The OECD and epistemic (de)colonisation: Globalising visions for knowledge in the Learning Compass 2030

ABSTRACT

Much attention has been given in recent years to how the OECD promotes a neoliberal, marketised vision of education. There has been less focus, however, on how the OECD also offers a neocolonial vision of education, which promotes the epistemologies of the Global North at the expense of those of the Global South. This article contributes to this latter kind of critique through a decolonial analysis of the OECD’s new policy framework for the compulsory schooling sector – the Learning Compass 2030. Drawing on the work of the Latin American Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad and that of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it argues the Learning Compass’s drive to ‘modernise’ education worldwide unavoidably exists alongside a colonising impulse which denies the viability of non-western epistemological positions. This will be shown through an analysis of those parts of the Learning Compass which are focused on what knowledge students should acquire in the 21st century.

KEYWORDS:

• OECD
• decolonial theory
• learning compass
• neocolonial
• coloniality
• education policy

Introduction

The OECD positions itself as the world’s foremost guide to the future of education. As a result, the OECD’s products and pronouncements have come under extensive scrutiny, especially for the ways in which they often promote a neoliberal, technocratic, marketised vision of education (Grek 2009; Sellar and Lingard 2014; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Less work has been done, however, on the ways the OECD’s vision, positioned as universal while simultaneously firmly grounded in Eurocentric epistemologies, is neocolonial as much as it is neoliberal. This article seeks to build in the important work of others in redressing this imbalance (see for example Kaess 2018; Shahjahan 2016, 2013; D’Agnese 2015; Tikly 2004), by means of a decolonial critique of the OECD’s latest major project in the education space – the Learning Compass 2030.

Emerging out of the OECD’s broader Education and Skills 2030 project, the Learning Compass is the OECD’s first attempt to develop a comprehensive roadmap for national curricular reform in the compulsory schooling sector (K-12). In the words of Andreas Schleicher, Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills at the OECD, the Learning Compass is ‘a framework [which] helps countries structure their thinking of what is important for tomorrow’s world in terms of the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values’ they need to support their students to develop, thereby offering a ‘structure that systematises to build national curricula in a way that is sort of predictable’ (OECD 2020). Given the widely-acknowledged power of the OECD to guide the global conversation on education and influence the development of national and sub-national education systems (Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Sellar and Lingard 2014; Shahjahan 2013), it is vitally important that we closely interrogate this new vision the organisation is putting forward. This is especially so given the OECD has been promoting the Learning Compass as a major new initiative (OECD 2020), and already appears to be using it as a tool to assess various national curriculum reforms worldwide (for instance OECD 2019a). To undertake this work, this article draws primarily on decolonial theory, especially the work of the Latin American Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad and the writings of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. It ultimately argues that the curricular vision the OECD promotes in the Learning Compass can be understood as an attempted ‘colonization of the imagination’ (Quijano 2007, 169), or, in the words of Santos (2014, 2018), an attempted ‘epistemicide’. In its modernising mission to build ‘predictable’ (and therefore increasingly homogenous) national curricula, it is also in some sense an unavoidably colonial project which promotes certain modes of understanding anchored in the Global North at the expense of others in the Global South.

As should be clear by my reference to epistemologies, I am interested particularly here in the vision of knowledge the Learning Compass puts forward, that is, the outline it offers of what and how students should know in the 21st century. This focus is important because, as Smith (2012, 61) writes, historically speaking, ‘knowledge and culture were as much part of imperialism as raw materials and military strength’, and so too today, the framing of what is worth knowing, what can be known, and how it can be known, is central to the continued domination of the Global South by the Global North (Santos 2014; Smith 2012). It is especially important to consider the OECD’s vision of knowledge as it pertains to the compulsory schooling sector, given that historically speaking, such schooling has been central to the colonisation of indigenous peoples (Simon and Smith 2001; Fanon 1963; Santos 2018). This focus on knowledge means that some of the other aspects of the Learning Compass will receive slightly less attention, though I believe deep analysis of one centrally important aspect of the OECD’s vision here will be more revealing than trying to tackle the project in toto, and will hopefully open up paths for future, more wide-ranging, analysis.

In what follows, I will first provide some context to my discussion, focusing on the history of the OECD as a ‘modernising’ force focused on a particular idea of ‘development’. This will be followed by a discussion of decolonial theory, with a particular focus on the Latin American Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad and the work of Santos, and the thoughts these authors have on the relationship between coloniality and knowledge. This will then allow me to offer a critical discourse analysis of knowledge in the Learning Compass. I will argue that the Learning Compass systemically privileges an epistemological position which, while claiming to be universally applicable, and therefore in some sense ‘neutral’ or ‘common sense’, is in fact highly Eurocentric. This therefore means that the Learning Compass’s modernising project also ends up being a project with coloniality at its heart. Finally, I will end with a brief consideration of what it might mean to eschew the OECD’s vision and embrace what Santos (2014) calls an ‘ecology of knowledges’. From the outset, it is also important to acknowledge that I conduct this analysis as a scholar who has lived almost exclusively in the settler-colonial state of New Zealand, as someone of European (i.e. settler) rather than indigenous descent. Although I have reflected deeply on the biases inherent in this positionality, it will inevitably influence the analysis I reproduce below.

