Risk Society and School Educational Policy

Grant Rodwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367000448
• eBook ISBN: 9780429813863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Risk Society and School Educational Policy explores the impact of risk society on policy in the US, UK and Australia through both practical and theoretical perspectives. The book develops an in-depth understanding of risk society itself, and guides the reader in applying this knowledge to the problem of how this impacts policy and practice in school education.

Drawing on work by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Rodwell explores the development of risk society as a field of interest, discussing its history, contemporary significance and links with neoliberalism, school education, and both mainstream and social media. He also examines its impact on government policies and the practical implications of how this impacts the educational experiences of children around the globe today.

A book for policy professionals, researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in Education Studies, Theory and Policy, and International and Comparative Education, Risk Society and School Educational Policy is the first international academic monograph published in the field.

1
The looming presence of risk society

Introduction

There is little new in the notion of risk. There has always been a contingent and vagarious edge to life and societies. “What has changed is the nature of risk…. The way we interpret risk, negotiate risk, and live with the unforseen consequences of modernity will structure our culture, society and politics for the coming decades” [Franklin: 1998, 1]. Indeed, how does this translate into the political process and into public policy? According to Franklin [1998, 8], “risk society is forcing us to make decisions”. The old politics asserts old certainties, insisting other people will make these decisions for us. Now, risk society politics is more demanding. It demands active participation through all layers of social, political and economic activity. Perhaps, this helps explain the 2016 Brexit decision, the election of President Trump, and in Australia the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and also Green parties in national politics from the 1980s, as people attempted to respond to what they perceive to be national risks resulting from globalisation.

Postmodern societies are continually confronted with national risks and threats. What genetically modified (GM) foods did for one generation, marine life contaminated by ocean-plagued plastics did for another generation. This is worthy of mention for what it means to risk society theory: “Plastic waste pollution of our planet has reached crisis point, especially in the oceans where it poses unprecedented threat to marine life…. Birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals, have all been found entangled in plastics, or with ingested pieces of plastics … suffer[ing] impaired movement, ability to feed and reproduce; as well as lacerations, ulcerations and death” [Plastic poisons in the food chain: 2015, n.p.]. Or as Vince and Hardesty [2016, 1] puts it: “Plastic pollution in the marine and coastal environment is a challenging restoration and governance issue. Similar to many environmental problems, marine plastic pollution is transboundary and therefore the governance solutions are complex”. In fact, “although the marine environment is unlikely to return to the condition it was in before the ‘plastic era’, it is an example of an environmental restoration challenge where successful governance and environmental stewardship would likely result in a healthier global oceanic ecosystem” [Vince & Hardesty: 2016, 1]. Indeed, viewed through the lens of risk society theory, that is where the drive from local to global governance comes in. Risk society determines this. “In risk society, modern society becomes reflexive, that is, becomes both an issue and a problem for itself” [Eid: 2003, 816].

Increasingly since the 1960s, climate change is being linked with natural disasters. With technological “advances”, progressively plastics are manufactured and used in ever-increasing ways, much of it finding its way in oceans. Obviously, these kinds of risk touch different nations in different ways. Small island nations such as Bangladesh will suffer disproportionally, as small island nations are among the most vulnerable – the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tonga, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Cook Islands (in the Pacific Ocean); Antigua and Nevis (in the Caribbean Sea); and the Maldives (in the Indian Ocean). These are the same nations which climate change is first impacting [Bruce: 1993].

This brings into question the role of science in modernity. Beck [1998, 13] contended many people in the age of risk believed there can only be one authority left, and that is science. But science is not like that, nor are the demands of risk society. “It’s not failure but success which has demonopolized science”: for example, witness climate change and plastic contaminate oceans. In Giddens’ [1998, 23] words: “As the pace of innovation hots up … new technologies impact more and more to the core of our lives”.

Since the 1970s, risk society theory has gathered much traction amongst researchers from a variety of disciplines, if not education. But what might a history of risk society and school education reveal? To adopt Beck’s [2015, 331] words: “To the extent that risk is experienced as omnipresent, there are only three possible reactions: denial, apathy or transformation”. Indeed, “how to live in the shadow of global risks? How to live, when old certainties are shattered or are now revealed as lies?” [Beck’s: 2015, 331] These words should not be taken as something to be feared or something to be apprehensive about, but rather as providing an invitation to travel where few researchers hitherto have dared, and to uncover some wonderful new knowledge and understandings of school education.

