisations. One of the side events of this Summit was convened and chaired by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who also heads the Global Happiness Institute. The session was concerned with deepening the impact of education for sustainable development through social-emotional learning and “happiness”. Both the Transforming Education Summit and Sachs' Happiness Institute advance what Glenn Adams and his colleagues call “neoliberal selfways”, the core features of which include a sense of radical abstraction from social and material context, as well as an entrepreneurial approach to the self as an ongoing development project, whereby individual growth and personal fulfilment depend crucially on “affect regulation” (Adams, Estrada-Villalta, Sullivan, & Markus, 2019). Instead of cultivating global citizens who are committed to addressing political issues, such as resource allocation, recognition and redistribution, deepening the impact of education for sustainable development is preoccupied with subjective happiness, well-being and affect regulation in order to inculcate self-reliant, self-responsible, self-managing and above all else, resilient citizen subjects. This logic, I contend, enables the political to be avoided by masking systemic inequalities as individual problems, thereby diverting energy away from the pursuit of global justice and equality.

I wrap up by quoting Robert Arnove who, writing around 30 years after his original critique of philanthropy, contends that the growth of philanthropy is corrosive of democracy and democratic processes and pre-emptive of more radical structural approaches to social change (Arnove & Pinede, 2007). He stresses that it is still overwhelmingly foundations drawing on profits derived from the existing social system that determine what issues merit society's attention, who will study them, which results will be disseminated and which recommendations will shape public policy. Decisions that should be made by publicly elected officials are thus delegated to institutions and individuals who cannot conceive of changing, in any profound way, a system from which they derive their profits and power.

Fernando:

My presentation is entitled “Crisis in Education Policy: The Case of Sri Lanka”. Due to the prolonged ethnic conflict, youth uprisings, language barriers and a widening gap between the rich and the poor, among other factors, many actors have developed a special interest in Sri Lanka's education system. Our own political authorities, international organisations, teachers, parents, the media – all typically see Sri Lanka's history of political unrest as largely grounded in decisions related to education policy (DeVotta & Ganguly, 2019; Rawat, 2022; Hewage, 2020). The policy implemented in 1945 (Alawattegama, 2020), on the cusp of independence for Ceylon, seems in many respects quite forward thinking, even from our 21st century perspective; in the middle of the twentieth century, Ceylon was at the forefront of Asian societies when it came to universalising access to basic education. But as education became intertwined with political competition in the years after independence, and implicated in increasingly bitter disputes over distribution of public-sector jobs amongst a more educated workforce (especially as the economy became more stagnant), rival narratives of educational crisis took hold (Little & Hettige, 2013).

Sri Lanka's pursuit of education for all was associated with an expansion of the welfare system in the mid-20th century, supported initially by sustained economic growth as well as historically accumulated resources. In the early post-independence years, when the national economy was one of Asia's most successful, spending on public education was up to 4% of total GDP during the 1950s and 1960s (Tilak, 1992). However, this percentage saw a steady decline in subsequent decades, largely due to increasing military expenditure owing to political turmoil and ethnic conflict. In 2012, the Sri Lankan government's spending on education was less than 2% of GDP 1960s (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012), and between 1987 and 2017, education spending declined at an average annual rate of 1.97% (UNICEF, 2019). Current estimates show that government spending on education stood at 2.5% of GDP in 2023 (World Bank, 2023), but the allocation of Rs 237 billion lags significantly behind spending on the defence, health and transport sectors (Department of National Planning, 2023). Furthermore, 90% of the allocated budget is spent on salaries (UNICEF, 2022), leaving only 10% for infrastructural development, mid-day meal programmes for underprivileged schools and subsidies for free uniforms and instructional materials. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nation Children's Fund (UNICEF), Britain's Department for International Development, the Swedish International Development Agency, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation are all longstanding donors to the Sri Lankan education sector. Superficially, the accumulated contributions of so many donors appears positive, but on closer inspection the sheer number of actors and their lack of cooperation, conflicts of interest and overlapping projects make for an uncoordinated pattern of implementation, and a decidedly mixed record in educational development (Sanmugeswaran, 2021; Rameez, Fowsar, & Lumna, 2020; Kadirgamar, 2020).

