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Shaping the futures of young Europeans: education governance in eight European countries

In the past two decades, a growing literature has focused on the process of Europeanization in education, and the convergence and divergence of education policy processes in old and new European member states. Such analyses focus on ‘soft’ forms of governance, such as the pressure of international comparative assessments, the diffusion of travelling policies and the powerful policy discourses which link learning to the economy. Arguably, far less attention has been paid to the endurance of national institutional structures in relation to the Europeanization process. The authors of this volume focus on the governance of educational trajectories which allow them to analyse constellations of educational discourses and institutional structures – in particular, relating to access and selection mechanisms – in a common framework. The volume has been produced in the collaboration of a European research consortium comprising teams from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, the Netherlands and the UK. The two opening chapters discuss the theoretical approach which guided the research project.1 The conceptual framework combines two streams of thought: the German sociological tradition of life-course analysis and the political science literature of governance. The analytical concepts of discursive and institutional opportunity structures (DOS and IOS) emerge from a combination of these two approaches with the aim to interpret and categorize the ‘selection principles’ that structure educational trajectories past due to (fear of) discrimination in the labour market. Chapter 6 explores the changing Libyan Pan-Arabist education provision over time (up to the NATO military intervention in 2011) and, by drawing from Derrida’s notion of ‘hostipitality’, once more argues that different forms of discrimination were reproduced, in this case in Libya against especially Palestinian refugees. The concluding Chapter 7 explores whether the South-South educational migration system can provide ‘alternative modes of responding to refugees’ (141). Neither idealisation nor demonisation, this conscientiously written analysis is outstanding in disaggregating the ‘trans-regional, intergenerational and multi-directional’ (6) complexities of these education programmes. Such analytical sophistication, i.e. exploring in multifarious directions, (inevitably) deprives the book of a strong line of argument which perhaps would have increased its accessibility for readers unfamiliar with the MENA context. Equally, some readers, like myself, may wish for greater analytical weight on the reproduction of the global, structural dependencies to balance out the great detail dedicated to individual experiences (the latter, however, being one of the assets of this book). Of minor relevance here, though noteworthy, is the unfortunate misspelling of ‘Bolivian’ instead of ‘Bolivarian’ (with respect to Venezuela or the Bolivarian Revolution) on one or two occasions (e.g. 16) which, however – speaking from my own experience – I would attribute to an over-autonomous copy editor rather than the author herself. This book, then, is an extremely valuable contribution to the study of the interdisciplinary refugee-education-migration nexus, and of the MENA region and South-South cooperation generally. For the critical education policy community it underscores that alternatives to the global neoliberal eduscape and Northern-led neo-colonialist ‘refugee education’ and ‘peace education’ do exist, despite their marginalisation in today’s mainstreamed academia: South-South humanitarianism concerned with ‘‘saving a way of life’ over ‘saving a life’ per se’ (22). Thomas Muhr School of Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK thomas.muhr@nottingham.ac.uk