Educating for the Knowledge Economy?

Critical Perspectives

Hugh Lauder, Michael Young, Harry Daniels, Maria Balarin, John Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415615075
• eBook ISBN: 9781136730948
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The promise, embraced by governments around the world, is that the knowledge economy will provide knowledge workers with a degree of autonomy and permission to think which enables them to be creative and to attract high incomes. What credence should we give to this promise?

The current economic crisis is provoking a reappraisal of both economic and educational policy. Policy makers and educationists across the world see education as central to economic competitiveness. However, this book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between the economy and education since, in contrast to policy makers' rhetoric, the relationship between the two sectors is not straightforward. An unorthodox account of the knowledge economy and economic globalisation suggests that autonomy in the workplace and permission to think will be only given to the elite. In this view many aspirant well-educated middle-class young workers are doomed to disappointment.

In this book, leading scholars from the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand discuss these issues and interrogate the assumptions and links between the different elements of education and how they might relate to the economy. Even if we assume that the official view of the knowledge economy is correct, are we educating young people to be autonomous, creative thinkers? Are current policies relating to knowledge, learning and assessment consistent with the kinds of workers and skills required for the knowledge economy?

Educating for the Knowledge Economy? will appeal to academics, policy makers, teachers and students interested in the central role of education in the knowledge economy.

1 Introduction

Educating for the knowledge economy? Critical perspectives

Hugh Lauder, Michael Young, Harry Daniels, Maria Balarin and John Lowe

In the city of Bath (UK) there is a famous Abbey dating from the ninth century. Beside the main doors are two ladders carved into the stone and on the ladders angels are ascending towards heaven. Some angels, who have sinned, are falling down the ladder, but not many. The contemporary secular version of this story is that of education and the knowledge economy.

Until the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing economic recession in the American and British and some European economies, policy makers, many economists and management gurus bought into the idea that we were on the sunny uplands of a new stage of capitalism driven by knowledge.¹ If individuals invested in their education and ascended the credential ladder they could secure well paid, high status jobs, in which creativity was at a premium. The most articulate disciple of this vision was Peter Drucker (1993), the management guru, who suggested that in this new stage of capitalism power would transfer from capitalists to knowledge workers because the new ‘capital’ would be knowledge.

Founded on this belief, a new informal social contract was struck between citizens and the state: the state would provide the educational opportunities for citizens to ascend the credential ladder and in return they had to study and achieve to the best of their abilities (Brown et al., 2011). Through this contract it was thought the state could achieve both economic competitiveness and social justice. Knowledge was assumed to be at the heart of economic competitiveness and hence better educated nations would have an edge in the global economy. Underlying this assumption was the view that the knowledge economy would usher in an increasing proportion of well paid, ‘knowledge’ jobs. This would then allow for upward social mobility and social justice since well educated students from all social backgrounds could then aspire to high status knowledge economy jobs.

This is the story that has been told by policy makers, economists and management gurus. In effect they have bought into, and spread, an ideology about how the economic world is structured and how individuals can play their part in its success. It is a social imaginary that has education at its centre.²

The notion of a social imaginary is important in understanding the hold of the idea of education and its centrality to the knowledge economy. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) describe it as follows:

a way of thinking shared in a society by ordinary people, the common understandings that make every day practice possible, giving them sense and legitimacy. It is largely implicit, embedded in ideas and practices carrying within deeper normative notions and images, constitutive of society.

(Rizvi and Lingard, 2010, p.34)

We can see the work of both the descriptive and the prescriptive in this imaginary. The claims made for education in relation to the knowledge economy can be summarised as ‘learning = earning’ and the prescription that follows is that all those interested in gaining well paid jobs should invest in their education (Brown et al., 2011).

