Policy Cultures and Education Policy: A Central and Eastern European Perspective

This book is about the way national education systems are shaped by or show resistance to transnational influences. It is based on two key assumptions: one is that transnational influences have a major impact on the development of national systems; the second is that these influences are filtered by national political cultures. The first assumption was introduced, at the beginning of the book, with the metaphor of international airports; the second by that of the coastal rocks hit by the waves of the sea. The seven country cases illustrating the analysis have been selected from the most advanced regions of the world. This naturally raises the question of how far these cases are representative for other regions. Are transnational influences perceived, welcomed, absorbed, resisted, damped, and so on in a similar way in all educational systems or are there clearly distinctive patterns? Is the dynamic of the national and the transnational alike in the more developed and the less advanced parts of the world? The simple answer to these questions can only be “no,” but we have to go beyond this.