Over-educating the World? Exploring a Taboo in the International Development Discourse.

Mass education is now a worldwide feature of modern nation-states. This is true for primary and secondary education and increasingly for higher education and more recently lifelong learning. Strongly standardized forms of school organization, curriculum and educational purposes have spread rapidly throughout the world often highly detached from local realities and with clear signs of over-education, which can only be explained if education is understood as an ideology promoted at the world cultural level by international organizations. These are the main tenets of neoinstitutionalist world polity research on global educational expansion and will serve as a theoretical frame for this paper, which is based on qualitative analysis of education documents from a wide array of international organizations.