The OECD, modernisation and the Learning Compass 2030

In order to fully understand the Learning Compass, it is first important to understand something of the OECD’s origin as an institution. The OECD was formed in 1961 as a successor organisation to the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). Among other functions, the shift from OEEC to the OECD allowed non-European states, such as the United States, to become members. In addition, the word ‘development’ was placed in the name of the organisation. This was revealing, because, as Tröhler (2014, 6) writes, ‘behind the notion of development – a notion that is not suspicious per se – is almost the whole ideological assumption of the Western world and foremost of the United States’.

This specific meaning of ‘development’ in the context of the OECD emerged from the post-war belief held by influential mid-century American thinkers like Walt Rostow that the United States represented the ideal society due to it being the world’s first truly ‘modern’ nation. Such thinkers argued that it was therefore the duty of the United States to guide the world towards ‘development’ along the same path it had taken. As Gilman (2003, 2) writes, for these thinkers ‘the overall purpose of development was to achieve modernity the world over’. It is especially important to note that these modernisation theorists believed that:

…modernization was a homogenizing process … the manifold forms of traditional life giving way to a unitary, interlocking, and global modernity, the shape of which was already discernable in the contemporary United States. (Gilman 2003, 6)

In the OECD embracing the idea of ‘development’, it therefore positioned itself as an organisation dedicated to a teleological, homogenising view of societal progress, the highest point of which was epitomised by the ‘modernity’ of the United States.

Although the OECD remained focused largely on ‘western’ nations and on economic development for the first 30 years of its history, after the collapse of the Soviet Union it broadened its focus in two ways. Firstly, it began engaging with a broader range of nations (especially those in the former Eastern Bloc and Latin America). Secondly, it greatly strengthened its focus in areas like health, education and the environment, though these were still understood principally through an economic lens (Woodward 2009). When it comes to the focus of this article, education, the OECD’s work has largely been understood as, and simultaneously critiqued for, promoting an idea of education as a key tool in nations becoming more economically competitive. The most prevalent OECD programme in this regard is PISA – the Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA’s testing regime and competitive ranking of nations is seen to embody a technocratic, neoliberalising vision where nations are encouraged to improve test performance as a way to directly improve economic performance (Grek 2009; Sjøberg 2016).

As programmes like PISA have broadened their focus over time, including such initiatives as ‘PISA for Development’ (PISA-D) which is focused on low-income countries, it has been easier for scholars to see how the OECD’s drive for ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ via education can be understood as a neocolonial project as much as a neoliberal one, as western ideas about education are forcefully promoted as a global ideal (Kaess 2018; D’Agnese 2015). Thus, when Andreas Schleicher talks about how PISA is a ‘test to measure … knowledge and skills’ and how this allows cross-national comparisons which ‘have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share’ (Schleicher 2012), we can see this as not just about a regime of competition, but also about driving cultural homogenisation. Directing all nations to follow ‘high-performing systems’ who have been deemed to be ‘high performing’ based on certain tests designed by the OECD projects an imaginary where there is one (typically western) version of educational success, rather than allowing space for the discussion of different kinds of knowledge and skills which may be required in different contexts. However, as noted above, this kind of critique remains underrepresented in the literature, and no such decolonial perspective has yet been brought to bear on the Learning Compass in particular.

This brief context helps us to situate the emergence of the Learning Compass. In many ways, this project stands as the logical next step in the OECD’s work in education. Firstly, it is in line with the OECD’s continual extension of its ambit. The Learning Compass is not targeted just at member states or particular ‘developing’ states as past initiatives were. Rather, it is directed at all nations. Secondly, it represents a movement from a focus on assessment tools like PISA which construct a form of implicit curriculum (Takayama 2018) towards offering a fully developed normative schema for what national curricula should include. In this broader focus and greater degree of specificity, the Learning Compass therefore represents one of the strongest attempts yet by the OECD to push its development/modernisation agenda.

The vision of education the Learning Compass offers can be understood as very much in line with the OECD’s continuing neoliberal preoccupation with developing workers for the knowledge economy (Hughson and Wood 2020). However, we can also understand it from a decolonial perspective as embodying a form of coloniality in the way that it promotes and upholds the epistemologies of the Global North at the expense of the Global South in its vision of curricular reform. Of course, such views need not be seen in opposition. As many have argued, the promotion of an overtly economic rationality is also a kind of ‘coloniality of being’, privileging as it does the western homo economicus as the ideal student/citizen (Shahjahan and Morgan 2016; Naidoo 2011). This article, however, will limit its scope to commentary only on the vision of curricular reform promoted by the Learning Compass, and in particular, the Learning Compass’s vision of what knowledge is viable, appropriate and useful. Before turning to this analysis, however, it is first necessary to outline the decolonial perspective this article adopts.

