Paradoxes of Democracy, Leadership and Education

Struggling for Social Justice in the Twenty-first Century

John Schostak, Matthew Clarke, Linda Hammersley-Fletcher, John Schostak, Matthew Clarke, Linda Hammersley-Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138492981
• eBook ISBN: 9781351029162
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

Paradoxes of Democracy, Leadership and Education engages both critically and creatively with important social, political and educational issues, and argues that the organisational forms of contemporary schooling are caught up in politically significant contradictions. Highlighting the inescapable paradoxes that educators must grapple with in their thought and practice as they seek to reconcile democracy and leadership in education, this book addresses the question of whether socially just democratic futures can be realised through education.

Divided into two parts, the first part explores theoretical frameworks and concepts, presenting theory and raising issues and questions, while the second shares diverse examples of practice, renewing and reanimating the links between education, leadership and democracy, and providing models of alternatives. Studying a number of global developments that can be seen as potentially threatening, such as a growing inequality in wealth and income and the declining participation and trust in democratic processes, this text is at the forefront of international innovations in educational theory and philosophy.

A fascinating and vital read for all researchers and students, Paradoxes of Democracy, Leadership and Education considers the opportunities and challenges that are confronting and threatening education in the modern world.

Part 1

The scenes of debate: How theory opens avenues for action

Introduction

Debate depends upon the presentation of reasons, evidence and arguments by all if it is to succeed in producing courses of action that are satisfactory to all. One can imagine many scenes. Some are quite small: between a couple, a few friends or perhaps a group of around twenty. When the size of a group begins to matter about the practicality of bringing all into discussion, a strategy can be put in place like breaking the large group down into small groups, each group coming to an agreed range of views and arguments which can then compared in plenaries with the results of other groups. There may be a thousand voices, but no more than a dozen different arguments. A dozen arguments can be submitted more easily to stringent evidence-based and logical critique than a thousand vying voices. If the task is to find the range of substantially different arguments to be made, then there is no reason why the same process cannot be undertaken with millions of individuals, a process today that can be facilitated through internet-based digital communications technologies. Theoretically at least, it seems possible.

But imagine another scene. Here, the reason of others does not matter. Only the reason of ‘The Great Leader’, or at least, the reasons of a squabbling oligarchy or some self-righteous elite matters. In such a scene, the will of elites takes precedence over the needs, interests and desires of the mass. The mass exist simply to take sides and to obey their leaders. The role of obedience and thus of the ever-present potential of disobeying the masters matters. As Etienne de La Boetie (1552) wrote in his short treatise, the wonder is that people obey rather than disobey. He described the hierarchical structure of rewards given by the masters to their courtiers, their generals and so on downwards to the very bottom that leads each individual to obey willingly. Those at the top, he argued, were in reality quite small, like all people who have no superpowers to enforce their will. Rather, it was the organisation of the willingly obedient who could be deployed to coerce, even kill those who disobeyed… disobeyed what? Nothing other than the fantasy of the power, the glory, the fearsomeness of the leader.

Imagine a third scene where the anger, the frustrations, the desperation of the oppressed masses has been stirred up by the arrogance and sheer insolence of the elites who have broken the underlying rule that even tyrants must ensure that their servants and slaves must have a certain level of security and enjoyment, otherwise they will rise up and vent their fury. This is a turbulent state where mobs riot and new leaders arise to lead people against old masters. It is a powerful lesson to ruling elites who have taken their mastery for granted. New masters make new promises to right the wrongs of the old elites. And when the places of power have been won by the new leaders and their followers, there is a choice to be made – at least theoretically – between adopting discourses, organisational forms and ways of life that usher in the democratic practices that take into account the voices of all in decision making affecting the people in their daily lives, or those that depend upon the benevolence and will of a leader or ruling elite.

The first of these scenes, in modern terms, we can refer to as the Enlightenment scenario. The second we can see in the relatively stable scenarios of a well-organised and administered bureaucracy where dissent is at a minimum, or at least relatively easily suppressed by those who are well fed and can look forward to stable if not rising levels of quality of life. The Western powers largely enjoyed such a period following the revolutions of the eighteenth century with increasing moves towards democratic-like freedoms and technological advancement that both disciplined the masses and gave increasing numbers of them access to ever wider ranges of consumer products and services. The third is a period of rising discontent, protest, populism and revolution. What starts as a small protest can grow quickly into a major movement of protest. The ruling powers will attempt to suppress it. However, if, in their arrogance or self-deluding fantasies, they do not respond to appease at least some of the major demands of the protestors, then the movement to overthrow starts to become inevitable and can happen very quickly as with the fall of the Soviet Empire symbolised in the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is at this point that an apparent levelling takes place. That is to say, the great invincible power of the Leader is stripped away and he or she – but mostly he historically – stands no taller, no more powerful than any other individual. It is this moment that Rancière refers to as the political. It is the moment at least partially glimpsed when each individual sees that the previous arrangements of power have collapsed and that in this moment no one person is greater than any other person. Lefort (1988) sees it as the empty place of power. That is, the place of power that had once been occupied by the tyrant, the monarch, the ruling elite has collapsed leaving no one individual able to dominate it. The choice then is either to fill it with some new, ‘better’ leader; or, to leave it empty. For Lefort the work of democracy is to ensure that the place of power remains empty. But this can only be done if forms of organisation and procedures are established that ensure no one person or ruling group can permanently occupy the place of power against the wishes of the people.

