What are we saving? Tracing governing knowledge and truth discourse in global COVID-19 policy responses

As the world went suddenly into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sending individuals to their homes and shutting businesses and institutions, the closing of schools posed big problems. The majority of the world’s children were out of school, leading to the longest sustained period of school closures in history. We saw educators turning towards responses not aimed at collegial and community-engaged strategies for education in an emergency but at online learning cast as education/business as usual. This study explores the logic driving this global response through analyses of the documents released by three key global education actors: (1) the OECD and its paper A Framework to Guide Education Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020; (2) UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition #LearningNeverStops; and (3) the World Bank’s Guidance Note on Education Systems’ Response to COVID-19; and Guidance Note: Remote Learning and COVID-19. The authors of this article draw on Carol Bacchi’s approach to poststructural policy analysis to make visible the key concepts and binaries used within policy texts and to understand the “technologies of saving” that were invoked in each policy response, locating the education programmes, activities and actors within knowledge practices in educational reform. This article explores the World Bank, OECD and UNESCO responses using an analysis of knowledge harmonisation and difference among these institutions as well as their location as key norm-setters and governing actors in the field of education. The authors argue that all three responses privilege private-sector providers of digital technology. The consequence of these responses is that technologies of saving have centred on privatised, corporate edu-business and edu-tech aimed at online education delivery, bringing significant risks for the erasure of local knowledges. The authors’ study suggests that local policymakers, including community-based and national actors, must be invited into the discussion to envision other possibilities and to name the potential destructiveness embedded in the international organisations’ actions.