Attempts to implement a sector-wide approach to handling development funding from donors have not been successful. This failure arises from conflicts of interest between various parties involved. While education is standardised through country-wide tests, this forced standard only lowers the quality of education as the lack of coordination between the provincial government's promises and actual developmental efforts exacerbates gaps in infrastructure provision and access to facilities. Efforts to bring the project officers of various donors under the authority of the Ministry of Education continually fail, as the salaries paid by the project-based entities and their other resources and facilities far exceed anything the public sector can offer. There is stubborn resistance to attempts to centralise and coordinate project-based approaches, not least because donor agencies are keen to “brand” their distinctive contributions so as to ensure “accountability” and demonstrate to funding providers where and how their money has been spent (Little & Hettige, 2013; Sanmugeswaran, 2021; Tennakoon, 2022).

Ultimately, most of the international organisations providing financial aid also base their policies on a neoliberal outlook, giving priority to decentralisation and deregulation, privatisation of educational provision and involvement of profit-making educational enterprises, on the premise that market-based approaches are “efficient”. Against the backdrop of a chronically weak and underfunded public sector, this has led to an exacerbation of inequalities in the distribution of educational opportunities (Tennakoon, 2022). Although the growth of private-sector investment in education may seem positive, an expanded pattern of access mediated by fees has made financial resources an increasingly significant hurdle to educational access for many (especially beyond the elementary level) (Little & Hettige, 2013); Nawastheen (2019); Priyashantha et al. (2022).

Data from the Human Development Index also indicate a correlation between educational levels and economic prosperity; but correlation, notoriously, does not necessarily indicate causation. As the Sri Lankan economic crisis in 2020 (and the island's prior economic record) illustrates, the promise that enhanced access to education and elevated educational “outcomes” will promote economic growth has been broken again and again (Maitra & Chakraborty, 2021). The Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness of 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008 were used as frameworks for guiding donors' behaviour and facilitating progress. While initially many donors agreed to implement a sector-wide approach, the World Bank pioneered moves towards adopting the Accra Agenda to guide its educational work. But it was precisely the leadership of the World Bank and its attempt to impose a universal framework that made other donors wary. They stressed the objective of country ownership, alignment of aid with country goals, harmonisation of the provision of aid by various donors and a focus on results and mutual accountability. In Sri Lanka, successive governments have struggled to take full ownership of their own development agendas, while donor talk of respecting national leadership has not always been matched by action. Just as education in Sri Lanka has contributed to ethnic tensions, youth uprisings and other political tensions and crises, global agendas and international influences have played an important role in shaping and constraining the choices of national policymakers there.

Elfert:

Regarding Fazal's presentation, I think it is a very good idea to use Habermas at the moment because, being from the Frankfurt School, he was very concerned about the tendencies of institutions and organisations to develop rationalistic and instrumentalist attitudes and the oppressive structures of bureaucracy. He wrote about the ideology of technology and science and also about the legitimation problems of late capitalism which require the manipulation of the masses for political leaders to maintain their power. I think these are all phenomena that we are witnessing today. So Habermas' work is very relevant to our times. Also, you talked about the life world and the system world, and noted that the life world is being increasingly colonised by the system world. We can see that in education, which has been standardised and impoverished by testing according to global agendas and measurement. Also, with respect to Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, this has today been deeply infiltrated by state and corporate power. His concepts are really useful.

Coming to Audrey, I think one way in which we see the system world colonising the life world involves reconfiguring public education as a marketplace, to be exploited by private corporations. The crisis narrative keeps people constantly on their toes and makes them tolerate things like declining living standards, that they would otherwise not easily accept. You talked about the 2022 Transforming Education Summit, and there is going to be another in September 2024, the UN Summit for the Future, for which there is a policy brief on the internet which talks about managing global shocks. The World Economic Forum brings out risk reports on a regular basis. There is also a new vision for the United Nations – “UN 2.0” – which talks about delivering better results in progress towards the SDGs in part through digital innovation foresight and behavioural science (UN, 2023b). Where Audrey's presentation and mine were similar, I think, is that we both critically view crisis narratives typically as moves by international organisations to promote certain vested interests, such as corporate interests.

