The Global Education Archipelago

Education is represented as a global enterprise, an essential form of government with no centre and with little recourse to deliberative intervention. The global university is considered as an important feature of the postcolonial global hierarchy of being, analogous to the ‘great chain of being’ celebrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, with its feudal, hieratic structure. The educationscape is identified and described as the key governmental feature of the contemporary world, the apotheosis of biopower’s triumph in modernity and beyond. The ranking and ordering of the world through education is an important feature of this governmentality. The postcolonial development and continuation of this state of affairs is examined in relation to what is referred to as global technological enframing, the decentred restriction of being in modern and contemporary polities enacted through educational apparatuses. The remorseless idea of lifelong education is revisited as an essential component of this condition. The failure of educational discourses to grasp the condition of its own being is considered as essential to strange but almost universal celebration of education as an unquestioned good, so that critique falls short, reserving ‘pure education’ as the path to redemption or improvement.