In each scene, theory functions differently. In the Enlightenment scenario, theories freely arise and are freely contested in order to derive various forms of ‘truth’. There are those that are supported by all possible observations. These are essential or universal truths, like those of mathematics and logic. They provide guidelines for reason. However, reason about what? The early computer programmers’ term GIGO – garbage in, garbage out – is as true as it is for programming logic, as it is for mathematics and statistics. It is here that other forms of truth-making become critical. What do we know about the real world? How do we know that unicorns don’t exist but kangaroos do? There is an obvious answer perhaps to a ludicrous question, but it becomes more problematic for large numbers of people when the key terms are replaced by ‘god’ and ‘evolution’. The search for evidence that provides ‘reasons’ for the existence of something begins the process of distinguishing what is real from what is not and that which is based on empirically grounded reason from views based on faith or the say-so of ‘authorities’. It is here that the methodological doubt introduced by Descartes proved so revolutionary and so threatening to the powers based on faith and belief in the superiority of some over others. On the one hand, using one’s own intelligence to form opinions and knowledge about the world places the power to think and act within one’s self. However, as Spinoza (2004) argued, through the aggregation of the power to think and test out evidence and arguments within processes of debate there is a greater likelihood of coming to an understanding of what is real and what is universally true. Hence, by ensuring that freedom is always in association with equality, there can be no domination by one individual or group over others in the processes of debate, decision and action. For him, democracy was the way to ensure this. There was then, at least theoretically, the threat of the possibility of organisations developing based upon the equality of free intelligences. How then could this be prevented by those whose power, privilege and wealth was threatened?

Crudely, when moves towards democracy became irresistible then those who wanted to preserve or establish reasons to maintain their privileged positions had to find ways to corrupt democracy. The question then was how to fill democracy’s ‘empty place of power’ with enduring forms of organisation that privilege some over others yet preserve the appearance of people making choices. Each chapter of Part 1 addresses aspects and issues related to these scenes of power and debate where either democracy is enhanced or it is weakened or indeed suppressed.

Schostak opens with the ways in which Power inscribes its discourses of mastery over the powers of individuals through the processes of schooling. He does this by drawing upon the four key Lacanian discourses of the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst. The argument is that these discourses pervert contemporary democracies and are too often underpinned rather than challenged by the mainstream forms of schooling. However, as a counter to such discourses, in Chapter 2, Schostak draws upon the idea of the society of equals as a key aspiration underlying the democratic ideal that has been diluted by conservative elites. There is then the potential for contradictions to be experienced in everyday lives in terms of a yearning for freedom alongside the enjoyment of winning but where losing has harmful consequences for people’s lives and engenders resentment. How teachers respond to such issues is taken up in Chapter 3 by Hammersley-Fletcher and Schostak in their combined exploration of the paradoxes of leadership that lead to a continual sense of juggling or negotiating ways through the conflicts. This, in itself, can be dispiriting. However, through engaging schools in critical reflection and research alongside building networks across schools change can begin to take place. There is thus, as Clarke argues in Chapter 4 the possibility of democracy and education in spite of it all. He draws upon Lacanian approaches to ‘enjoyment’ and ‘fantasy’ to explore the lure of neoliberalism and its impacts socially, politically and in education. Creating counter-discourses to the neoliberal fantasy that underpins the contemporary capitalist project is part of the ongoing project of democracy.

This theme is continued by Schostak in Chapter 5 through his reading of Lacan’s approach to the discourse of capitalism and its impacts upon the discourses of education and democracy. He suggests that to overcome the capitalist fantasies require an escape from the discourses of the master. It is not enough to keep searching for a great leader of the left. That only returns us to subjection to yet another master. Discourses of democracy and of education that are rooted in a principle of equality being co-extensive with freedom offer that chance to escape towards the society of equals envisaged in Chapter 2. In Chapter 6 however, it is argued by Schostak and Zagorianakos that modernity is split between those currents that technologise and submit the world to ‘reason’ and competition; and those that employ reason to create the economic and political conditions that are capable of actualising the common good. This split generates on-going crises. In these crises of modernity, unfortunately, democracy has long been playing a losing game. The co-authors in Chapter 7 draw upon the arguments of the previous chapters to inquire more deeply into the competing logics of competition and collaboration in creating and maintaining inequalities and seek a more socially just future in the logic of democratic forms of cooperation. Overall then, the chapters of Part 1 analyse, critique and explore counter theoretical frameworks to those that underpin capitalist forms of market competition and the infrastructures that impose elite dominance.

It is broadly argued that the effective public required by radical forms of democracy rather than the phantom public manufactured by contemporary forms of liberal market democracy should take its inspiration from a Spinozan-like society of equals and the early aspirations of the cooperative movement to developing democratic, socially just futures.

