Education in a Postliberal World Society

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the overreach and failures of the international liberal order have led to a panoply of political movements and oppositional models that attack its legitimacy. We draw on neoinstitutional theories of educational change to suggest that the overall decline in liberal hegemony has weakened the centrality of education in models of society, and further that the rise of alternative models of society has redirected education toward less liberal-individualist forms. In a period we see as fragmented and “postliberal,” some of these alternative models deemphasize the liberal tenet of individual actorhood to reassert collective identities (e.g., nationalism, religion, or race/ethnicity), while others assert uncontrolled individual expression. We discuss the implications of these processes for issues such as school enrollments, educational stratification, curricular content, pedagogy, and educational organization. Going forward, it is difficult to imagine that education in its liberal form will be as central as it was in the earlier postwar period.