Klees, Steven J. (2002) “World Bank education policy: new rhetoric, old ideology” in International Journal of Educational Development Vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 451-474
ESS99 is the WB’s first education sector policy paper in 19 years.
Klees will be going after the Bank on various fronts, starting with the terms use din ESS99 that run counter to Bank vocabulary over the past decades – evoking caring, but remaining The Bank – all about efficiency and cost-effectiveness and comparative advantage – just not saying so quote so loudly this time around.
p. 453 – Klees outlines the Bank’s “stages of development” rhetoric – essentially Rostow-ian. Four categories – least developed (sub-Saharan Africa and some of South Asia); emergent systems (Latin America, North Africa, Asia); reform systems (Russia, Eastern Europe); and, mature systems (the West).
Rhetoric – partnering; caring and nurturing [of clients and their circumstances – culturally, socially, politically – presumably]; listen carefully [to client perspectives]; best practice.
NGOs as established & supported as a means to de-legitimize government, to privatize “development”.
p. 455: “. . . this major shift of the Bank and other aid agencies to financing programs through NGOs resulted in the creation of more right-wing NGOs, more cutthroat competition among all NGOs, and a more dominant role being played by international NGOs.”
Teacher unions are the single “partner” to be singled out for critique. They are then brought back in – not as “union,” but as “teacher groups” and not as “partners” but as part of a process of consultation. As Klees points out, consultation is not partnership.
SWAPs – sector-wide approaches == enforced consensus.
Poverty alleviation = economic growth and vice versa. To help the poor, a country’s government will be pushed to liberalize trade and foreign investment, open markets, reduce government spending (but what, then, of schools), and otherwise follow the prescriptions of the IMF and Structural Adjustment Programs.
Loan conditionality = the hammer that turns WB ideas and recommendations into prescriptive advice.
Knowledge Management – an “Orwellian specter” (p. 459) - in Klees alternative rendering, the knowledge bank becomes the Monopoly Opinion Bank (MOB)
Higher education versus basic education – a 20+ year running battle within WB
p. 464: “’Qualified’ has stopped mattering to The Bank, because they have used their research to “show” that teacher pre-service and formal education requirements are not important; if anything, it is in-service training that is needed.”
p. 465: “The report is missing any discussion of post-school opportunities and the world of work.”
p. 470: “. . . if education is seen as a human right, then examining the obstacles to fulfilling a child’s right to an education becomes even more subversive of the economic order. It directly raises the need to consider the existence of poverty as a human rights violation, of the need for our economic and political systems to recognize the right to economic survival and a sustainable livelihood.”
