Coping with many societal challenges (for example social inequality, migration, unfair trading, pollution and climate change) asks for solutions across nations, thus calling for trans-national coordinated , developed and accepted actions. Education has to play its role in preparing the next generation for contributing to this coordination and solutions by supporting students to become qualified, socially competent, open minded and democratic. Inspirations from multiple sources from diverse cultures and theories seem to produce conflicting visions and competing discourses about what the purposes of and means in education should be.

To contribute to an understanding of these visions and discourses this paper poses the research question: What type of education will contribute to educating the next generation to be qualified, socially competent, open minded and democratic?

We see two contemporary, fundamentally dissimilar discourses on education and their theoretical and societal roots: one is the technocratic turn and homogenization of education and another is a Democratic Bildung perspective in education for world citizenship in national or regional/local education (Moos, forthcoming).

The first discourse concerns the prevailing learning outcomes politics, governance and practices with international competence descriptions and measurements, as in the OECD’s PISA project. The, usually implicit, intention of such projects seems to build a global set of standards and measurements in order to be able to compare, assess and govern student outcomes across national systems. Such an approach produces globally homogenized discourses of aims and methods of education that neglect national and local cultures, societies and discourses. It also creates global evidence and best practice examples that encourage practitioners to ask for correct answers from students and discourage to develop creativity, problem solving skills and critical thinking (Ball, 2012; Hopman, 2008; Lawn & Grek, 2012; Moos, 2009).

In the second discourse general educational theories and experiences discuss education as a mixture of qualification, socialization and subjectification (Biesta, 2009). One can argue, that such a mixture intends to establish non-affirmative education and thus assists students to develop into autonomous and authoritative subjects by “creating opportunities for action, for being a subject, both in schools and other educational institutions, and in society as a whole” (Biesta, 2009). Biesta thus extends Dewey’s notion of experiences, deliberation and communication and his analysis points to the necessity for grounding student subjectificational learning in the actual cultural, relational and material context (Dewey, 1916/2005).

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