Our Student Fellow Ethel Ng has written the following post on her take on our ‘D for Decolonisation’ week.
Borrowing Trouble: New Orientalism in Education Policy Borrowing
Introduction
Both the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – who is responsible for the conception of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – and McKinsey & Company are well-established in the arena of global education influence. Recent decades have seen international actors increasingly garnering authority over education policy priorities, generating supposedly ‘universal’ and ‘neutral’ knowledge governance to advise on reforms. But what are the potential repercussions for social justice? How true is the ‘neutrality’ of the OECD and McKinsey?
For this week’s ‘D for Decolonisation’ blog, I delve into the neo-liberal Western-centric nature of their policy borrowing – with particular attention to East Asian education and legacy Orientalist narratives. I resolve that we must make a conscious commitment to decoloniality for the future of education.
The Power Players: OECD & McKinsey
There’s something to be said about the oversimplification and commodification of education – the complexities of education being reduced to numbers and rankings, neglecting cultural differences. Education becomes a product to be traded.
The OECD was founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. Its 38 current nation state members espouse commitments to liberal democracy and market economies, with the majority of OECD members having high-income Global North profiles. McKinsey was founded in 1926 and now boasts its position as a prestigious American multinational strategy and management consultancy giant.
Both are heavily invested in education as a means for economic competitiveness, with core education conceptions targeting efficiency, measurable skills, and replicable practices aligned with increasing human capital and prosperity. Commodifying and neoliberal rationale is interwoven through the subtext of every mention of ‘progress’, ‘ability’ and ‘student learning and completion outcomes’. Sharing an ‘epistemic community’ with other similar transnational policy actors (UNESCO, the World Bank, Pearson etc.) they often interact with East Asia as reference societies in ways that perpetuate post-colonial dynamics and Orientalist legacies.
The Rise of “New Orientalism”
Using Western-governed standards internationally possesses neo-colonial dimensions. One-size-fits-all policy templates and unnuanced perceptions of what constitutes ‘good education’ has formed a newer, but no less pervasive, Orientalism masked as scientific method. With McKinsey and the OECD effectively promoting a universal, hierarchical model, sentiments parallel the historic ‘Empire’, where ‘a single power overdetermines structures in a unitary way’.
The global trend for education policy borrowing has seen a rise of ‘East to West’ analysis and moral panic. Western media representation of East Asian schooling domination of international standardised tests, including PISA, has been characterised as aspiring yet threatening to the domestic economy. The postcolonial West/East dichotomy is enduring even in portrayals where East Asian societies are the ones lauded as ‘education utopias’ and as a ‘panacea for underperforming systems’.
Interestingly, looking across global education actors and their analysis of Eastern educational success, different types of Orientalism are at play – albeit all concluding with the sentiment of the East as a threat and growing anxiety. Slightly older interpretations tended to represent East Asian education as a torturous damnation to subject students to. More contemporary analysis curiously introduces more internal conflict – a concoction of both attraction and anxiety.
The British government began to reference East Asian education with increasing legitimacy regarding policy borrowing from 2010 onwards. Through the activities of McKinsey and the OECD, there emerges a ‘new Orientalism’. Most of their analytical and consultancy reports – despite examining different East Asian societies individually – conducted analysis by homogenising all data, and subsequently generalising and assigning the relevancy of conclusions to the majority of the Asian continent, in order to arbitrarily conceive of a universal model of excellence, transferrable across the globe. By maintaining such instrumentalist and commodifying attitudes towards East Asian education, the observations drawn by the OECD and McKinsey are prone to remaining overly simplistic and caricaturing.
To take Confucianism as an example, it is often indiscriminately prescribed as the be-all-end-all explainer for East Asian education practices. It is indivisible from stereotypes of rote learning, test orientations and the repression of creativity and critical thinking – the antagonist of Western, ‘humanising’, learner-centred pedagogies. To so uncritically ascribe differences in educational outcomes to generalisations of Confucianism, cheapens the global education discourse around identifying and interpreting other potential factors at play. Imposed homogeneity that bolsters essentialism, merely perpetuates the Global North’s epistemic violence and inadequate engagement with (or complete dismissal of) the Global South’s diversity. While the sociopolitical and economic landscape has quite dramatically changed over the last few decades, the stripped-back relationship between the West and East remains clouded with Orientalism, albeit a new Orientalism.
Conclusion
Remaining fiercely relevant to this day, the imperial project, resting on the back of coloniality, romanticising seamless linear progress, democracy, humanism and scientific reasoning. The UK’s poor PISA performance in comparison to East Asian societies has become a major concern for economically driven Western global education actors, who translate this as having negative implications for their respective economies. Moral panic has ensued, with the primary concern of Anglo-American nation-states being the threat of lost hegemonic superiority within global markets. More effort should be concentrated on working towards a more equitable, culturally sensitive model of education policy borrowing, breaking the dominance of Western-centred policy actors and holding open space for knowledges derived from plural cultures and traditions.
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