The Social Construction of Globalised Education Discourses: Inhabiting a World of Performativity, Competition and Responsibilisation

Drawing on Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s notion of internalisation, this chapter argues that twenty-first Century learners are now born and socialised into a world through schooling in which globalised discourses of neoliberal performativity and responsibilisation are taken for granted as being the norm. However, this experience of the world is not necessarily fixed and pre-given. It is a construction. These discourses have been socially constructed in the process of globalised education reforms by governments and educational institutions in their quest for global competitiveness and comparative education data analysis. Educators themselves have forgotten the alternative educational discourses of happiness, learning for life, and so on, that were once more prevalent. Influenced by the purpose of social constructionism, this chapter argues for the need to take a critical stance towards this taken-for-granted knowledge to promote a more socially just and inclusive experience of education for learners and to foster a sense of agency and self-efficacy.