EDUCATION IN EUROPE AND THE LISBON BENCHMARKS

This chapter discusses how important the EU's involvement in education has been. It outlines Europe's demographic development, the change in labor markets and human resources. The interaction of these three areas of society points to an enormous need for action. It then discusses how to gauge the level of education in a population, and what absolute and relative measures of educational achievement could look like. It examines the educational policy objectives formulated by the EU, and describes to what extent the European countries have already accomplished them. The chapter discusses two fundamental questions: first, how coherent are the individual goal dimensions of the Lisbon strategy and what can we learn from the degree of their correlation for future empirical research on education? Second, what do the indicators allow us to say about issues of equal opportunity and social exclusion in European countries, and how much diversity is there within Europe in this respect? It concludes with a summary illustrating the analytical potential of the indicators and showing that purportedly simple measures have more to them than first meets the eye.