Educating Europe: EU government, knowledge and legitimation

Educating Europe follows a political sociology approach for the analysis of the education policy domain in the European Union. The book will examine the ways in which an education policy field has been constructed in Europe since the early 1970s. It will explore how this field has never really been peripheral or ‘secondary’ as, perhaps its silencing from mainstream EU integration studies and political science has rendered it to be. Rather, it will show the ways that governing education has been integral in the processes of creating a European home market, at the heart of the neo-mercantilist project in the ‘80s, as well as during the later dominance of the neo-liberal ideology in the'90s-2000s and the efforts to create a competitive supra-state.

It will develop an original understanding of the role of international organisations by establishing a preliminary, alternative perspective in the policy learning literature, which has so far been dominated by the idea of the transfer of practices and ideas from 'Europe’ to the nation. It will explore how policy problems are constructed, the processes that institutionalise them into ‘objective’ and ‘real’ public issues and their legitimation through the fabrication of relevant monitoring instruments and the need for action.

Educating Europe will be of key interest to students, practitioners and scholars of education policy, EU studies, European studies, comparative education, sociology, and social and public policy