Europe beyond education: Implications for education

Sir Michael Sadler, in his Oxford Speech at the turn of the 20th century, stated that "the things outside the schools matter even more than the things inside the schools, and govern and interpret the things inside". Despite, over a century later, the increasing influence of an applied form of Comparative Education which claims to identify universal and transferrable policy solutions, for many of us Sadler's assumption has been and remains a central tenet of our academic field. This conference is designed to provide a site to explore that aspect of our academic identity. In particular, we invited an acknowledged ‘outsider’ to frame the current ‘situation’ in Europe beyond education and what that means for identity formation projects in general. We also invited two distinguished ‘insiders’ within education to discuss or extract the educational implications out of this ‘situation’. Our 'insiders' are invited not to take for granted our long-standing and largely under-theorised assumption that ‘the things outside the schools are more important than the things inside’. Instead they are encouraged to problematise it.