Cultural strangers and educational change: The OECD Report Investment in Education and Irish Educational Policy

This paper treats the OECD report on Irish education Investment in Education published in 1965 as a ‘cultural stranger’ and assesses its contribution to Irish educational policy up to the present. Widely regarded as a major modernizing force in Irish society, this report is perceived to have confronted, penetrated, and changed the insular paradigms governing Irish educational policy, in particular replacing the personal development with the human capital paradigm as the institutional rationale for education. The influence of Investment in Education is situated within the economic reconstruction that commenced in the late 1950s, and the lack of contestation and the role of interest groups within the state apparatus and beyond are analysed. The expansion of the human capital paradigm to incorporate commercial, vocational, and market interpretations of schooling and the impact of these on the structuration of consciousness within the educational policy‐making community are described. The conclusion locates these developments in Irish education within their comparative context.