The Potentialities of “La mesure en éducation”: the European Union’s Open Method of Coordination and the Construction of a European Education Space

The central focus of this paper is the use of indicators in the construction in specifying and monitoring the response of Member States education and training systems to the goals for the future of the EU set out after the Lisbon summit in 2000, which called for Europe to become ‘the most dynamic, c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Roger Dale
Format: Article
Language:fra
Published: Les éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme 2005-06-01
Series:Cahiers de la Recherche sur l'Education et les Savoirs
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/cres/1889
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Summary:The central focus of this paper is the use of indicators in the construction in specifying and monitoring the response of Member States education and training systems to the goals for the future of the EU set out after the Lisbon summit in 2000, which called for Europe to become ‘the most dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustained development, with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. Education’s response, which, it was emphasised at Lisbon, could only be met at the level of the eu and not at individual state level, was to be framed and delivered by means of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The paper discusses the origins and processes of the OMC, and especially the role played in those processes by indicators and benchmarks. It considers especially the development of the Detailed Work Programme through which education systems were to meet the requirements placed on them. The paper argues (a) that these processes lead to the collective identification of common problems, framed by indicators and benchmarks, which underpins and enables the development of a new European education space, separate from and not reducible to, the education sectors of Member States (MS), and (b) that education policy making at eu level is about technical problem solving between stakeholders in the system rather than the political resolution of political conflicts between different interests. The paper concludes with the identification of nine mechanisms through which indicators “work”.
ISSN:1635-3544
2265-7762