OECD’s dominant discourses of the low-performer and the production of subjects

Abstract

This article aims at troubling the dominant discourses around OECD’s portray of the low-performer. It deconstructs and maps the taken-for-granted truths that are built under the assumption that an accumulation of risk factors on students would pose a threat to the economic growth of a country. From this reading, the low-performer is taken as a child in need of salvation full of disadvantages that must be overcome. By building on a Deleuzian nonsense, the analysis plays with other types of correlations to conclude that the low-performer is fabricated to be an underachiever.