Globalization: Challenges for the Modern Curriculum; or a Power/Knowledge Complex in the Production of Curricular Variables?

Globalization is often referred to as external to education - a state of affair facing the modern curriculum with numerous challenges. In this paper it is examined as internal to curriculum; analysed as a problematization in a Foucaultian sense. That is, as a complex of attentions, worries, ways of reasoning, producing curricular variables. The analysis is made through an example of early childhood curriculum in Danish Pre-school, and the way the curricular variable of the pre-school child comes into being through globalization as a problematization, carried forth by the comparative practices of PISA. It thus explores the systems of reason that educational comparative practices carry through time; focusing on the way configurations are reproduced and transformed, forming the pre-school child as a central curricular variable.