In his 1987 book 'The Struggle for the American Curriculum' Herbert Kliebard analysed the forging of the American curriculum as the outcome of a struggle between a range of interest(ed) groups and parties. He thus showed that the curriculum should never just be understood in rational terms – as an answer to Spencer’s question ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’– but always also as the result of social and political struggle. If Kliebard still worked in a tradition that saw the curriculum mainly as a national project, the contemporary dynamics of curriculum making are increasingly taking place at a global level (Priestley & Biesta 2013). It thus becomes necessary to ask what the dynamics of the struggle for the ‘world curriculum’ are, also because at the level of official politics curriculum matters remain the prerogative of national governments. In addition to the global dimension, it is important to note that this struggle is mainly driven by the logic of comparison (the comparison of performance of education systems) rather than by explicit educational ideologies, and that key players such as the OECD are not nation-based but represent an altogether different set of interests. In my contribution I aim to review main lines of recent scholarship about the role of PISA in the struggle for the world curriculum (e.g., Hopmann, Brinek & Retzl 2007). This will be guided by two questions. Firstly, I am interested in the question of PISA’s attractiveness. Why do people at many different levels within the educational systems ‘fall’ for it. Secondly I am interested in the impact of these dynamics on the much more fundamental discussion about what makes education ‘good’ (Biesta 2010), where I will ask how this question can still play a role in the discussion about the curriculum and the future of education more generally.
