While most academics have never found any simple answers to this question, the corporate and government voices initiating these calls for assessment have tended for the past century to see higher education in terms of workforce preparation. Since 1980 or so, a globalized rhetoric of skills and workforce preparedness has emerged with which U.S. discourses of education, skills, and work have become tightly coherent. In effect, this has become the new global “common sense” rhetoric of workforce preparedness. Moreover, this globalized neoliberal discourse has often taken place in conservative social and political contexts, giving it not only the aura of common sense but of moral correctness as well. In this discourse, the central point of educational assessment is the assessment of skills that have a workplace payoff, skills having become a general term for practices or forms of knowledge that fit a worker into a job. Education as a process of inculcating skills is ideally cast as a life-long investment in human capital. Such rhetoric of education and continual skill improvement deflects attention from the structural changes of late capitalism. This rhetoric assigns responsibility for job finding and retention onto the workforce itself and onto the higher education system, which is now tasked with workforce training. In such a climate, legislative concerns with educational “value for money” appear immune to challenge and U.S. educators comply readily with legislative requests for accountability. No one examines the terms of this new “common sense”; nor, of course, are educational institutions in any position to not comply. No one asks if education has “outcomes” in the ways that private enterprises do or why private enterprise is supposed to be a model for education.

This paper proposes that the legislative calls for assessment are an assertion of control over higher education’s opacity to and independence from the market logic. Market logic has attained a sort of unquestioned moral authority among political conservatives in the United States (and elsewhere) and among neoliberal market interests globally. This is reflected in the unquestioned reification of knowledge and practices as assessable skill sets. Of particular interest here is the fact that such accountability is now proposed as a way to protect the public interest. To examine these connections, I lay out the following elements: a brief sketch of key moments in higher education assessment; the function of education vis-à-vis the United States and global workforce; the rhetoric of skills accounting; contrasting perspective on skills assessment; and legislative pressures reinforcing the “common sense” of education as skills-inculcation in a globalized economy.

At a broader theoretical level, this essay argues that faith-based initiatives provide a specific way of imagining global interactions. Within the cultural scheme of lending and aid agencies, as well as within the conceptual framework of the Churches of Christ missionaries, faith-based initiatives are seen by participants as counteracting the dehumanizing effects of globalization. Religion is seen as providing a moral base upon which to rebuild a de-territorialized global culture, and education is viewed as a counterbalance to growing global economic inequalities. Together, religion and education operate symbolically and instrumentally to motivate and organize nonreligious initiatives. They are used by policymakers and religious leaders alike to inspire a worldwide community that paradoxically lives within, and yet transcends, national and linguistic boundaries and to create a sense of hope for future, better educated citizens. As Wolfensohn put it, religion and education tear down the “imaginary wall” between developed and undeveloped countries; faith-based initiatives “[transcend] economics” and deal “with the essence of humanity and what is right.” Or as President George W. Bush remarked, “The truth of the matter is that [a sense of purpose] comes when a loving citizen puts their [sic] arm around a brother and sister in need and says, I love you, and God loves you, and together we can perform miracles.”

Our paper offers a modest response to challenges set by two comparative educators who have contributed to our understanding of education and globalization processes. First, Nelly Stromquist has asked, “How can we apply the theory and knowledge of unfolding globalization developments to create an understanding of new educational phenomena?” We begin with that application in our examination of higher education reforms in China. Second, Philip Altbach has noted that “a balanced perspective [on how globalization trends influence education] requires careful analysis of the downside– viewpoints often not articulated in the rush toward the global future.”

This paper postulates that this common model of education is spreading because it fits the current needs of educational governance in highly industrialized societies. Because the requirements educational systems must satisfy are similar, the solutions are similar. Even a cursory examination of the assumptions that shape educational policy across the globe reveals that, in fact, countries share many of them. For example, education is increasingly necessary to lead a good life, in particular to avoid unemployment. High wages and good working conditions often require many years of schooling. As a result, citizens demand an effective education for their children.

By examining how programs and policy formation for democratic civic education have unfolded in Mexico over the last ten years, I hope to illustrate the unique and unexpected ways that one instance of the state—the Ministry of Education—goes about attempting to educate democratic citizens. I attempt to theorize important continuities and disjunctures across these different approaches to democratic civic education, and to thereby situate the local appropriation of global flows of ideas about democracy and citizenship. A key question for this paper is how democracy becomes “glocalized” in in and through particular educational programs for democratic citizenship.

In attempting to provide a conceptual framework that would simplify and provide coherence to an enormous amount of material at issue, I have decided to adopt a model suggested by Rolland Paulston and Gregory LeRoy to examine nonformal educational programs. The framework consists of two principal axes—a vertical one, concerning where reform is initiated (whether at the top in international and national bureaucracies or at the bottom in grassroots movements), and a horizontal axis, concerning the goals of educational changes—varying between principal economic instrumental goals or sociocultural and political change (often associated with identity movements). Paulston and LeRoy’s review of the literature on nonformal education indicated that most programs fell in the upper left quadrant of Figure 1, and were designed to meet the so-called “manpower” or “human resource” requirements and the needs of dominant groups. Still, there were also a number of grassroots movements that viewed education as a catalyst for fundamental social changes.