A critical and comparative reading on discourse of education for economic development: the reports of World Bank as a case study

Abstract

Documentary analysis of educational policies offers an outlook that is conducive to a comparative deepening of social phenomena to understand new ways of shaping the political power. Critical discourse analysis provides the conceptual and methodological elements that allow us to approach to documentary analyses using the tools necessary to examine the underlying forms of representation and action and discursive strategies. With these methodological tools, five World development reports published in the end of decades are analyzed, as typical texts of globalization, and work as a case study to recognize the discursive characteristics that remain and change in conception of education for development. This discourse analysis of the respective reports allows us to identify the profound adjustments, not only in terms of the conception of development over the last 50 years, but also in terms of function of educative policy in this development. It is concluded that critical discourse analysis is an approach that allows us to focus on discursive practices as social practices and on policy design in a historical perspective. The selection of hyper-institutionalized and highly policy-referenced texts such as the World development reports, allows for a comparative approach to both their current incidence and in historical perspective the phase of policy design at the global level.