Educating Europe: Diversity, Commonality and the enduring question of Europeanisation
The lecture will discuss commonality and diversification in education through a focus on the story of Europeanisation. This is a story which, much like most accounts narrating this old continent, is one of difference and commonness. On the one hand, diversity is integral to Europe, since most of what we identify with a degree of ‘Europeanness’ has always connected diverse people and ideas through movement and mobility; education, either in its institutionalised or in its less formal guises, has always been central in the distinctiveness -but also unity- 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’, education has been one of the main pillars of building the ‘national’, as national stereotyping would continually separate and therefore define ‘us’ from ‘them’. At the same time, and despite its inherent fluidity and changeable nature, another relatively bounded entity was being formed: that is ‘Europe’, which in disciplinary and broader political terms emerged as an entity defined predominantly as the effort to unite the European peoples -despite divergences- in the common European ‘project’.
Therefore, this lecture will explore the dialectical relationship between commonality and difference and show its potential for a more productive analysis of the governing of Europe. It will suggest that this antithetical relationship -which has to a large extent shaped European history- between a desire to move, travel, get to know one another, yet routinely, almost subconsciously finding those ‘others’ as different and hence unintelligible, is a particularly productive setting in which to investigate the production of Europe itself. The lecture will aim to move beyond top-down accounts of the transfer of European education policy from Brussels to the national, towards more attention to the interaction of diversity and commonness as key Europeanising forces.
