Suchergebnisse

Human development and rights-based approaches to education have been gaining support among international organisations and development agencies as alternative frameworks to human capital orthodoxy. While these global trends have been well-documented in the international development literature, there is little empirical evidence into what extent, and through which mechanisms, alternative development paradigms in education are influencing Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reforms. Chile provides an excellent opportunity for this kind of research given the long cycle of political contestation of neoliberal education policies in the country during the last decade. The article analyses TVET policy discourses for the last three government administrations (2006–2018) from a Cultural Political Economy perspective. The adoption of the rights-based approach in Chile shows its potential to mobilise greater involvement of the state in the funding and provision of TVET and in the support to secondary TVET students who want to continue their studies in tertiary education. However, the rights-based approach to education falls short when it comes to problematising political economy structures that shape TVET policymaking and the precarious labour market opportunities available to TVET graduates. These shortfalls show the need to incorporate more fundamental critiques of the neoliberal paradigm into the formulation of alternative policy agendas for TVET.

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET.

The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we will argue, do not capture adequately the meanings students attribute to these aspirations. By means of in-depth interviews and combining a critical realist approach to social action with capabilities approach, the paper explores the educational and professional aspirations of students at the end of secondary TVET in Chile. We consider that high educational aspirations of secondary TVET students in Chile need to be understood as a reflexive response to significantly high social inequalities in the country, the precarity of working conditions in a highly liberalised labour market, and the enduring neoliberal tenet of meritocracy. We also argue that understanding aspirations is key to reimagine TVET's roles and purposes at individual, institutional and national levels, towards fairer opportunities for human development.

The article presents findings from a research project which explored how experiences of higher education supported – or not – the emergence of developmental leadership and the formation of networks among leaders of three political and social movements in the Philippines in the post-Marcos era. Based on life history interviews with key leaders, the study points to the importance of different forms of social capital, especially bridging capital, in navigating a stratified system within this oligarchical democracy. Experiences of higher education were important for leaders' development, but not necessarily in predictable ways.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, European authorities reinforced the economic objectives of European lifelong learning policy, promoting employability solutions to address youth unemployment, and increasing their political influence on the implementation of national lifelong learning reforms. This article investigates to what extent these supranational policy orientations have been translated into concrete national lifelong learning initiatives. Although European countries were not equally affected in terms of time and intensity by the rise in youth unemployment rates, the political responses from their governments shared a central focus on employability solutions to youth unemployment in lifelong learning policy reforms. Our comparative analysis shows how different lifelong learning policy initiatives managed to 'educationalise' a structural economic problem (i.e. youth unemployment) into an individual educational concern (i.e. lack of education and skills). We argue that the 'educationalisation' of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies is a crisis management strategy, which has allowed governments to focus on the individual symptoms of the problem while avoiding offering solutions to the underlying structural causes of young people's poor labour market prospects.