The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is an important indicator of the increased global importance of education. It defines the goal of education at the level of the child rather than the state, the community or household. The requirement that each child be treated as an individual who can expect to see their ‘personality, talents and mental and physical abilities’ fully developed, is an example of the individualism which features in three important theoretical paradigms for understanding the rise of education and training. We compare accounts of the global growth of education produced by functionalism, neoinstitutionalism and political economy with the help of qualitative research on children’s experience of parental influences. The research is drawn from semi‐structured interviews with millennial graduates in Portugal, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It reveals weaknesses in the paradigms which are related to the way each theorises individualism and the role it plays in parental influence on education. The functionalist and neoinstitutionalist conceptions of individualism limit the usefulness of these paradigms for understanding changes in the way families around the world prepare children for education. The political economy paradigm is more promising; however, an approach which identifies only one, neoliberal, version of individualism has limited purchase on international differences in parental influences and the way these influences are changing. An approach which can draw on the contrast between a cognitive individualism associated with neoliberalism, and sentimental individualism which originates in social movements, is more promising.

中文翻译：

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父母，个人主义和教育：三个范式和四个国家

联合国《儿童权利公约》（1989年）是教育在全球范围内日益重要的重要标志。它定义了在儿童层面而非国家，社区或家庭层面上的教育目标。要求每个孩子被视为个人，可以期望自己的“个性，才智和身心能力得到充分发展”，这是个人主义的一个例子，这种个人主义体现在三个重要的理论范式中，以理解教育和培训的兴起。我们通过对儿童的父母影响力经验的定性研究，比较了功能主义，新制度主义和政治经济学对全球教育增长的说明。该研究来自对葡萄牙，新加坡，英国和美国。它揭示了范式中的弱点，这些弱点与每个理论提出个人主义的方式及其在父母对教育的影响中所起的作用有关。功能主义和新制度主义的个人主义观念限制了这些范式对理解世界各地家庭为儿童准备教育的方式上的变化的有用性。政治经济学范式更具前景；然而，仅能识别一种新自由主义的个人主义的方法，对父母影响力的国际差异以及这些影响力变化方式的购买受到了限制。可以利用与新自由主义有关的认知个人主义与起源于社会运动的感性个人主义之间的对比的方法更有希望。