Education, Value-systems and Global (Dis)orders

Publicado el oct 15, 2025

CICE Editor:

Camille Fabo, Teachers College, Columbia University

Background

Profound ideological and power shifts in the global order have accelerated during the last decade (Mundy et al., 2025), with widespread contestation of global values often criticized for being either too Western, too “woke” (Schoorman, 2024), or grounded in unbalanced power relationships (Menashy, 2019) and colonial legacies (Popa, 2025). These critiques have intensified alongside challenges to the liberal order and the institutions supporting it worldwide (Goddard, Kreuder-Sonnen, and Rittberger, 2024). As schools and education systems reflect both nation-state values regarding domestic issues as well as how they position themselves in the world society (Pizmony-Levy, 2011; Russell, 2018), they are also increasingly at the center of political contestation (Salajan & Jules, 2025). Education has thus become a central terrain of these ideological debates (Furuta et al., 2023). 

In the United States (U.S.), the Department of Education has faced repeated political efforts to reduce its area of operations (Kruzel, 2025), while teacher recruitment has become increasingly politicized, and diversity and inclusion initiatives are being dismantled (U.S. Department of Education, 2025). Universities in the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have been accused of spreading antisemitism. In West Africa, the Islamist group Boko Haram continues to attack Christian schools for their Western orientation, and separatist groups such as the Ambazonia Defense Forces in Cameroon target schools for their perceived ideological alignment with the state (Cameroon | Crisis Group, 2025). At the international level, organizations focused on education (including United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations) are seeing financial support diminish, justified by accusations of antisemitism, neo-colonialism, interference, and other forms of bias, amidst skepticism about their practical and economic raison d’être (Bromley et al., 2020). As such, it is timely and crucial to interrogate and provide new knowledge on how educational policies and settings respond to ideological and socio-political changing paradigms.

Special Issue Aims
This special issue of Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) seeks to advance conceptual and empirical understandings of the role of education in contexts of a contested global order. We aim to establish a critical conversation on how education both responds to and is reshaped by these shifting dynamics, including how the agency of teachers, students, and schools contributes to building their desired national and international value system.

We welcome submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • The evolution and contestation of the “global script”: from liberal-democratic values to alternative visions
  • Historical and contemporary perspectives on the education of minoritized groups and the attacks they face
  • The evolution of school reforms and educational responses to the rise of authoritarian regimes and conflicts
  • Resistance movements in schools and academia: their ideological framing and limitations
  • The effects of global (dis)order on educational institutions, policy, and actors
  • Education’s role in shaping national and international orders (and counter-orders)

We invite original research articles, essays, article responses, and book reviews that address these questions and related issues. Methodologically, we welcome qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approaches, particularly those that enable meaningful comparisons across contexts or situate individual cases in dialogue with existing scholarship. Contributions are encouraged from early-career and established scholars, educators, administrators, graduate students, policy-makers, and practitioners working in governmental and non-governmental organizations.

Manuscript submission information

  • Please consult our submission guidelines here. 
  • Deadline: January 23, 2026.

 

References

Bromley, P., Schofer, E., & Longhofer, W. (2020). Contentions over world culture: The rise of legal restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, 1994–2015. Social Forces, 99(1), 281–304. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz138

Cameroon | Crisis Group. (2025, December 2). International Crisis Group. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon

Furuta, J., Meyer, J. W., & Bromley, P. (2023). Education in a postliberal world society. In The Oxford handbook of education and globalization (pp. 96–119). Oxford University Press.

Kruzel, J. (2025, July 14). US Supreme Court clears way for Trump to gut Education Department. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-supreme-court-clears-way-trump-gut-education-department-2025-07-14/

Menashy, F. (2019). International aid to education: Power dynamics in an era of partnership. Teachers College Press. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED596080

Mundy, K., Menashy, F., Jules, T. D., & Salajan, F. D. (2025). Debates and disruptions in the global governance of education: Taking stock in tumultuous times. Comparative Education Review, 69(3), 504–518. https://doi.org/10.1086/736502

Pizmony-Levy, O. (2011). Bridging the global and local in understanding curricula scripts: The case of environmental education. Comparative Education Review, 55(4), 600–633. https://doi.org/10.1086/661632

Popa, S. (2025). Decolonial, critical, and ethical approaches to global citizenship education curriculum and pedagogy. PROSPECTS, 55(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-025-09734-y

Russell, S. G. (2018). Global discourses and local practices: Teaching citizenship and human rights in postgenocide Rwanda. Comparative Education Review, 62(3), 385–408. https://doi.org/10.1086/698305

Salajan, F. D., & Jules, T. D. (2025). Academic freedom under siege: The global fallout of US authoritarianism and its threats to comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review, 69(3), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1086/736480

Schoorman, D. (2024). Waking up to the “anti-woke” agenda. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 56(4), 404–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2024.2364632

U.S. Department of Education. (2025, January 23). U.S. Department of Education takes action to eliminate DEI. https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-takes-action-eliminate-dei