Continent imaginaries across time: official educational discourse from the progressive USA to UNESCO

Abstract

In 1928, the United States Government published the Meriam Report. Almost a century later, the 2023 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report was released by UNESCO. In this paper I put these documents in conversation to trace the common ideological threads woven into the transition from a colonial era to our globalised world of mass schooling. The two reports seemingly have distinct emphases. A fixation on imperial expansion, Indigenous assimilation, and administrative progress gives way to the centrality of measurement, human rights, and building a transnational community. There are differences in form, vocabulary, grammar, and medium. But there is a unity in the insistence on modern education as the solution for social progress. By analysing the discursive practices of official reports, I show a persistence in the underlying narratives and symbols of education. These draw on shared–but contingent–social imaginaries of modernity which, once recognised, can open to alternative reimaginations.