Professor Fernando discussed crises that were born out of a range of socio-political factors, but I think we all emphasised the role of education in reproducing hierarchies of power and politics. Other overlapping points related to the promises of education, intertwined with promises of social mobility, higher incomes and so forth that have remained unfulfilled.

Vickers:

I have a question for Audrey, but to some extent, for any of you. It is perhaps not so much a question as a comment. Maren mentioned the Transforming Education Summit. I was also thinking about the Futures of Education Report that UNESCO produced a couple of years ago, with the subtitle “A new social contract for education”. When I saw that concept on the cover, I was hopeful that the report would delve a lot more than reports of that kind typically do into what needs to change in society in order to make possible the kind of education we might really want for ourselves or our children. In fact, though, when you read the report, it is still primarily talking about education as a means of solving a range of social problems or crises. Audrey was primarily talking about the role of psychology or psychologisation in narratives of crises and this idea that the stock response to whatever crisis we are facing is to empower children or citizens in general to make them more resilient and socially-emotionally competent. She was critiquing the fashionable argument that education's primary role, in response to our pervasive crises, is to strengthen you as an individual, endowing you with qualities that will enable you – or your brain – to respond positively to crisis-induced stress and contribute to a better communal, societal response. But ironically, alongside or stemming from all this emphasis on psychology and individual responsibility comes an exacerbation of psychological damage, because this narrative of education as a crisis response mechanism piles more and more pressure on individuals, especially young people. Fazal very appropriately mentioned, at the end of his presentation, climate change. This is very much at the forefront of the minds of younger people and should be at the forefront of all our minds, but here we are talking about crises and it has rated just one brief mention. Why is that not front and centre of this whole discussion? When it comes to the climate crisis, what are young people going to do about it? They cannot do anything. The talk we often here about education, or specifically schooling, as a solution to the climate crisis is an atrocious lie; if adults do not act now, the world will already be fried by the time our children emerge from the education system. That is a comment. Would you like to comment on that comment?

Rizvi:

I think education has always promised more than the state's capacity to deliver. Educational promises are always exaggerated and that has been true in the past as well as today. We have promised all kinds of things that have not been realised. When they are not realised, then the state and the system has to do something about it. It has to actually provide a response and this is where outsourcing as a way of realising the promises comes in. We cannot afford to run a properly funded state system, say politicians, so let us bring in the corporations. Let us bring in “the people”, or civil society. Let us do privatisation. I am always astonished at how the government of Vietnam, for example – a socialist government – has allowed the amount of privatisation that is going on there. That is because the state until recently did not have the capacity, the money to be able to create a public sector that met the requirements of massified expectations, not just the expectations of 5% of the population but of 95% of the population. As a result, the state has quite often seen itself as having no other choice but to privatise as a way of actually outsourcing its lack of capacity.

I think the same thing can be said about the legitimation and motivation problems associated with the massified system. And all the conditions that exist that have led to a great deal of lack of motivation, lack of legitimation, lack of rationality. One response is to make people resilient in the face of the difficulties they will inevitably experience; for that we need to find tools, and psychologisation is one of the tools that has now become prevalent. Not only is psychology and social and emotional learning becoming an industry, as Audrey has rightly pointed out, but it is also a response to the motivation and rationality crisis. I think that is the thing we need to understand. The state itself is in a contradictory kind of a position where it recognises the materialities of the crisis but then has to generate an idiographic or ideological language or discourse, in order to respond to the materiality of the crisis. In other words, it is a very complicated relationship between the material aspects of crises and the response in discursive terms or in ideological terms to those materialities which are truly recognised by the state, by international organisations and so forth. Instead of just pointing out that the state is not doing x, y or z, we have to analyse how the contradictions that states face prompt the adoption of solutions which lead to the hollowing out of the public space or public sphere.

