Someone gets it right

My skepticism about what's termed the "Global Education Industry" by many, many smarter people than me (Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Antoni Verger, Francine Menashy, Stephen Klees, among others) centers on the potential problems arising from privatization — unequal access, unequal learning, unequal opportunties and the focus on skills (competency-based learning, anyone?) in the absence of education about theory, history and the norms and values in which society and culture locate their foundations. "We" will become functionalists. 

Two Austrian researchers have got it right, however. Working with the Austrian Foundation for International Research, Margarita Langthaler and Homa Bazafkan have written a very savvy, well-founded and not-very polemical report:

Digitalization, education and skills development in the Global South: an assessment of the debate with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa 

states the situation succinctly and well — "...the impact of digitalization on education systems in the Global South in terms of equity and quality will first and foremost depend on political governance." The point, at least from my perspective, is that the private sector and the transnational education players can't be let and shouldn't be asked to make decisions about what is, or should be, a global public good. Their interests are divergent from the interests of many.

Langthaler and Bazafkan frame our hope, our counterposed desire (the following emphasis is theirs): "What emerges as a necessary response is the strengthening of public education as a core concept." Education is a human right, don't get it wrong.