Data, trust and faith: the unheeded religious roots of modern education policy

Abstract

This paper explores the unheeded religious roots of the modern conviction to standardised, scientific education policy and its inherent sciento-social epistemology. In doing so, it traces the discursive roots of this hierarchical but non-governmental idea of social governance from its 16th century Scottish Presbyterian predecessors to its advocates at Teachers College, Columbia University around and after 1900 and ultimately to its global spread in the later twentieth century via the OECD.

UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective

“…But perhaps more fundamentally the post-WWII global governance architecture can be argued to hinge on the rise of bureaucracies and a technocratic worldview which is intimately linked with the emergence of modern nation-states in the decennia after the Enlightenment. Tröhler and Maricic (2021) even argue that this development cannot be understood without considering religious ideas about "faith and ideas of salvation" (p. 150). Their argument finds resonance in Fuchs's (2007) analysis of historical networks in education contending that, the transnational philanthropic and religious networks of the nineteenth century were replaced by professional actors and experts whose profession was education.…”

“…This ambition to make education the object of scientific inquiry and as such improve its role in state-crafting processes was broader than merely comparative education. As argued by Tröhler and Maricic (2021), the social sciences as such should "discover psychological laws, identify the problems of the social world and contribute to ordered progress through an efficiently administered school that converted the pupil into a 'learning child' as an empowered future bearer of progress" (p. 139). To no small extent this idea involved the transformation of pedagogy into applied psychology, psychometrics and statistics (Danziger, 1998).…”

Re-reading the OECD and education: the emergence of a global governing complex – an introduction

“…In the SI, Tröhler and Maricic (2021) contribute to this debate with an original and engaging account of the religious roots of the modern conviction to standardised, scientific education policy and its inherent 'sciento-social epistemology', in which notions of faith and salvation are inscribed. They trace the discursive roots of a distinctive idea of social governance and moral order from the Scottish Presbyterians of the 16th century, via early experimental psychologists at Teachers College, Columbia University around 1900, to US education policy in the post-Sputnik cold war crisis and its global diffusion via the "temple of growth" that is the OECD (Schmelzer 2016).…”