Vickers:

In a material sense, the problem comes down to tax. And there has been talk of standardising corporation tax or internationally agreeing on a minimum level, which will have implications for the resources that states have to fund public education. However, at the UN's Transforming Education Summit, was finance high up on the agenda? I do not think so. The fact that the philanthropic organisations were given such a high profile reflected how the focus was being deflected elsewhere. You mentioned a country like Vietnam and the limitations of the government there in terms of its capacity to source the revenue needed to publicly fund education. To some extent, the Vietnamese government, like many others, accepted the narrative that legitimises the role of the private sector in education. I am wondering, in the case of Sri Lanka, to what extent the state was able to resist the narratives of privatisation. Would you like to comment on that, Prof. Fernando? Or Audrey, would you like to first pick up on any points?

Bryan:

To go back to the question around why the climate crisis is not being foregrounded in the discourses and narratives. Of course there is always an introductory nod to the severity of the climate crisis which, it goes without saying, is an actually existing crisis. But the big elephant in the room in that conversation is that companies are deeply implicated in the exacerbation of the climate crisis, not least because of things like data centres that produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, it is precisely this energy-hungry “Big Data” that is required for all of the forms of learning that tech corporations are promoting: personalised learning demands massive global databases, tracking various dimensions of individual students' educational performance. These energy-intensive tech corporations are themselves a big part of the climate problem. Therefore, besides a perfunctory nod in the direction of the climate crisis, why would it actually be examined in a way that would demand interrogation of who the culprits are?

Regarding your other question about young people and the responsibilisation of youth. One of the reasons why I have such difficulties with social emotional learning as a paradigm is because none of the problems related to climate crisis are really addressed, such as the need to really grapple with its affective dimensions: climate anxiety, trauma and so on. We need to take that seriously. But social emotional learning to my mind just exudes toxic positivity. We are essentially asking young people to be happily bullet proof and robot proof. But what about all these other aspects of what it means to be human? In a way it is refreshing that we have this new vocabulary emerging around the climate crisis, because social emotional learning completely denies all of these other negative forms of affect that actually have powerful capabilities in terms of spurring social change and the youth climate movement. We need to legitimise negative emotions like rage and anger and to really harness their capacity to bring about genuine forms of transformation.

Vickers:

Absolutely! Are any of you here angry? You should be! In a moment we will move to getting some questions from the audience, but if you would like to respond to my question, Prof. Fernando, that would be great.

Fernando:

It is very difficult for me to answer the question about the Sri Lankan state's capacity to resist calls for privatisation. In Sri Lankan society, as across South Asia, patron–client relationships are very vital and complex, and the state – including state-run education – tends to operate as a huge patronage network. These patronage networks entwine politicians not only at the local level but also at the provincial and the national level. After the introduction of economic liberalisation policies in 1978, there was a major shift in the education system, the qualifications regime and the economic structure. A number of state-owned enterprises were privatised, but the privatisation push met with a lot of resistance. Then the government elected in 2005 was rather nationalistic and announced that they did not want to privatise anything. For ten years, they stuck to this slogan and it helped them to maintain their patron-client relationships and their voter base. In 2015, a government was elected that was more committed to elements of privatisation, partly out of a desire to challenge entrenched networks of patronage. But after only four years, the nationalist-populists were back in power again. Privatisation in Sri Lanka, especially of education in general and higher education in medicine, has been difficult and patchy. There is a lot of private provision of elite schooling, but if someone wants to privatise state universities, that is essentially impossible. For example, the Sri Lankan government has not been able to introduce medical courses in private universities; and when it comes to talk of privatised higher education, there is a lot of resistance from young people losing equal access to education.

