Relating development to quality of education: a study on the world bank's neoliberal policy discourse in education

Abstract

This article examines the way the World Bank policy discourse in education relates development to quality of education and the underlying agenda. It argues that development and education have been defined deficiently, adhering to neoliberal ideology that benchmarks economic outcome. The conceptual formulation of quality of education draws heavily from the business domain, which ensures operational compatibility between the pursued reductionist notion of development and the narrowed role of education it entails. In the World Bank's policy papers, this reductionist conceptualization of development and education, reinforced by corporatist construction of quality of education, facilitates the neoliberalization of education, mostly of higher education. This is textually worked out using effective discursive tools that "naturalize" the visibility of the neoliberal mandate, creating a moral obligatory aura camouflaged under a common sense-driven humanistic concern to achieve consensus. Recently, quality of education has been instrumentalized by the Bank to formulate a global super-structure for data collection and dissemination on learning outcomes to ensure neoliberal control and competition at all levels of education.