Indeed, by examining through this chapter the essential characteristics of risk society theory, and then in proceeding chapters applying these features to broad areas of school education, we will be able to bring fresh understandings to school education, and of course as well as social risk theory. We will come to realise risk society is responding at every turn, certainly as the following pages of this book will reveal, in almost every nook and cranny of school education.

Our challenge in this chapter is to elucidate the main characteristics of the risk society thesis that will at once invite further research, and stimulate fresh enquiry into aspects of school education in Australia, the UK and the US. We begin by breaking some relatively new ground by looking at how an historical analysis of risk society theory has fared thus far. Here, we are struck by an enormous projection of opportunity.

Historicising risk society theory

The response by the New Right, in some parts of the world “scoffed at concern for the environment, denied the ecological responsibilities of government and aimed to privatise environmental risk by transferring responsibility to the market” [Gray: 1998, 44]. Market forces could be used to harness science and defeat this threat. For decades, science had shown that it could dominate and control nature [Tindale: 1998].

In some comparatively rare research, Boudia and Nathalie [2007, 10] stressed the value in researching risk society theory within a historical framework, “and thus underlin[ing] the centrality of its political dimension[s]”. These researchers looked to environmental legislation in the UK, the US and Germany to illustrate how politics is imbedded in social risk theory: “The Thatcher era broke the trades union movement in Great Britain, the Reagan administration strengthened the US Government’s grip on the Environmental Protection Agency to the benefit of industry, and the government of Helmut Kohl in Germany ignored the demands of German ecological movements”.

Beginning with the Tasmania imbroglio over the 1972 flooding of the iconic Lake Pedder for a hydroelectric power station, and then the proposed damming of the Gordon River another environmentalist story emerged in this far off Australian island state. The politics of these latter events were intense, and assisted in the 1983 Hawke Labour Government’s national victory.

As Boudia and Nathalie [2007, 10] have shown, risk society theory “has generated a large body of research into the role and impact of science on risk which came to dominate the field and dealt with participatory democracy, deliberative procedures (e.g., citizens’ conferences and hybrid forums) and standards for good governance in science”. Our task in the following chapters is to illustrate how this kind of research can be applied to school education in Australia, the UK and the US.

Beck proposed some key hallmarks that for him separate our historical moment from earlier eras. Central to his thesis is that risk has escaped the control of institutions and governments, albeit much of what preoccupies institutions and governments is what Beck termed “manufactured risk” – for example, “risk amplified by a self-interested security state” [Culver: 2011, 7]. Culver [2011] argued a historical perspective of this is vitally important for a percipience understanding. Successive stages of modernity are evident when governments and institutions set out to control risk, as well as perceptions of risk. Again, this is central to the risk society thesis. Culver [2011, 7] wrote in respect to the “‘first’ modernity, efforts were made to manage and ‘demoralize’ risk”, came with workplace safety, when early in the 20th century the onus for workplace safety moved from workers to employers. Something similar occurred about the same time in respect to the state and changing norms of sexuality in society, moving from being a personal issue to one that was perceived by some legislators to be a government responsibility.

Chapter 5 of this present study, for example, demonstrates how the governments and health and educational authorities at times dealt with what they considered to be sexually precocious young girls, considered to be a liability to the state – by subjecting them, inter alia, to a clitoridectomy. Now, instead of moralising the perceived problem, the state would intervene at times, depending on the girls’ social class, in performing clitoridectomies on these young girls. In the more recent “second” modernity, the state and institutions attempted to manage a perceived risk by anticipating dangers that we individually have not experienced. In stark contrast to the earlier phase of modernity, now the state and institutions in attempting to control risk, promotes sexuality education programs in its schools and colleges. This is undertaken at some level of responses from certain moral provocateurs, moral entrepreneurs and political elites [Rodwell: 2017].

Not only does the historicising of risk society theory and school education strengthen our understanding of risk society theory, it also strengthens our understanding of school education, both historically and in the present. Following the work of the late and influential academic and educational historian, Professor Joe Lyons Kincheloe (1950–2008), from McGill University in Montreal, McLaren [1995: 29] who argued for this kind of analysis. He urged educational historians to: “Improve their ability to uncover the way that power works, personality is produced, disciplinary matrixes are legitimated and objectivity is defined”.

Tracing out the history of risk society impacting school education, this present book will reveal exactly how “power works, personality is produced” [Kincheloe: 1991, 232]. Although little recorded and analysed, with the virtual ascendency of risk society thinking over school educational policy internationally, the impact of this thinking on school education national policy has accentuated vastly during the early decades of the 21st century. Typically, this underpins the value of studying the history of what has been labelled “educational reforms”, demonstrating the great accomplishments of the past were cumulative and comprised the building blocks that “would raise us to a higher standing-point from which we may see much that will make the right road clearer to us” [McCulloch: 2011, 29].