Vickers:

So, what you are basically saying is that the state or the public sector has been captured by elites who are using it as a source of patronage and, in that situation, it is difficult to transform the public sector to ensure that it better performs what are supposed to be its core functions. I just want to quickly raise an issue related to what Audrey said about responsibilisation and psychology, specifically as it relates to post-conflict recovery, reconciliation in a society like Sri Lanka. I have been doing some work recently on Sri Lanka, looking particularly at the issues of post-conflict reconciliation following the civil war that ended in 2009. The history of that conflict and post-independence Sri Lanka is always glossed over or entirely ignored, at least in the school curriculum. In the civics curriculum, there is some discussion of “conflict” as an issue, especially in textbooks for the more senior school grades. But those civics texts do not talk about the specifics of conflict in Sri Lanka at all. Instead, “conflict” is decontextualised and depoliticised; the text explains that conflict “begins in the mind of the individual” and identifies individual mental states as the ultimate source of conflict. In other words, what we see in the Sri Lankan school curriculum is seemingly a radically psychologising and depoliticised approach to conflict. I wonder to what extent that is understandable and necessary in a society like Sri Lanka, where the memory of conflict is still very raw; or whether this approach is counter-productive. Is avoiding confrontation with the sources of conflict essentially storing up problems for the future?

Fernando:

After the end of the war, many of us hoped that the government would produce a concrete solution to the problems of social division and inter-ethnic tension, but there was resistance from nationalistic movements. Most Sri Lankan governments do not have a stable majority, so no one wants to take concrete action. There are many hidden tensions bubbling beneath the surface of politics. This happened in the 1971 JVP insurgency and again in 1989, when people felt under pressure to remain silent regarding some of the key issues that were causing discontent. Something similar has been happening since 2009.

Vickers:

My sense is that there are a number of NGOs, especially in Colombo (the Sri Lankan capital), that devote themselves to educational issues and we are seeing a lot of these ideas related to social emotional learning being taken up or adapted by these organisations and sold as solutions to crisis in Sri Lanka. And they tend to be sold as very decontextualised, depoliticised solutions. One of the reasons why local NGOs latch onto SEL discourse may also be because they are aware of the popularity of this globally, and see alignment with the SEL movement as a way of sourcing funding from organisations outside of Sri Lanka that are promoting these ideas.

Fernando:

Yes, I think most of these NGOs are clustered around Colombo, not in very marginalised or remote areas. Whether messages about conflict resolution and education are going to the right groups or communities is the important question that you should ask. Colombo is not the place where this work is most needed, but it is where NGO activity is concentrated.

Vickers:

Yes, Colombo is very much detached from the rest of the country.

Rizvi:

I just want to say that I really like the term that Audrey just used: toxic positivity. It is very well crafted. I have been working with Bhutan over the last three years and it has, over the past 30 years, promoted itself as the “happiness kingdom”: well-being, mindfulness and Buddhist ideas about all those things are central to its branding. I am using the term branding very deliberately. What I find interesting is that there are people in the poorer parts of Bhutan who are disgusted by the toxic positivity of happiness because they feel that they have huge poverty, huge problems of inequality, etc. Yet, their country is being promoted as the happiness kingdom. Youth unemployment is huge. When I presented this to people who are in political power in Bhutan, their response was that it is really quite interesting because the notion of happiness that we promoted in the 1990s was generalised community happiness rather than individualised psychological happiness. Then all these people from outside Bhutan had come along and had brought in social emotional learning, and all those vocabularies that have, from generalised community happiness, made the concept of happiness highly individualised. There is a role that international organisations and international educational systems – for example, master's programme in Australia – are playing in reshaping or rearticulating the meaning of happiness.

Question 1: A Nation at Risk and The World Education Crisis were major textbooks when I was studying at university in 1984. My question is, “Did we lose our dignity as academicians or education policy specialists to industry or Ministries of Industry or Trade?”. I think ideas of crisis have been debated by academicians but today, work on the SDGs and all those progressive new visions of education policy is very much shaking hands with industry. For example, I was doing a lot of work with European professors in the early 2000s, and many were complaining about the Bologna Process [which promoted a standardisation of European degree programmes, which shorter periods of study, etc.]. They felt that Bologna was undermining their academic dignity and forcing them to accept vocational education as part of their empire.