Decolonial theory

Decolonial theory, in the sense that I am using the term, is generally understood to have emerged from an interlinked group of Latin American thinkers known as the Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad. These writers all take inspiration from the Peruvian sociologist Quijano’s (2000, 2007) writing on modernity/coloniality in the 1990s (Escobar 2010). Their work collectively offers a way of thinking about the world which forms the basis of my analysis. Beyond this initial ‘base layer’ of theorists, however, this article also draws on other key thinkers associated with the broader decolonial tradition. This includes most prominently Santos (2018, 2014), as well as other thinkers such as Smith (2012), Fanon (1963) and Bhambra (2014). Below I outline some of the central decolonial concepts that I will use in my argument. These concepts help to establish what it might mean to ‘think decolonially’ for the purposes of this project.

Modernity/Coloniality

The idea of ‘modernity/coloniality’ sits at the centre of the work of the Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad. The central proposal here is that these two concepts, modernity and coloniality, are bound inextricably. As Mignolo (2011, 3) writes, ‘coloniality is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality’. In traditional western European thought, modernity is imagined to emerge from the Enlightenment and to be the dawn of a mode of rationalising thought grounded in the original Cartesian distinction between the thinking subject and the object of inquiry (Bhambra 2007; Mignolo 2011). Decolonial theorists, however, connect the origins of modernity to the colonisation of the Americas from the 15th century onwards. This then allows them to focus on ‘modern’ thought as being deeply imbricated in processes of othering, racialising and capitalist accumulation (Escobar 2010; Dussel 2000). It was from this point onwards, they argue, that European epistemologies and ontologies came to be defined as correct, universal, ideal and legitimately hegemonic, as they were set up in opposition with the various ways of thinking and being encountered in the Americas which were positioned as particular, localised and deficient (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2011).

Santos (2007, 2014), building on Fanon (1963), calls this line set up by Europeans between their ‘superior’ onto-epistemological position and those of non-western peoples in the Global South the ‘abyssal line’. For decolonial theorists, central to the project of the modernity is the creation and then maintenance of this line, the making of ‘a world cut in two’ (Fanon 1963, 29). Thinking of modernity as modernity/coloniality thus allows us to see it as embodying a ‘double function as an emancipatory project and as a mythical culture of violence’ (Dussel 2000, 474). It projects a mode of thinking which is claimed to be universal, purely rational and thus liberatory, but such a projection simultaneously involves the rejection and dismissal of other non-European onto-epistemological positions.

Epistemology of the zero point and the geopolitics of knowledge

Mignolo (2011, 80), building on the thinking of Santiago Castro-Gómez, puts forward the ‘epistemology of the zero point’ and the idea of the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ as a clear way to talk about the epistemologically privileged position of European knowledge within modernity/coloniality. Under the epistemology of the zero point, ‘modern’ western knowledge from the Global North is imagined to be universal, operating from the ‘zero’ or neutral point, while non-western knowledge of the Global South is imagined as unique and inextricably tied to particular ‘points’ – particular places, people and traditions. Central to this view is the Cartesian separation between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. Post-cartesian thinking in the west has held that since this subject-object separation has been made, knowledge has now been created that is free of entanglement from one’s particular positionality. This in turn has seen the Global North assert itself as ‘the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of “civilized” knowledge’ (Smith 2012, 66). With knowledge as a detached object in this sense, it is then also able to be imagined as a kind of commodity, one which can be ‘exported to those whose knowledge was deviant’ (Mignolo 2011, 13).

In contrast to the epistemology of the zero point, decolonial theorists assert the continued existence of the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’: the idea that all knowledge is produced in a specific time and place by particular people, and that this inevitably influences the nature of that knowledge (Grosfoguel 2002). Importantly, understanding that knowledges are enmeshed within geopolitics is not an attempt to delegitimate western knowledge(s), or to embrace an ‘anything goes’ relativism (Santos 2018). Rather, it is simply to recognise that knowledge production is a human process and that all knowledge has a history of some kind which needs to be recognised.

An ecology of knowledges

As well as offering concepts which allow us to critique the state of the world, decolonial theorists also offer ways of thinking about alternatives. This article draws on one in particular: Santos’s (2018, 2014) idea of the ‘ecology of knowledges’. Santos proposes that instead of one knowledge tradition, western knowledge, being enshrined as universal and superior, we need to strive towards a world where all knowledges are able to coexist with each other. Importantly, this does not mean that each knowledge system exists as an island; nor does it involve the dismissal of western knowledge traditions. Instead, in Santos’s view we need to get away from the domination of one knowledge system by another, and towards a world where the focus is on productive dialogues between different knowledge systems, ‘aimed at enhancing reciprocal intelligibility without dissolving identity’ (Santos 2018, 32). This ‘ecological’ system does not mean a totally relativistic approach to the value of knowledge, with all knowledges ascribed some kind of formally equal degree of validity. Rather, Santos imagines a world where different knowledges have different degrees of validity in different contexts, depending on the ‘project of social transformation’ (Santos 2014, 190) they are put to. In these contexts, they are judged against their ability to bring forth ‘a more just and democratic society, as well as one more balanced in its relations with nature’ (Santos 2014, 190). There is not space here to explore Santos’s complex explanation of exactly how such an ‘ecology’ may work in practice. However, the important point from the position of this article is that Santos’s approach would entail ending the hegemony of modern, western, hyper-rationalistic knowledges in our society, and would bring forth a world where we were much more comfortable also seeing how various alternative knowledges, such as, for instance, indigenous knowledges, may help us to enrich our understanding of the world.

