Building Quality in Education

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to look at the arguments which support and challenge international standards in the campaign to build quality education. It seeks to raise the question of how a comparative educational practice can be developed which is aware of itself; aware of its oppressive and exclusionary possibilities; and can pose the question of how it might enter the perilous waters of universalism and particularism without succumbing to the seductions of an abstracted internationalised order which has no relevance for the children of a particular time and space or is so narrowly particular that its children do not have the means to understand their location in a globalising world. The article begins with a quick summary of the results of the major assessment instruments that have come into being in the wake of the Jomtien and Dakar agreements. It moves to a discussion of what the critique of these assessment standards are and concludes with an examination of how alternative assessments might be approached.