Elfert: I understand that you are wondering whether academicians have lost their soul by shaking hands with industry. I do think that it is highly problematic that private corporations and funders have become very influential in higher education institutions, particularly in the sciences. This is a big problem in my view, because if you are being funded by a funder who has a particular agenda, your research may tend to be aligned with the interests of the funder. That is definitely a big problem and we also see it in international organisations. When the UN launched its Global Compact in the 1990s, it started involving and partnering with corporations and private actors, and that has become more and more prevalent in recent years. We are seeing a shift from multilateralism to multi-stakeholderism. Multi-stakeholder groups, such as the World Economic Forum, are becoming very influential. I think it has gotten out of hand.

Bryan: For me, one of the major difficulties with those relationships has to do with the question of what constitutes evidence or what is perceived as constituting evidence. We have seen an increasing trend towards “what works” ideologies, and that is shifting towards real time data because technology exists to make all sorts of very complex patterns come together. This raises a lot of questions about the role of more traditional social science orientated approaches to data collection. For me, that is an important question in terms of who gets to determine what constitutes evidence, and what it means for qualitative approaches where the focus is upon developing rich, deep understandings of the complexities of educational problems and issues. Often, industry and private funders are not interested in that at all: they just want simple “solutions” to narrowly-defined problems. So, I think it is a really valuable question.

Vickers: Often industry and private funders are not interested in that kind of research, and your question relates to the role of academics and the implications of narratives of economic or productivity crisis for conceptions of the academic mission. Certainly, in many societies around the world, we have seen those narratives being weaponised to attack the role of the social sciences and humanities. That has very much been the case here in Japan and, in fact, specifically in relation to scholarship on education. I think eight years ago (in 2015) Shimomura Hakubun, the then Education Minister, publicly said: “Why are we funding social sciences and humanities in national universities? What is it useful for? Why don't we stop this and spend money on areas of research that are actually going to get the economy moving?” Although that aspiration was not fully realised in government policy, there was a significant attack on education departments in national universities, particularly affecting critical research on education policy. It has become more difficult to get funding, not just private funding skewed by corporate agendas, but also state funding reflecting political agendas that are problematic. This is, to some extent, a worldwide problem but it has deep roots in this region where there is a strong mentality of catch-up modernisation and the idea that education should above all serve the objective of promoting national strength and economic development. From the very beginning of the modern university system in East Asia, state-funded universities have existed primarily to serve the needs of the state and the economy, rather than to offer critical reflection on dominant economic and political agendas.

Question 2 (Miki Sugimura, Sophia University): When you talk about crisis, you emphasise the importance of global governance and international organisations. And when we think about global governance, for example the role of UNESCO, each member state has a different political orientation or perception of its national interest. You have just touched on the cases of Sri Lanka and Bhutan. How can this be reconciled with the demands of global governance? I have recently been involved in discussions over the revision to the 1974 Declaration [on Education for Human Rights and International Understanding], and it is clear that each member state starts from considerations of national interest, even when they talk about peace, international understanding and cooperation. I wonder if you have any comments on this.

Vickers: Yes, there is the problem of “warring” national visions of peace. Does anyone have any response to this?

Elfert: I think you are right: the ideas and views of the various member states are paramount, and we see this playing out in all multilateral organisations, even though their governing structures are different. The OECD has a smaller membership consisting of rich countries. UNESCO has much broader universal membership and there is a lot of conflict that plays out there. That is also a reason why the USA has sometimes stayed away because it found that other groups or camps were becoming influential and it was difficult for the USA to steer that organisation. There are absolutely national interests and conflicts about agendas that play out intensively also in the UN with the different wars and conflicts that are going on. But then there are instruments to bring everyone under the same umbrella and that is the global agendas – the Sustainable Development Goals, for example – that serve as a harmonising framework that usually all members work towards, and these agendas trickle down to affect all of our lives. Any organisation that raises funds in education, for example, nowadays needs to demonstrate alignment with the SDGs. University staff websites point out ways that we contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. It trickles down into almost everybody's lives.