Methodology

This article makes use of the decolonial theory outlined above to offer a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030, focusing on its portrayal of knowledge. CDA does not outline a set-in-stone methodology for textual interpretation. Instead, it captures a broad way of thinking about text that is explicitly transdisciplinary and open to working with other modes of knowledge production (Fairclough 2010; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 2010). Primarily, it approaches discourses in a dialectical-relational fashion, that is, it involves understanding discourses in a dialectical relationship to the world around them (i.e. as both produced by, and in some sense able to produce, the social worlds they are situated in). Its explicitly critical nature comes from its focus on ‘what is wrong with a society (an institution, an organisation etc.), and how “wrongs” might be “righted”’ (Fairclough 2010, 7), with an understanding that discourse, in the hands of the powerful, is central to the maintenance of inequitable or otherwise ‘wrong’ states of affairs.

Proponents of decolonial approaches to CDA have highlighted how this critical focus of CDA can be connected to decolonial theory’s desire to uncover the persistence of coloniality in our world (Melo Resende 2021; Ahmed 2021). In this way, decolonial theory offers a framework of reference thorough which we can consider what might be ‘wrong’ within a particular institution (here the OECD) as embodied in the discourse that institution produces, and what it might mean to put this ‘right’ in some sense. Bringing decolonial theory into conversation with CDA therefore ‘enlarges the scope’ (Ahmed 2021, 140) of CDA work, which historically has not paid enough attention to such issues. CDA is often though of in alignment with a broader critical realist project (Fairclough 2005), and, indeed, many scholars are now articulating links between critical realism and decolonial theory (Tinsley 2021; Melo Resende 2021), highlighting how both reject positivism and pure interpretivism. However, decolonial theorists do not tend to ground their work explicitly in any kind of metatheoretical orientation like critical realism. Indeed, part of the scholarly work they advocate for involves deep scepticism of any totalising theory of how to think about the world (something which includes a scepticism of the decolonial project itself, which is a context-specific project with its own geopolitics and must be thought of just one way of thinking among many [Mignolo 2011]). Following these thinkers, the analysis this paper undertakes does not, therefore, actively seek to ground itself in any broader metatheory, but simply draws on decolonial concepts to challenge how one particular institution, the OECD, projects an understanding of the world; in this sense it could be seen as ‘pragmatic’ (Santos 2014, 207).

To give this kind of approach sufficient clarity and precision, I draw in particular on what Santos calls a ‘sociology of absences’ approach. Santos (2018, 25) describes this as involving ‘the cartography of the abyssal line… it identifies the ways and means through which the abyssal line produces nonexistence, radical invisibility, and irrelevance’. Accordingly, through careful analysis of documents related to the Learning Compass, I will examine the ways in which the Learning Compass¸ as a discursive construction, embraces a version of coloniality as it systematically excludes or renders invisible epistemologies of the Global South, thereby continually re-enforcing the abyssal line and imagining ‘development’ as the acquisition of the epistemologies of the Global North.

Unlike previous OECD outputs, the Learning Compass is not a single report or programme. Rather, its contents are captured on a constantly changing website (https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/). Everything on the website collectively stands together to offer a vision for what schools need to include in their curricula in the 21st century. This analysis has focused solely on analysing the material on this website, which includes videos, graphics, reports and so on. Given the changing nature of the website, it is important to note that this analysis was undertaken in two distinct periods: 1 December 2019–31 January 2020, and 1 December 2020–30 December 2020, with all the material quoted below all still found on the website at the close of the second round of analysis. With regards to processing this material, CDA does not necessitate any set analytical process. In this study, in order to generate findings, documents were watched/read/engaged with multiple times, and annotations were made at moments where decolonial theory seemed to be able to illuminate particular sections. For instance, I noted where a ‘zero point’ epistemology seemed to be embraced, or where the OECD seemed to be marking an abyssal line. Equal attention was paid to where the OECD may have been embracing anything akin to an ‘ecology of knowledges’ approach. In line with the dialectical-relational approach of CDA, attention was continually paid to the relationship between these textual moments and the broader goals and history of the OECD discussed above, by asking questions like ‘how does the OECD’s historical orientation towards a certain kind of “development” relate to the vision of knowledge it promotes here?’. This process of close reading and annotation was eventually brought together in the key findings presented in the following section.

