Educational issues need reexamining, according to this author, to find the proper role for education in a new international economic order (NIEO). In the first part of this essay, the author questions older theories of education and development--which saw education as furthering national development by supplying trained manpower--and discusses current economic trends, the limits to growth, education's role in reducing or perpetuating inequality within nations, and the usefulness of international organizations in providing data, research, and theory on education and the NIEO. In the second session, the author notes the expansion of education in all countries, the lack of comparable economic growth, the decline of the idea that education is a prime factor in development, and the growing impression that education helps create unemployment or fostors loss of cultural identity. The author counters this impression by suggesting that education has multiple effects and should be seen as a subsystem within a larger socioeconomic environment. (Author/RW)