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Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to shape education systems. This article looks beyond dichotomies such as the national versus the European or the global, in order to focus on those governing spaces and practices that lie in between bounded, predetermined, and preconceived entities and education organisations. Our locus of enquiry is education actors and their practices as they use comparison to make governing happen. The article examines the case of Swedish education (its policy actors, governing elites, and education practitioners) to examine this relation between comparison, governing, and the transnational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Countries in Europe, through the European Union, are creating, as part of the market and its governance, a new policy space in education. It is being formed through law, regulation, networking and harmonization. The development of standards across the different fields of policy, statistical calculation and commerce underpins and extends the creation of policy spaces. Europeanization processes in education have some subtle and yet powerful features created through measurement and standardization. They may have a technical form but they are knowledge based, policy driven and exclude politics. Europe is at the leading edge of new forms of governance in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore the extent to which there is an interdependence between new governing forms, often characterised as 'post-bureaucratic' and new knowledge forms, that are often described in terms of 'mode 2' knowledge - that is, knowledge that combines the academy, the state and the private sector in co-production. The discussion is based on the analysis of a large number of policy texts concerned with education research as well as scrutiny of academic literature on research policy in England from 1945 to the present. Much recent policy and academic discourse, we suggest, characterises new knowledge forms as socially-responsive, and as potentially democratising knowledge, because of their apparent interactive, iterative, problem-focused and trans-disciplinary character. We suggest that such an analysis is insufficiently attentive to the discourse of the knowledge economy, and the related (discursive) turn in new knowledge production towards governing knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ways in which space, politics and science converge to create a unique cultural event in education in Europe. It highlights the formation of a European cultural identity which was incorporated into the day-today expectations of educators and educational researchers working in European education. According to the article, the availability of frameworks for measuring and coordinating education across the region create a Europeanized culture that enhances those established in government and trade.

The coincident arrival of a European policy space in education and a European Educational Research Association [EERA], and their subsequent relation, will be the subject of this paper. EERA is a hybrid organization—it supports scientific networking, it is a social partner in EU policy, it is a first level social space for networking, and increasingly it is faced with acting in policy forums. It is scientific, public and professional but most of all, like most associations, especially those working across borders, it is unstable and voluntaristic. Establishing itself in a new policy landscape, a European Policy space rapidly emerging in higher education and research around it, and burdened with the pasts of its members—and its diversity of traditions and languages—is difficult enough. Yet it has to be examined against new theories of governance and the role of networks, which place associations in Europe in a very interesting role. The paper tends to the conclusion that either EERA or the theory fails to meet the task required of it—so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of a distinctive and useful European education policy space is a necessary part of the project of Europeanization in the European Union. A 'European education area' is fundamental to the contemporary structuring of the European Union; it announces the arrival of a major discursive space, centred on education in which the legitimation, steering and shaping of European governance is being played out. This article explores the problem of governance and education, through its first stage, the construction of a European education project, based on cultural inheritance and then cooperation networks; then it examines, in the second stage, the determination of a new policy of lifelong learning. This new policy shifts the emphasis from formal institutional influence and centres on the individual learner, stressing performance and comparison. The article discusses the difficulty of this task, and its most important aspect, connecting governance and a meaningful project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a historical analysis of the relationship between teachers arid the state. The historical analysis demonstrates the ways in which strategies of teacher management shifted according to circumstances in the first period, the 1920s, restrictions on teacher autonomy were removed, and 'indirect rule' used as a means of moving teachers away from the labour movement. In the second period, after the 1944 Act, a restricted 'professional' autonomy was encouraged In both periods equality of status for teachers as 'partners' in the educational enterprise was offered in return for teachers' acceptance of a limited or licensed professionalism. Current developments in the management of the teaching force suggest that the abandonment of indirect strategies of management may result in a return by teachers to less restricted 'professional' behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the article "A Systemless System: Designing the Disarticulation of English State Education" by Martin Lawn is presented.