Analysis and discussion

The purpose of the learning compass

It is useful to begin this analysis by examining the statements the OECD makes about what the Learning Compass is, and what its aim(s) are. In the ‘About’ section on the main webpage, we read ‘the project aims to set goals and develop a common language for teaching and learning’ and that it seeks to ‘build a common understanding of the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values students need in the 21st century’ (OECD 2020). The idea of developing a ‘common language’ or ‘common understanding’ is not ipso facto an example of coloniality on the part of the OECD: indeed, decolonial theorists also seek to offer a ‘common language’ or ‘common understanding’ related to where they think humanity needs to head, albeit one which accepts divergent onto-epistemological positions. However, understanding the Learning Compass in dialectical relation to its context, that is, as produced by an organisation committed to a modernising, homogenising project, suggests there is a clear risk that such ‘common understanding’ could in fact be a Eurocentric one, with the OECD therefore at risk of ‘impos[ing] a provincialism as universalism’ (Quijano 2007, 178). Elsewhere, the OECD often talks about the Learning Compass as a tool to ‘help shape the future we want’ (OECD 2019c, 11). In line with Santos’s (2018) sociology of absences approach, we can ask who the ‘we’ is here – who is included, and who is excluded?

Answers to this question can begin to be seen in two key documents that form part of the broader Learning Compass project – a list of contributors document (OECD 2019d) and a project background document (OECD 2019c). The contributors document is revealing because it spells out exactly how many individuals contributed to each aspect of the Learning Compass, and which countries they were representing in doing so. There are a huge range of lists on the document, covering everything from members of particular advisory groups on certain topics to lists of other international organisations who sent observers. Below (see Table 1) I have summarised the contents of a number of the key lists in the document, focused on how many of the participants are from ‘non-western’ nations, i.e. those nations outside western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I have opted for this purely geographical definition to avoid engaging here with complex debates about which exact nations fall into the nongeographical category of the ‘Global South’.

Table 1. Make up of certain committees that contributed to learning compass 2030.

List	Number of Participants	Number of Non-western participants + countries
Core Advisory Team	4	2: 1 x Korea, 1x Japan
Learning Compass Working Group Leaders	14	4: 2x Mexico, 1x Singapore, 1x India
Knowledge & Skills Working Group	21	8: 4x Chile, 1x Japan, 1x Kazakhstan, 1x Turkey, 1x Singapore
Academic Curriculum Experts	31	0 representing universities not located in western nations
Student Advisors	69	24: 9x China, 6x Japan, 4x Kazakhstan, 3x Korea, 1x Turkey, 1x Myanmar, 1x Mexico, 1x Indonesia

This kind of analysis is limited in that it cannot capture, for example, whether an individual representing one nation has meaningful connections with another (something perhaps likely to be the case with universities in particular). However, the picture it paints of western dominance in the creation of the Learning Compass is nonetheless clear. As an aggregate figure across these 5 groups, only 27% of contributors were from non-western countries, and out of these countries only a few were low income, including Myanmar, India and Indonesia. Although one could argue that, as an OECD project, the Learning Compass will inevitably draw primarily on the expertise of OECD nations, it is worth remembering that the ambition of the Learning Compass is not just to reshape education within the OECD but rather to offer a vision to the world. Thus, if we acknowledge ‘the interconnection between geo-history and epistemology’ (Mignolo 2011, 91), it is problematic that the Learning Compass’s vision emerges largely from consultation with western individuals, while others areas of the globe are marginalised, or even excluded altogether – only one African country for example, South Africa, had individuals who were consulted. From a decolonial perspective, a ‘common understanding’ for the future of education cannot be advanced by listening to individuals principally located in the Global North (Santos 2018; Shahjahan 2016).

The impact of the hegemonic status of western ‘experts’ in the shaping of the Learning Compass is clear when turning to the ‘history of education’ section provided in the project background paper (OECD 2019c), which lies at the centre of the justification for the Learning Compass. The paper begins its historical section by discussing the industrial revolution of the 19th century. We read that:

With economic growth, standards of living and average income improved; and with the introduction of universal public schooling, more people benefitted from the gains of the industrial revolution. However, schooling was modelled to respond to societal demands for labour, and thus the goal of education was largely to prepare students for jobs. Teaching was also made “efficient”: in mass education, one teacher was to teach as many students as possible with standardised content. (OECD 2019c, 6–7)

There are a number of assumptions in this potted history which reveal its Eurocentric foundations. Firstly, the industrial revolution here is positioned as a positive force, something that led to improved standards of living and wider access to education. What this does not acknowledge what Mignolo (2011) calls the ‘dark side of western modernity’, or the coloniality inherent in modernity: here the fact that the gains of the industrial revolution were made in large part possible by the horrific extraction of wealth from other peoples around the world via colonialism and slavery (Bhambra 2007; Yusoff 2018). The industrial revolution in this document is seen purely as part of ‘modernity’ rather than as enmeshed within modernity/coloniality (Quijano 2007). Secondly, education is imagined here as tied to the needs of the (European, industrial) economy, with 19th century classrooms understood as mirroring the ‘standardisation’ of the factory.

