Education has become a key policy area both in nation-states and at the global level, particularly when it comes to the schooling of children. Although responsibility for formal education primarily falls to the state, International Organisations (IOs) have increasingly become involved in this field. This dissertation discusses the conceptions of education present in the United Nations through two of its main agencies with a mandate on the subject – UNICEF and UNESCO. A selection of the agencies reports are analysed through the theoretical approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in relation to a concept here called traditional schooling. This concept draws on authors that discuss how forms of education have been conceptualised and institutionalised as part of political, economic and cultural processes in Western Europe in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, serving as reproducers of a certain social order. The dissertation conducts a historical overview of the emergence and dissemination of formal schooling, as well as the role of the United Nations in this process, and analyses UNICEF and UNESCO documents that refer to their vision of education, its goals, importance, actors and methods. It concludes that the organisations visions do not always align education s goals, importance, subjects and methods, and although they frequently serve as promoters and disseminators of traditional schooling, there are dissenting initiatives that indicate there is room for other visions of education to emerge.