The general thesis of this paper is that the motives of the currently dominant global educational governance are rooted in a specific cultural milieu in the time of the Cold War, more precisely in the late 1950s, heading to a harmonious world. The more specific thesis is that a series of failures in the achievement of this harmonized globe led to reforms in educational governance, leading eventually to the development of instruments like large-scale assessments, such as PISA. The concluding thesis (...) of the paper is that precisely because the idea of global governance is rooted in a specific culture, its instruments run the risk of only affecting formal structures of education in other cultures rather the inner activities of the ‘educational fabric’. (shrink)