ABSTRACT
The story of education governance in Europe, much like most accounts narrating this old continent, is one of travel and prejudice. On the one hand, travel is integral to Europe, since most of what we identify with a degree of ‘Europeanness’ has always connected people and ideas through movement and mobility; education, either in its institutionalized or in its less formal guises, has always been central to the ‘traveling’ of cultures, practices and peoples around Europe. Paradoxically however, the national education system has always been relatively closed off; seen as a bounded entity in itself, it became one of the last fortresses of the nation-state against the predicament of ‘global’ dictates and shifts. Despite borrowings and ‘policy lessons’—which have largely been silenced by education historians for a long time (Lawn, 2008)—education has been one of the main pillars of building the ‘national’, as national stereotyping would continually separate and therefore define ‘us’ from ‘them’.
