Conditionalities are most broadly defined as the provisos that are to be met by a country when borrowing money from the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Increasingly, they have proven to have far reaching consequences for countries entering into agreements with The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade…

At first glance, creativity in the classroom and global capitalism have little in common, yet scratch beneath the surface of "creativity" and we find a discourse of economic and cultural freedom that was used as a bulwark against communism during the Cold War, and more recently to reconcile individuals to neoliberalism in the post-Cold…

Higher education is one of the last democratic institutions in society and it is currently under attack by advocates of neo-liberalism. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this "battle" can be framed as a battle over the direction of the Enlightenment. Critical Theory and neoliberalism both emerged from academia in response to…

As it is in many countries in the world, in Turkey the effects of neoliberal ideology have rapidly increased since the 1980s, and social and economic structure has been transformed. Education, which is the basic dynamic of constructing social and economic structure and regeneration, stands in the center of neoliberalism. In this process, what…

I am examining the state of democracy and education in current circumstances of global race of the superpowers for military and economic domination--race that creates impoverished nations, impoverished markets and dysfunctional educational systems. What Dewey foresaw and termed in the early 20th century as an annihilation of space is today's…

In contemporary capitalist economy knowledge generating becomes part and parcel of material production and man, as the bearer of intellectual capacities, the principal productive force. In this reality, education came to mean the formation of the "general intellect": the cultivation of mind and the development of consciousness, of its moral,…

This paper examines the pedagogical implications of the Occupy Movement from a Latin American decolonial theoretical perspective. Central to this analysis is a geo-political understanding of the ways in which capital and coloniality are historically "entangled." Building upon the notion of a "neoliberal revolution" advanced by various Marxist…

This paper attempts to critically analyze the educational discourses and policies of the European Union over the last decade (2000-2010) in the context of the Lisbon Strategy initiatives (Council of the EU, 2000) and provide an account on "The Shape of Things to Come". It will be argued that the symbolic and actual construction of the "Europe of…

In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online.…

Emphasis on "the knowledge economy", the commodification of public services, the massification of HE and decreases in public funding of education are the context for new forms of educational provision. Some nations have led the demand for and provision of cross-national educational services. The largest exporters of Higher Education have been the…

This article scrutinizes the transformation of vocational training in Turkey. Entertaining the question, "Why did the vocational high schools become an issue in the country all of a sudden?", it aims to cover the social and economic dynamics behind this transformation. Establishing the link between Turkey's integration with the global economy and…

What sort of expectations of transformation of higher education have been aroused by liberation movements? Has the new South Africa fulfilled such expectations? This paper explores the promises and processes that have enveloped South African universities in recent decades. It focuses on the underlying assumptions shaping academic disciplines in…

As globalization has rendered knowledge constitutive of global economic capital, scholars have shifted their attention regarding Bourdieu's (1973) notion of cultural capital from one focused on the reproduction of inequalities through the processes of distribution of "official knowledge" to a focus the processes whereby dominant groups maximize…

The present work analyses the role of the international organizations in the orientation of educational reforms and reforms of professional formation/training taking place, in particular, in Latin America countries and in the Caribbean Islands from the beginning of the 1990's on. This article is organized into four sections: in the first one, we…

This essay is a critical reflection on educational standardization, particularly the standardization of assessment flowing down from major international assessment projects like the OECD's Project for International Student Assessment to national and sub-national school systems. I argue that the establishment of an increasingly uniform metric to…