Educating Europe EU government, knowledge and legitimation Routledge Studies on Government and the European Union Series

Educating Europefollows 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

Part 1: Education policy making and the emergence of Europe as a common market1. The government of education in Europe at the first half of the 20th century2. The beginnings3. At the other side of the Atlantic: the role of the OECDPart 2: Learning in Europe as a competitive supra-state4. The government of education through the Lisbon process5. PISA and the role of international comparative assessments6. The role of expertsPart 3: Where to for education governance post-Lisbon? Europe and learning in the post-neoliberal era7. Policy learning and the government of EU’s education8. The future of the government of EU’s education: dilemmas and directions9. Knowledge, learning and the governing of Europe: a political sociology approach

Sotiria researches the role of education/learning as a policy sphere that actively contributes to Europeanization. She is interested in performance monitoring and comparison as forms of education governance, through which the project of Europeanization is pursued. Therefore, her research places numbers and comparison in the foreground of enquiry into policy, rather than examine them as merely offering ‘evidence’ to policy making.