When it comes to the 21st century, the (assumed) state of modern, European economies are once again the anchor in considering the direction education needs to take, as in this statement:

As governments like Germany overhaul their economic strategies in the face of unprecedented challenges, including an exponentially faster rate of technological change, meaningful and relevant changes in education are urgently needed to achieve more inclusive and sustainable development for all, not just for the privileged few. Ethical questions about how to harness the knowledge and skills we possess to create new products and opportunities loom large. To shorten the period of “social pain” and maximise the period of “prosperity” for all, education systems need to undergo transformative change too (OECD 2019c, 3)

Although there is a commitment to ‘more inclusive and sustainable development’ here, it is clear that the Learning Compass is imagined very much as a tool to guide curricula towards being more useful for the needs of the western economy (see Hughson and Wood 2020). Thus the ‘common language’ the Learning Compass seeks to create is at risk of being one which is in fact built by the knowledges of the Global North and with the needs of the economies of the Global North in view (this is the context the text sits in dialectical relation to), something which means the Learning Compass therefore continues to chart the abyssal line. We can see this more clearly in turning to the detailed articulation of what knowledge the Learning Compass considers worthwhile for students to learn.

Knowledge in the learning compass

The Learning Compass’s ‘Knowledge Concept Note’ (OECD 2019b) offers a detailed breakdown of what knowledge the OECD believes students need to acquire to ‘shape the future we want’ (OECD 2019c, 11). There are 4 types of knowledge listed as useful for students to acquire. Firstly there is disciplinary knowledge, which is imagined as the central type of knowledge, being ‘the foundation of the conceptual structure leading to understanding and expertise’ (OECD 2019b, 6). Then there are two other types of knowledge which relate to disciplinary knowledge: ‘interdisciplinary knowledge’, which is said to be about ‘relating the concepts and content of one discipline/subject to the concepts and content of other disciplines/subjects’, and epistemic knowledge, which is identified as ‘understanding of how expert practitioners of disciplines work and think’ (OECD 2019b, 4). Only one type of knowledge, procedural knowledge or ‘the understanding of how something is done’ (OECD 2019b, 4) is not imagined as disciplinary.

Given that disciplinary knowledge is positioned so centrally by the OECD here, we need to ask what disciplinary knowledge is. Kelly, Luke, and Green (2008, x) talk about disciplines as ‘epistemological frameworks for naming and understanding the world’, that is, they offer certain ways of seeing and thinking, and, crucially, also involve the adoption of a certain kind of ‘identity and affiliation’ (Kelly, Luke, and Green 2008, ix). Central to understanding disciplines from a decolonial perspective is that these ‘epistemic frameworks’ are not neutral. Instead, as Mignolo (2011) has shown, modern academic disciplines emerged from a particular place (western Europe) in particular languages (Western European languages) largely via a particular institution (the ‘university’). Smith (2012, 61), drawing on Foucauldian language, therefore identifies these academic disciplines as ‘regimes of truth’: they offer particular modes of understanding and ways of seeing the world which are often deeply intertwined with the colonial project, especially as most key disciplines came into being at the height of European colonialism in the 19th century (Rudolph, Sriprakash, and Gerrard 2018). The OECD, however, does not wrestle with the complex history of the geopolitics of disciplinary knowledge here. Instead, in its assertion that disciplinary knowledge is simply ‘the foundation of the conceptual structure leading to understanding and expertise’ (OECD 2019b, 6), or elsewhere that it is ‘needed in order to understand the world’ (OECD 2019b, 6) it positions such knowledge as ‘universal’ and as occupying the ‘zero point’ epistemologically speaking (Mignolo 2011).

The issues with this centring of disciplinary knowledge can be seen perhaps even more clearly in the way the Learning Compass positions disciplinary knowledge as simple, uncritical path towards achieving educational ‘equity’:

Acquiring disciplinary knowledge is a step towards ensuring equity and opportunity to learn. Voogt, Nieveen, and Thijs (2018) define equity as when “all students have opportunities to access a quality curriculum to reach at least a basic level of knowledge and skills, and that the curriculum does not set barriers or lower expectations due to socio-economic status, gender, ethnic origin or location”. They define opportunity to learn as when “the curriculum supports all students to realise their full potential … Young and Muller (2016) refer to equity and opportunity to learn as the idea of “knowledge of the powerful”. (OECD 2019b, 7)

The misconstrual of Young and Muller (2016) (who actually make a distinction between ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’, arguing only the former leads to equity – though their argument has been much critiqued) is particularly revealing here. In positioning disciplinary knowledge as ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and suggesting a simple acquisition of this ‘knowledge of the powerful’ here as a way to achieve equity, the OECD firmly reveals an imaginary where the ‘solution’ to today’s educational problems lies in an uncritical embrace of western disciplinary forms, without space being made for other knowledge traditions.