Question 3: In the presentation a while ago, we heard the phrase “The learning crisis is a teaching crisis”. Can you comment on talk of a crisis of academia (or academics)? There is great pressure these days on countries or governments to participate in the OECD's PISA assessments; at least this is a big question in my country, The Philippines. Does not joining PISA make our country less of a country? So, do we have an academic crisis or is this something manufactured or imagined?

Question 4: I have a comment. You talked about crisis narratives and how international organisations create such narratives. I am equally interested in how governments and nation states adopt these crisis narratives. I did some research on COVID-19, and during the pandemic everyone was in crisis and no one knew what to do including the governments and international organisations, so there was no leadership. In the absence of leadership at the national and international levels, teachers became active in this scenario as they self-mobilised. They created Facebook groups. I observed a lot of solidarity. There were no top-down instructions as to what to do, and we witnessed some very creative bottom-up approaches. In the later phase, we saw international organisations become very active as they created coalitions and developed crisis narratives and called for unified approaches to the crisis. And then governments, who were very happy to outsource solutions to international organisations and multinational corporations such as Microsoft. But perhaps you can comment on the role of teachers who, as I observed, were very active in the first phase of the pandemic, and also comment on the role that was later assumed by international organisations as they sought to assume leadership in guiding the educational response to the COVID crisis.

Vickers: Yes, that is an example of an actual crisis initially opening up a space for teachers to exercise professional autonomy, only for that space later to be hijacked or occupied by states or multilateral actors seeking to promote their own agendas.

Question 5 (Xiaomin Li, Beijing Normal University): I would like to invite you to share a bit more about the temporary dimension of crisis narratives and legitimation because I am thinking of Susan Robertson (a professor at Cambridge University) who has a paper about international organisations colonising the future of education. She takes a historical perspective by tracing back and Maren (Elfert) and Christian Ydesen, you have another paper which looks at the OECD's Future of Education and Skills programme and how this is constructing a “promissory” vision of the future. It appears to me that these crisis narratives were used in the past and continue to operate in the present. In what ways do you think the narrative strategies or techniques used in the past are similar to or different from those we see today?

Rizvi: Basically, I think what we have seen over the years is that crisis discourse and language have always been there. Sometimes, it is much more intensive and immediate than at other times. What is happening now, through datafication, is that there is a new governance technique, called anticipatory governance, that is being tried out. This means that various statistical methods and digitally-based, probabilistic technologies that we have developed are now being applied to thinking about how to name and manage crises. I suspect that this technology is only going to become more and more ambitious, sophisticated and complex. A consequence of this is that those people who have access to these technologies will become incredibly influential, while others with different orientations, perhaps more ethical and political, will get side-lined. So I think increasingly rampant technologisation has its consequences for the ways in which we might think about crisis in the future.

There is one other comment I would like to make before I pass on. We sometimes talk about triple crises of equity, quality and relevance. Quite often, these three are presented as parallel crises, but little work is done to see how our conceptions of relevance affect how we think about quality or how our ideas about quality affect how we think about equity. In other words, those three concepts are interrelated. That leads me to comment on industry and our cosiness with industry. Industry is increasingly defining relevance, so that determining the content of relevance has effectively been outsourced to corporations. That has led to us trying to understand quality in terms of how effectively education caters to what industry wants. So, in other words, our ideas of equity and quality have become dependent on our understanding of relevance and how relevance should be thought about.

Vickers: If you want to see a manifestation of this side-lining of approaches to education that do not draw primarily on technology or science (or psychology conceived as a science); if you want to see an example of the side-lining of social sciences, humanities or philosophy-based approaches to education that engage with political, social and cultural context, then take a look at the Reimagining Education report published by UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Delhi (Duraiappah et al., 2022). This features a whole section – or “Working Group” – on “Context”, which was largely written by social scientists interested in education. But that section of the report ended up being buried by the institute that commissioned it (MGIEP). MGIEP then produced a “Summary for Decision Makers” that enthusiastically promoted science- and technology-based “solutions”. I encourage you to take a look at that, to scrutinise the section on “Context”, and then notice how that is ignored in the main report.