1 Power, schools, schooling and the perversions of democracy

John Schostak

Overview

Discourses provide the personal and public conditions through which subjects and their worlds are constructed both as places of the present and as dreams to be realised or nightmares to be avoided. As such, discourses transmit knowledge, values and beliefs about worlds, thus moulding minds and behaviours as well as shaping identities. However, discourses always have to be interpreted according to circumstances and are thus essentially open-ended. As a form of power through which individual powers are organised, discourses have the power to shape and consolidate but also to convey new forms through new discourses. To understand power, how it develops and how it may be used to construct, subvert and invent worlds requires understanding how discourses configure subjective experience, interpersonal relationships, knowledge, agency and the truth-status of subjects, events and objects. In this chapter, how power is organised between actors is explored in relation to Lacan’s four discourses: the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst. Through a discussion of these discourses, it is argued that, rather than democracy, it is perversions of democracy that have been written into the present, repressing freedoms in the name of the market as a corrupted machine for the appropriation of wealth, power and privilege by elites. Illustrated through contemporary neoliberal discourse and practice, it is argued that democracy, schools and schooling and, more broadly, the idea of ‘the public’ have been designed by elites who profoundly distrust the ‘masses’, the ‘ordinary’, the ‘little person’ in order to contain unruly passions and instil habits of submission, compliance and ‘respect’, and a fear of the law through discipline.

The connection between how people think about the distinctions between education and schooling and the functions of schools, colleges and universities in their lives is critical to what kind of society is produced. There is nothing neutral about schools. As Harber (2004) has described, historically and globally schools have promoted not just obedience to authority and deference to one’s ‘betters’ but subjection to tyrants, hostility to others and a willingness to engage in military violence more than they have promoted democracy and the processes of co-operation and peace. In the face of Western democracies being hollowed out through the manufacture of consent (Lippmann 1922) to the policies of an ‘invisible government’ (Bernays 1928), Dewey argued for the potential of education to deepen American democracy. However, as Labaree (2010) argues, he lost out to David Snedden and Social Efficiency as in the UK progressive, democratic, comprehensive forms of education lost out to the schooling efficiency movement seeking high-reliability schools (Reynolds and Stringfield 1996). More broadly, the narrative that won, and is still winning on a global scale, involves a few people manipulating a lot of people to produce wealth for them.

The way to become rich, it is said, is to get people working for you. It seems perverse that globally billions of people work for the few who extract billions in wealth from their work. This applies to such an extent that 1% of the world’s population have been reported to own as much as the rest of the world (BBC 2016); that 25 families control $1.4 trillion (Bloomberg 2019); that 26 people have as much as the world’s poorest 50% (Elliott 2019). As the WHO Report (2008: 26) described, “social injustice is killing people on a grand scale”. It seems perverse that even when people are apparently free to make a choice, they may vote against their interests, as in voting for austerity (Blythe 2013). They appeal to knowledge and truths for their decisions that do not accord with how these are academically defined, termed by Lacan as the discourses of the university. Lacan’s approach to discourse provides a way of reading the positions people adopt with each other in terms of power, agency, knowledge and truth and what they desire, hence enabling a more complex analysis of reasons for decision making and action. Analysing what people say, what narratives they tell in response to a simple question like “why do you let them?” – or, “how do they get away with it?” – goes some way to understanding how the potential for a good life for all, no ifs and buts, is perverted. For the wealthy, their elite power resides in getting hold of and manipulating – indeed perverting – the narratives people deploy in explaining their lives.

The pioneers of the public relations industry, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, saw very clearly that how a story was told was key to influencing people’s consent to the policies of politicians as well as their decisions to buy the products and services of the business world. Bernays (1928), whose uncle was Sigmund Freud, called it propaganda. He drew upon psychoanalysis to explain how people are seduced to give consent in the interests of governments and the wealthy. He saw little, if any, distinction between propaganda and education – both were tools to shape democracy in the interests of the elites who composed what he called the “invisible government” (p. 37): those who pulled the political strings. Lippmann (1927) considered that democracy could only work if policies were formulated by experts. No single person, he argued, was sufficiently competent to resolve the complexities of today’s problems. The issue then was about what level of trust to give to the diagnoses and solutions of experts. If people cannot be expected to make appropriate decisions, then their consent to accept expert decisions would have to be manufactured. However, in doing this, people must believe that they themselves have chosen the decision. In short, he argued, the idea of the public is illusory; it is a phantom. Rather than possessing ‘knowledge’ as a basis for formulating their judgements and decisions, they have ‘stories’ that paint pictures of ‘reality’. It is, then, the role of the public relations industry and the media of the day to paint the pictures that manufacture consent to the policies of the ruling elites. The power of the narrative is to shape the will of the people. To help e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: The scenes of debate: How theory opens avenues for action
• PART 2: The struggle to develop alternatives within the contemporary scenes of practice
• PART 3: Concluding comments
• Bibliography
• Index