In uncritically promoting a form of knowledge grounded deeply in the western European tradition of thought, the OECD is therefore clearly engaging in a form of coloniality as it takes something that has particular origins (disciplinary knowledge) and projects it as universal and as central to students ‘realis[ing] their full potential’ (OECD 2019b, 7). In doing so it silently charts the abyssal line. Its discursive promotion of one mode of knowing without considering the limitations or challenges to this mode, or fully considering other ways of knowing, amounts to epistemicide: ‘the destruction of an immense variety of ways of knowing that prevail mainly on the other side of the abyssal line’ (Santos 2018, 9). This is especially the case given the OECD’s uncritical and totalising promotion of disciplinary knowledge here.

Importantly, decolonial scholars do not tend to desire the elimination of disciplinary knowledge from the curriculum; more often there is a desire to work both within disciplinary spaces, as well as with other kinds of knowledges, to advance understanding (Santos 2014). Consider, for example, Bhambra’s (2014) call for ‘connected sociologies’ which better account for the linkages between the origins of the discipline of sociology and of empire, or Yusoff’s (2018, 87) call for an ‘insurgent geology’ which takes the discipline beyond the extractive language geology has offered the colonial project. However, in not considering these alternate ways of understanding disciplinarity and instead presenting it simply as a basic, foundational, universal way of knowing, the Learning Compass stands as clearly emblematic of the ‘cultural complex’ (Quijano 2007, 172) of modernity/coloniality: promoting one epistemology as the route to societal success, to modernity and development in a way which simultaneously silences other potential epistemological positions.

To pay attention to the kinds of disciplinarity Bhambra or Yusoff advocate for would potentially have led the Learning Compass towards a more critical approach to curriculum knowledge more aligned with an ecology of knowledges approach (Santos 2018). However, it is clear when looking at what the OECD imagines both the function or purpose of knowledge to be, and, related to this, how it imagines the form of this knowledge, that such an approach is not feasible within the Learning Compass’s broader frame of reference. The clearest idea the Learning Compass offers for how it thinks about the function of knowledge can be seen in the following quotation, which is meant to describe the benefits of disciplinary knowledge:

The subject-specific concepts and detailed content of disciplinary knowledge that students learn are also influenced by the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are prized in society at the time. One major trend shaping the economy and society is the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI). Because of this technological development, researchers find that students will need to acquire different types of knowledge and understanding. According to Luckin and Issroff (2018), people should understand basic AI concepts, be digitally literate, be data literate, know online safety, understand basic AI programming, understand the ethics of AI, and, for some people, know how to build AI systems (OECD 2019b, 6).

This statement aligns very strongly with those made about the needs of 19th and 21st century schooling found in the background paper, which positioned education as needing to respond to changes in nations’ ‘economic strategies’ (OECD 2019c, 3). Here, knowledge is imagined as useful because it can be used in interpreting and working with the ‘technological development’ of AI, that is, it has a clear economic benefit. This also speaks to the way the Learning Compass positions the form of knowledge: it appears here in classic Cartesian form as an object, something which is ‘not only different from the “subject” … but external to the latter by its nature’ (Quijano 2007, 172). As Kaess (2018, 349), writing about PISA for Development, notes, in the OECD’s neoliberal imaginary, ‘knowledge is more often than not viewed as a commodity that is simply transferrable – from teacher to student, from parent to child, from country to country – thus dismissing the dialectical relationship between learner and context’. Thus, knowledge in the Learning Compass is something ‘out there’, detached from its geopolitics and ready to be exported from the Global North to the Global South for the purposes of the latter’s ‘development’: useful for tasks such as working with AI, for example.

It is worth finally noting that the Learning Compass does attempt briefly to engage with indigenous knowledge which, while not making the list of the four main knowledges, does get a small text box within the Knowledge Concept Note. There is brief acknowledgement that from an indigenous perspective, knowledge can sometimes be ‘neither a subject nor an object’ (OECD 2019b, 6). However, we then read that while there is ‘no single definition’ of indigenous knowledge, indigenous knowledge has the following ‘shared understandings’:

• Interconnectedness: Everything is connected, nothing is excluded, and everything is related.

• Everything in the universe is fluid and in motion

• Reciprocity, generosity, kindness, harmony, balance and beauty are words spoken about the world and contribute to the health and well-being of a community. (OECD 2019b, 6)

These claims are backed up by reference to one OECD commissioned report about indigenous education in British Columbia. As a non-indigenous researcher, I am not best placed to judge how accurate these claims about indigenous knowledge are. However, the broad nature of these claims, as well as the fact they are extrapolated out from a report into just one place, would suggest that the OECD is potentially offering a very limited, homogenised view of indigeneity. Considering this alongside the fact that this information is put in a separate text box and not discussed as part of the broader framing of knowledge in the document ultimately further emphasises the coloniality of the Learning Compass. While perhaps feeling compelled to pay some attention to indigenous knowledge, the marginalisation of this knowledge within the framework works to further re-enforce the OECD’s vision for epistemic modernisation as being about the acquisition and economically productive use of Eurocentric epistemologies.