Fernando: I think governments in Sri Lanka have tried to create hope and aspiration, which is a good political strategy. People keep voting in the hope that something better will happen in the future, if only we can somehow resolve the immediate crisis and minimise its impact. I think about how governments have adapted or responded to crises such as the civil war, the tsunami or the 2022 economic crisis. They always try to create hope and force the people to keep on hoping that something good will happen in the future while telling them that we will try our best to resolve the negative impacts of the current crisis situation. Hope and aspirations have emerged as important concepts when it comes to justifying or explaining the limitations of government responses to crisis.

Vickers: Hope sounds great and empowering. But, then it is often coupled with a narrative that says: those of you who cast doubt on the narrative of hope, what i your problem? You are enemies of the nation. You are talking us down! You are trying to undermine this happy, collective realisation of our true national destiny. And if you are undermining this, you are a traitor!

Elfert: I would like to start in the reverse order. I think that international organisations have used crisis narratives to push certain agendas. I mentioned the example of the World Bank’s 1974 report, which invoked a crisis narrative to claim intellectual authority where the World Bank was moving from a funder to an intellectual organisation and then claimed to be a policy shaper. I do think that the promises were different, as Euan Auld and I discuss in a forthcoming paper (Auld & Elfert, 2024), because, in the 1960s, there was a planning approach – very technocratic and rationalistic – and the promise that was made was that education would lead to economic growth and prosperity. And, later in the age of globalisation and neoliberalism, the promise was to build a globally competitive knowledge society.

Today, though, it seems disorder is the new order. We do not really have much hope as we are in a perpetual state of crisis-induced anxiety. The crisis narratives are similar in some respects, but there are differences in the promises that have been made. There was a question about how governments adopt (or hijack) the crisis narratives and you said that during COVID, first there was self-mobilisation around the crisis and then international organisations adopted these crisis narratives and outsourced the solutions. I agree with the questioner about this. I also thought this was strange, because at the beginning of the pandemic there were more varied local and even national responses, and that seemed to make sense. Every context is different, so why would the responses not be different? But then policy debate all became very top down and everybody did the same. UNESCO had a learning coalition with many Ed Tech partners and, as various studies have observed, international organisations took a very homogenised approach to online learning and the adoption of digital technology (e.g. Shultz & Viczko, 2021).

Regarding the last question (from the Philippines): I agree with you. I think there is increasing PISA fatigue, as some scholars have recently noted (Sorensen, Ydesen, & Robertson, 2021). And I think that is why we are seeing the OECD turn to well-being, happiness and social-emotional learning – because people are starting to get tired of these narrow, standardised PISA tests. We can certainly talk about an academic crisis with so many strikes going on, but I think I will leave it at that as far as my comments now are concerned.

Bryan: The UNESCO's Futures of Education report has provoked quite a lot of criticism, but one of its strengths is how it positions and frames teachers as professionals. It really foregrounds teachers' autonomy and trust in their professionalism. For me, that was really refreshing, when you consider the prevalence today of moves to de-professionalise and “technify” teaching. So, I think there is a lot to be gained from celebration of the positive, hopeful aspects of the report. In relation to the question about how governments and nation states have adopted crisis narratives, in the Irish context there has been a wholesale adoption of the “crisis” framing. We have just undergone major curricular reform at primary and secondary level. To me, it is deeply concerning to see the extent to which concepts such as agency have been stripped of any structural connotation; it is literally a wholesale adoption of OECD's discourse around the resilient learner, the “learning compass” and individual “well-being”. The entire curriculum is underpinned by a responsibilising, self-managing narrative exhorting the promotion of “resilience”. It remains to be seen how this will be interpreted by teachers and schools. This is where I think we need traditional social scientific methods, qualitative ethnographic work, to see how these ideas are being taken up. But at an official level, we see wholesale, uncritical adoption of crisis narratives and ideologies.

Vickers: The point about teachers and the emphasis on professional autonomy of teachers is a really good one I think. I hope this is something we will return to, and give more attention to, at future conferences.