Standards and standardisation in European politics of education

This chapter focuses on current trends in education standards and standardisation. It explores some reasons why standard-based reforms are a dominant trend, and increasingly an indisputable truth for supporting educational changes at a global level. It considers standards as epistemic objects. The chapter discusses the history of standards and standardisation in education that specifically relates to the consolidation and the development of contemporary modern education systems since the beginning of industrial society. While the tendency towards objectualisation of education practice is a long-term process, a first wave of standardisation may be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, which was made explicit by the rise and consolidation of mass schooling. The chapter describes how the Europeanisation of education can be read as a standardisation process, and, in particular, as the enactment of space of commensuration made possible by standards of equivalence and performance.