This paper explores the vocabulary and frameworks offered by two theories of public policy process: the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the narrative policy framework (NPF) and what they offer to the study of global education reform. The foci of ACF are policy subsystems, formation of advocacy coalitions around policy issues, and their…

In this article, we address the limitations of sustainable development as an orienting educational horizon of hope and change, given that mainstream development presumes the possibility of perpetual growth and consumption on a finite planet. Facing these limitations requires us to consider the inherently violent and unsustainable nature of our…

This paper discusses the phenomenon of teacher awards with particular reference to one bestowed in Spain. This phenomenon is analysed in line with the consequences of free market ideology in education and the ideology of influencers and followers. Drawing on qualitative research based in participant and non-participant observation, in-depth…

The UK education system is becoming increasingly dominated by exclusive economic and political ideology. The neoliberal agenda marketises young people and encourages them to take part in a competitive system. The rise of multi-academy trusts (MATs) further exacerbates an already inequitable system in which young people with special education needs…

This article explores the erosion of public education as a project of democratization. It locates this erosion in the neoliberal world order that has redefined our understanding of schooling the democratic citizen in terms of developing market assets. In it, Carl Anders Säfström investigates specifically how this shift is apparent in the ways in…

Character Education in the UK is often considered controversial through its perceived neoliberal individualizing of character, disregarding of young people's moral agency, and blindness to the effect of social structures. This article presents an alternative framework for character educators, focussed on the biographical narratives of the students…

After decades of a savage global capitalist nightmare both in the United States and around the globe, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The denial of the most basic elements of neoliberal fascism appears more difficult in the age of mass pandemics. Neoliberal violence now takes…

In the last two decades, global citizenship education (GCE) has become a catchphrase used by international and national educational agencies, as well as researchers, to delineate the increasing internationalisation of education, framed as an answer to the growing globalisation and the high values of citizenship. These developments, however, have…

This article offers a response to some recent critiques of character education in a UK context, in general, and the approach promoted by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, in particular. The article argues that critiques of current UK character education betray an inadequate grasp of significant factions within its group of advocates,…

There is a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon entitled 'The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct'. It shows three dinosaurs surreptitiously smoking cigarettes. Why would such a peripheral habit like burning some leaves cause an extinction? Like dinosaurs, neo-liberalism has had a bad press. There have been plenty of critiques of neo-liberalism, and…

In this article, we use the zombies as a metaphor for reforms in the Polish academy and a description of how neoliberalism works. According to the interpretation of the production of zombies as a critique of late capitalism, we want to show, by using an autoethnographic method, how subjectivity, relationships with others and the world are changing…

In thinking the passage from the "all-human cerebrum" (H.G. Wells) to what one might call the contemporary "all-too-human" cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the "all-too-transhuman" cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells's idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering…

In the past decades, neoliberalism has permeated (foreign) language education, as has been discussed by critical research in the fields of: curriculum theory, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language policy, language assessment, to name a few. Despite the fact that research on foreign language education and neoliberalism is certainly…

The student as consumer has emerged as a common motif and point of contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades, as part of the critique of the neoliberal educational reform agenda that followed Lyotard's (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. In addition, the consumer-orientated student has assumed a problematic presence…

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience--an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers--is in…