While 'national education' has regularly been invoked by post-1997 Hong Kong administrations, its pursuit has acquired new force and urgency since the introduction in 2020 of a National Security Law. Investigating the role of schooling in this reinvigorated project of thought reform, this article asks how far recent initiatives have merely…

Since the late 1980s, school curriculum revisions in Japan have sought to promote capabilities and dispositions that transcend subject boundaries and are often labelled 'competencies' in international curricular discourse. This study examines policy documents over the period, showing how Japanese policymakers have sought to navigate pressures…

We examine the ideal twenty-first century learner as discursively produced in recent future-oriented documents published by the OECD and UNESCO. Drawing inspiration from Bacchi's question 'What is the problem represented to be?', we identify a constellation of interrelated discourses that together craft an image of a post-political, resilient,…

This historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two…

Over the past decade, the OECD has gradually shifted its governing mechanism from promoting 'best practices' based on comparative data on pupils' cognitive skills to actively advocating for individual and collective well-being as an "alternative" and "ideal future." This article focuses on the OECD's use of 'techno-scientific…

Internationally, particularly in Western societies, the concept of multiculturalism tends to be associated with 'progressive' and liberal social visions promoting cultural diversity and minority rights. However, multiculturalism may not necessarily be a 'cure' for social division, but a 'veil' that covers political fractures and imbalances within…

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China's use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national 'branding' in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI.…