Welfare States: Education as a Cure-All, 1950–2007

Abstract

The first three decades following the Second World War were a golden age for Western European countries and for the West in general (Judt, 2005). Europe had inherited a set of institutions useful for reducing the constraints on growth: ‘It was […] fortuitous that the inheritance was favorable, since these kinds of deeply embedded social institutions are slow to change’ (Eichengreen, 2007, p.5). The institutions of the education state were such deeply embedded and slow-to-change institutions; however, they were challenged since the mid-seventies by profound social and political change, new technologies and communication, manifold collective political action, and by entrepreneurial initiatives of newly arising competitors at the global level. Economic, fiscal, technological, and legal globalization; more intergovernmental and supranational cooperation; the internationalization of numerous professional networks; and the omnipresence of worldwide benchmarking, evaluation, and accounting in education reflect major transitions in the context of national education policy, politics, and institutions. These changes include a loss of power over educational control at the national level for the formerly leading groups. The gains in power they once achieved by winning the intra-national power struggles in history are at stake at the turn of the millennium.