Which priorities and strategies for education?

Marvelously complex, education affects us all. Nearly everyone has advice to offer on education, perhaps the most contested of public policies. Still, none of us, novice or professional, is quite sure how it works. The World Bank's experts are apparently more confident. Detached clinicians, they offer the unambiguous terms and orderly logic that (some) economists and fiscal managers seem to require. In their search for global recommendations, not only education but public policy more generally become largely matters of technique and administration. What could have been a pragmatic vision turns out to be just pragmatic, and perhaps not even that. Education as interaction, education policy making as a participatory process, education decisions as locally contingent, and the education of a billion illiterate adults all get short shrift. As analytic method obscures both education content and process, education for all seems likely to remain a distant goal. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd