Published In

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Subjects

Educational leadership, Postcolonialism, Globalization, Discursive psychology

Abstract

In 1928, the United States Government published the Meriam Report. Almost a century later, the 2023 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report was released by UNESCO. In this paper I put these documents in conversation to trace the common ideological threads woven into the transition from a colonial era to our globalised world of mass schooling. The two reports seemingly have distinct emphases. A fixation on imperial expansion, Indigenous assimilation, and administrative progress gives way to the centrality of measurement, human rights, and building a transnational community. There are differences in form, vocabulary, grammar, and medium. But there is a unity in the insistence on modern education as the solution for social progress. By analysing the discursive practices of official reports, I show a persistence in the underlying narratives and symbols of education. These draw on shared – but contingent – social imaginaries of modernity which, once recognised, can open to alternative reimaginations.

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

DOI

10.1080/03057925.2025.2483662

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43253

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