The point about the notion of a social imaginary, in relation to the knowledge economy, is that it is buttressed not only by the rhetoric of policy makers but also of policy-driven research by, for example, the OECD and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), resulting in comparative league tables on national educational performance. Since this research is the subject of editorial comment and debate in the world’s major newspapers it shows how compelling this imaginary has become. Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, defines the improvements needed in US education by reference to the global league tables constructed by the OECD while using a quote from President Obama, ‘The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow’ as a warning.³ Michael Gove, the Minister of Education in Britain, has said of the Head of Indicators and Analysis (Education Directorate) for the OECD, that he is the ‘most important man in English education’.⁴ This research throws out a fundamental challenge concerning this book. If indeed a sound explanation(s) could be reasonably inferred from these league tables to economic competitiveness then questioning what this relationship involves would be redundant.

Flat world, flat education systems?⁵

In his best seller, The World is Flat (2005), Thomas Friedman articulates two of the key neo-liberal assumptions concerning the idea of a global knowledge economy: that labour markets are now global and it is within them that all nations must compete. Those who compete successfully will do so on the basis of knowledge and innovation:

America, as a whole, will do fine in a flat world with free trade – provided it continues to churn out knowledge workers who are able to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created as we not only expand the global economy but connect all the knowledge pools in the world. There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea-generating jobs in the world.

(Friedman, 2005, p.230)

This peon to a neo-liberal view of economic globalisation stands little scrutiny (Brown et al., 2011), yet the idea that nations must compete in a flat world is reproduced in the interpretation placed on the comparative studies of educational performance undertaken by the OECD and the IEA in the studies conducted by these organisations (e.g. PISA, PIRLS, TIMMMS). What these international comparative studies do is to ‘iron out’ fundamental differences in the culture, knowledge, pedagogy and assessment of educational systems by reducing them to the technical problems raised by comparing student achievement across the globe (see Popkewitz, ). As such, they can construct a hierarchy of ‘performance’ in league tables by which policy makers can judge national achievements against those of ‘competitors’.

Torrance (2006) has described this as a form of globalising empiricism where fundamental differences in education systems can be reduced to what is ‘observable’ and measurable. However, Dale (2009) has noted that there is at least one powerful theory that could support the construction of these league tables, World Polity Theory (Meyer et al., 1992).

This theory explicitly argues for the convergence of national education systems on the basis of the dominant Western ideology of modernity, which explains why curricula in many countries appear the same and which has led to the rise of standardised models of society (Benavot et al., 1992, p.41) and in particular in education. As Schofer and Meyer put it: ‘The same subjects are taught with the same perspectives leading to very similar degrees and to credentials that take on worldwide meaning’ (Schofer and Meyer, 2005, p.917).

The consequence is that at the core of educational systems is:

a ‘rational’ discourse on how the socialization of children in various subjects areas are linked to the self-realization of the individual and, ultimately, to the construction of the ideal society. This discourse is highly standardized and universalistic in character.

(Cha, 1992, p.65)

In this way, the theory asserts a convergence in the structuring of education and in its outcomes; hence the kind of international league tables that dominate so much of political debate may be seen as justified on theoretical grounds.

However, there are at least three problems with this account. The first concerns the claim that schools teach the same kind of knowledge globally. Whether there is a global convergence in curricula turns on the kind of knowledge taught in schools and here, as contributors to this volume make clear, the claims made by World Polity Theorists are open to doubt. Young (Chapter 8) argues that in Britain and America, despite the rhetoric about the importance of knowledge, it is conspicuous by its absence in many curricula. Schools may have many aims but as Young (2009) has noted what is distinctive about them is their claim to impart abstract or universal knowledge represented by academic disciplines and theories.

