YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Education, training and learning mobility  81 [deterministic] assumption that “better educational outcomes are a strong predictor of economic growth” (OECD, 2010, p. 3). This assump- tion of the translatability of learning performance into economic perfor- mance is most evident in international surveys that measure educational performance in science, mathematics, reading, computer literacy, and civic literacy. The number of countries participating, and the number of resources invested, as well as the media and political attention given to the results of these surveys, are irrefutable evidence that they provide [at least for their proponents] a prime global benchmark for assessing the quality, efficiency, and equity of school systems. The global testing culture has become a kind of “new normal,” leading to the “datafication” (Williamson et al., 2020) or even “scandalization” of education (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2018). In this way, quantitative data has become an important means of lending “legitimacy” (Ringarp, 2016) to updates and other changes in public education. So-called “man- agement by numbers” (Grek, 2009) has created a complex relationship between science, “Big Data”, and policy (Prutsch, 2019). The matter is further complicated by the fact that the process of ‘corpo- ratisation of education’ has begun to significantly undermine the egali- tarian ethos of public education. This has been accompanied by a shift in emphasis in the discourse of the neoliberal agenda in education and its conceptual appeal, which now includes concepts that until recently were the [exclusive] domain of egalitarianism, e.g. equality, welfare, equal opportunity, fairness, etc. These and other changes in the broader substantive domain of education, e.g. the phenomenon of pre-school education, education as the delayed entry of young people into the la- bour market, etc., confirm that education and training remain at the centre of public policy. “Education is definitely important. Of course it is, I do not even know how to answer, it’s so obvious. I don’t know how important it is for a job, but it is important for being outspoken, even if it is not logically connected.” (Maša, 26 years old, self-employed but precariously employed)