Engineering the Free World: The Emergence of the OECD as an Actor in Education Policy, 1957–1972

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the OECDs emerging role in education policy and retraces the early history of the Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), which has become highly influential through the launch of the famous Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). It argues that the OECD’s engagement in education policy was driven by a network of technocrats aiming to produce the “right kind of people,” or engineering the West. Paradoxically, the failure of this quantitative planning project opened the doors for the OECD to get involved with more qualitative aspects of education planning. Catalyzed by the United States, and in particular the Ford Foundation, goal-oriented sciences were used by the OECD as governing means, allowing an organization that lacked binding policy instruments to professionalize its soft-law governance.

The O.E.E.C. should always bear in mind that it is an economic organisation and should confine its activities to those which have economic implications. It should avoid turning itself into an institute of pedagogics or of [sic] taking on activities which are best left to the various scientific institutions.

Dana Wilgress, 1960