Listen, Execute and Deliver. PISA Assignment for Teachers

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse the consequences that PISA (Programme for International Students Assess-ment) and the OECD’s educational agenda have had on schooling, as well as the conception of teach-ing that the OECD nurtures. I shall make my point conceptually by analysing the OECD’s public documents – publications, videos, webpages, and brochures – thus unravelling the OECD’s educational gesture and its underlying ethical framework. Specifically, I argue that the OECD’s explicit gesture of shaping the educational arena from above risks producing a picture of schooling in which both teachers and students merely have to listen to the OECD’s educational discourse, executing the related dictates, thus delivering OECD’s educational provision worldwide. In the final part of the paper, drawing from Heidegger and Arendt, I attempt to lay out a different way of conceiving edu-cational relationships if freed from the OECD’s educational order.