Conclusion: the OECD and decolonial futures?

The above analysis has shown how the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030 firmly stands as part of the cultural complex of modernity/coloniality. Speaking to its historical emergence as an organisation dedicated to a homogenising vision of ‘development’, in the Learning Compass the OECD continues to embrace a colonial rationality where the Global Northern onto-epistemological position is the ideal to be aimed at worldwide. This article has looked in particular at knowledge in the Learning Compass, due to the fact the politics of knowledge have so often sat at the heart of the imperialist project (Fanon 1963; Smith 2012). It has shown that far from embracing anything akin to an ecology of knowledges (Santos 2014), the Learning Compass has relied on the input of mostly western individuals to create a vision which has prioritised western knowledge forms which are imagined as useful for the development of the western economy. This knowledge is positioned as holding the ‘zero point’: as being the universal, foundational and natural form of knowledge which underlies the development of any subsequent modes of knowing. In promoting this vision, the Learning Compass implicitly invalidates the knowledges of the Global South, therefore embodying the duality at the heart of modernity/coloniality and the way it carries a ‘culture of violence’ within its ‘emancipatory project’ (Dussel 2000, 474).

In revealing itself as such, the Learning Compass does not stand in isolation from previous OECD projects. Instead, as discussed in the background section at the start of this paper, it can be understood as extending and solidifying the OECD’s commitment to a neocolonial approach to education (Kaess 2018; Tikly 2004). The Learning Compass continues to advance an understanding of knowledge as an object ‘out there’ (i.e. detached from its geopolitics) and of use primarily for economic advancement. This discourse can be seen clearly in PISA (see Schleicher 2012), but goes right back to, for instance, the OECD’s highly-influential 1996 Knowledge-Based Economy report, which argues that ‘knowledge is now recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth’ and that policies worldwide need to be adjusted accordingly (OECD 1996, 3; see also OECD 2012). However, beyond just furthering this idea of knowledge-as-productive-object, in important ways the Learning Compass marks a crucial step forward for the OECD in the way it sees the organisation offering the clearest outline yet of exactly what knowledge students world-wide should be acquiring. In this way, it goes beyond PISA with its tacit suggestions for curriculum-making (Takayama 2018), or previous OECD projects like DeSeCo (OECD 2005) which outlined just 3 broad competencies students should acquire, to outline a much more detailed vision. Given the widely-acknowledged ‘soft power’ of the OECD and the way the organisation appears to be willing to use the Learning Compass to assess the quality of national curricula (OECD 2019a), this vision of knowledge projected by the Learning Compass therefore is highly likely to have a significant influence on education systems globally.

Given the problematic nature of the OECD’s prescription here, we therefore must ask what it might involve for us to move towards a world where an ecology of knowledges can be recognised. There is not adequate space here to outline anything close to a comprehensive vision of transformation. Nevertheless, we can consider a few key points. Firstly, given the OECD’s history, funding structure and current direction, it seems unlikely it will be vehicle for this kind of transformation. However, this does not mean its hegemony cannot be challenged. Importantly, many local curriculum initiatives are increasingly embracing an ecologies of knowledge approach. Such local projects are rejecting ‘binary thinking and taken for granted frameworks of knowledge’ and therefore ‘mak[ing] space for imagining radical alternatives’, whether this be making space for indigenous knowledge within schooling, or rejecting the wholesale importation of western curricular forms into non-western settings (Miles and Nayak 2020, 103). At the same time, more theoretical work, taking place both inside, and, just as importantly, outside universities which is challenging the hegemonic status of uncritical forms of western knowledge should give us hope that transformation is possible (Elkington et al. 2020; Bhambra 2014).

It is crucial too to acknowledge that such transformation of the way we think about different kinds of knowledge is of course not just a rhetorical exercise for the sake of ‘diversity’; indeed, it is one of great urgency for our global wellbeing. There is perhaps no greater example of this than the climate crisis, where it is clear that the discipline of economics, alongside other disciplines, has been fundamental in generating the perilous situation we find ourselves in by offering an extractive system of thought which does not place adequate value on the natural world (Dasgupta 2021). Therefore, when imagining ‘the future we want’ (OECD 2019c, 11), an approach which sets up a dialogue between different knowledge systems, rather than maintaining the dominance of some over others, is a sine qua non. As discussed in the theory section above, this does not mean a collapse into relativism, but rather a greater openness to what different knowledges can contribute to the crises we face. It may be by bringing together, for instance, both western science and indigenous knowledge that paths to averting the climate crisis can be found (see for instance Wilkinson et al. 2020). Achieving such a state of affairs will not be easy, but, as Fanon (1963, 254) writes, ‘if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries’.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Professor Susan Robertson, Dr Bronwyn Wood and Simina Dragoș for kindly taking the time to read draft versions of this work and provide useful feedback. Thanks are also due to the Ideas Lab within the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education’s Knowledge, Power and Politics cluster who provided many constructive comments in response to a presentation based on this paper. Finally, thanks too to the anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).