TheDakar framework: constructing and deconstructing the global neo‐liberal matrix

Abstract

The paper’s focus is The Dakar framework for action—education for all: meeting our collective commitments, which presents the UNESCO, G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s blueprint for the ‘development’ of education globally by 2015. Taking a discourse analytic approach, discussion of the Dakar framework make two claims. The first is that the Framework has a Matrix‐like effect in that it potentially closes out other ways of thinking about and practicing education. The second argument is that the apparent contradiction between its deployment of a human rights centered discourse and neo‐liberal discourse that establishes this Matrix‐like effect, must be understood as something more than simply an exercise in lies, deception and rhetoric. Rather, the Matrix‐like effect of the Framework succeeds not because the Framework lies, but because it doubly exploits the very same ambivalence in liberal‐humanism that facilitated the European control of ‘Others’ in an earlier era of globalisation. Gandhi who challenged the Matrix‐like effects of globalising British Empire power in this earlier era of globalisation is referred to in the paper as a real figure of history to exemplify the Neo figure in the discussion of the Matrix as a metaphor for the neo‐liberal EFA policy.