Modernity and the notion of progress

Questioning the very idea of progress is at the heart of risk society theory. As with an unquestioned dam-building program on wild rivers, drowning ancient forests, as with a misplaced idea of progress, risk society theory brings into question notions of progress.

The author of this present book grew up in rural Australia during the post-war decades, when the country, with the help of an apparently endless stream of World War II refugees, was rebuilding and adjusting to a new world order, dominated in the West by the US, and the East by the USSR. Despite the Cold War anxieties, for me, apparent evidence of progress was at every turn, and most of this had to do with developments in material wellbeing and technological developments. It was during these years that courtesy of the New South Government public school system that I was provided with Ward’s 1952 textbook for lower-secondary history students from which I was to learn the “truths” of modern science in national progress, and their “superiority” over Indigenous knowledge and culture.

“The essence of the Western idea of progress can be simply stated: mankind has advanced in the past, is now advancing, and may be expected to continue advancing in the future” [Nisbet: n.d., n.p.]. What exactly do we mean when we speak of “advance”? We discover it is a highly nuanced word, with meanings ranging from the “most sublimely spiritual advance to the absolutely physical or material” [Nisbet: n.d., n.p.]. The Greeks and others liked to conceptualise progress in terms of the advancement of knowledge, particularly of the practical and scientific kind. But the idea was provided with a new twist by the ancient Christians and others, when they referred to “advance” or “progress” in a material sense, which would lead to notions of adapting the environment or society for the benefit of “mankind”, with these ideas being contextualised in democratic or totalitarian forms.

Even as early as the late 1960s, some thinkers were questioning the notion of progress. Inter alia, Aron [1968, 109] wrote of how the so-called progress embodied in modern Western societies had been accompanied by a massive breakdown of traditional families. In his acclaimed work – Progress and disillusion: the dialectics of modern society (1968), Aron cited vast examples of disillusion of progress in “modern” Western societies. In agricultural societies, with increasing mechanisation, there has been “such inroads on farming and the crafts that family working units are becoming increasingly rare”. The move to the cities by rural folk, had become almost a stampede, resulting in cities becoming tragic scenes of social alienation, and the focus of ever-increasing government expenditure. While back on the farm, in a drive continually to improve production, with decreasing labour costs, farmers increasingly looked to GM crops. Within a decade or so, theorists were transforming Aron’s concerns into fresh theories questioning the idea of progress. By the 1980s, these theorists were writing of this scenario described by Aron as risk society, and there are vast other examples troubling these writers.

The rise of green political parties

Sometime during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and not so subtly, the world was changing. For example, a visitor to Australia’s island state, Tasmania, during this period would have noticed a marked difference in conceptions of the relationships between government and society. Here, over the past few decades, the Hydroelectric Commission (HEC) master-minded major hydroelectric infrastructure works, which transformed and industrialised the state’s economy and society. As with the vast Snowy Mountains Scheme in Eastern Australia, governments provided immense numbers of displaced people from war-torn Europe with financial assistance to migrate and work on these state-owned schemes. For example, in Tasmania, remnants of the Polish Free Army were destined to play a principal role in these massive social and economic changes. The SS Asturias passenger list for September 1947 shows “278 Polish Soldiers’ – Address C/- Tasmanian Hydro-Electricity Commission”. Farmers, locksmiths, painters … soldiers from the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade (“Rats of Tobruk”), they had served with Allied Forces in North Africa. The soldiers arrived in uniform and were sent to Tasmania’s Butlers Gorge, where they lived in purpose-built camps, many of which are now a part of Tasmanian folklore.

Thousands of Polish immigrants followed. While their grand social and cultural clubs, built in the 1950s, by the 21st century were lying almost derelict, with the ageing of the original immigrants. Many of their children, however, went on to carve out prominent careers in the state, and nationally. And many of these second-generation Tasmanian Polish people would not share their parents’ drive to dam Tasmania’s magnificent wild rivers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Australian politicians were happy to fall into line in building such grand schemes and the Snowy Mountains [hydroelectric] Scheme. The long-standing Tasmanian Labour Premier, Eric Reece, was affectionatel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The looming presence of risk society
• 2 Risk society theory arrives
• 3 Young people and families living in risk society
• 4 Risk society theory, neoliberalism, school education, mainstream media and social media
• 5 National governments respond
• 6 National standardised testing and reporting
• 7 National curricular
• 8 Teachers, universities and teacher preparation
• 9 Contexts: bringing it together
• Index