Moreover, even when it is a key curriculum element, the conditions under which knowledge is learned is crucial to both economic competitiveness and social justice, and it is this that is ignored when it is assumed that there is a direct translation from positions in global league tables to economic success.⁶ We know from Alexander’s (2001) magisterial comparative study of primary schooling that pedagogies, forms of assessment and the way the curriculum is structured vary from nation to nation. And these differences will in turn affect students’ conceptions of learning and indeed this ideal of the learner to which they should be aspiring (Hempel-Jorgensen, 2009). These varying approaches to curricula, pedagogy and assessment are germane to the question of economic competitiveness precisely because these different approaches to the intellectual, social and emotional lives of students are likely to have a profound effect on the knowledge, skills, dispositions and practices that enable an economy to develop. For example, the best performing countries in science and maths in the league tables constructed by the OECD and IEA are often those from East Asia, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, and yet these are countries with long held concerns over whether their students are sufficiently creative to compete in the ‘knowledge economy’.⁷

The third problem concerns the idea that the knowledge economy will increase social mobility and hence social justice by enabling all those who wish to take the opportunity to invest in their education to do so on the understanding that knowledge-based jobs will be available when they graduate. However, the process of selection and stratification in education always produces inequalities that cannot be justified on the basis of merit. Inequalities not only ration access to knowledge and skills but also structure student horizons and identities. Education is about the construction of character, broadly construed, as well as knowledge and its application. If we see the imparting of abstract knowledge as central to a school’s aims then the question of inequality is one about how the working class and the dispossessed can gain this knowledge, rather than suffer what Sennett and Cobb (1972) describe as the hidden injuries of class inflicted by the experience of education.

The chapters in this book focus on social class because it intersects with the other central inequalities of gender and ethnicity. This is not, however, to deny or seek to obscure the significance of these inequalities. While the social imaginary of the knowledge economy trains attention on well paid, interesting jobs, knowledge capitalism is about cutting costs wherever possible and employing women is one of the principle means by which this is achieved. It is not only in terms of average salaries that women earn less than men in every country but also when education levels are taken into account. This is true for highly educated men and women in advanced economies, such as the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden (Evertsson et al., 2009) where we might expect knowledge to be a dominant economic principle. As Lauder, Brown and Tholen (Chapter 3) make clear, the starting wages for graduate women in the United States has been consistently below that of men for nearly 30 years.

What makes these data so shocking is that in the past decade women have outperformed men in most areas of education in the advanced economies, yet this has not been translated into equality in the labour market. Initially it might be thought that it is in the reproduction of families and workers that these inequalities lie (Folbre, 2009). However, this insight does not take account of the many women who are now the major breadwinners as well as having responsibility for the processes and work of reproduction. It might be expected that if the power of patriarchy lay in the labour market, we would be witnessing changes in women’s compensation by now.⁸ Debates about capitalism and patriarchy that were prominent in the early 1980s should perhaps be prominent again.

A similar point can be made with respect to ethnicity. While ethnicity and class are interrelated in terms of educational achievement (Rothon, 2008), many ethnic groups suffer an ethnic penalty in the labour market. In a globalised economy, class is also related to skilled migrants (Kamat et al., 2006) and as with women, employment of these migrants from developing countries is also a means of reducing labour costs.

These inequalities raise fundamental questions about the principles by which some groups remain dominant over others which are barely touched upon by flat world comparisons in either education or the labour market, as well as challenging the promise of social justice that accompanies the rhetoric of the knowledge economy.

If the claims of a flat global economy and flat education systems throw up one challenge to the themes in this book, then another comes from an altogether different direction: quite simply, that the social imaginary of education and the knowledge economy has evaporated in the light of the Great Recession.

Will the knowledge economy imaginary survive the recession?

Clearly, this question is primary because if the economic recession had dealt a death blow to the ideology of education and the knowledge economy, or what Grubb and Lazerson (2006) call the educational gospel, then a critical examination of its presuppositions would be of no more than historical interest. However, there are good reasons for thinking that this ideology will persist, despite significant fraying at the edges, because there is no viable political alternative on the horizon.

In different ways the policies and practices relating to tests and examinations and gaining qualifications, what passes in the rhetoric for learning, have suffered, partly through the development of trends prior to the recession and partly as a result of the recession. In Britain, it was the previous Labour government’s intention to have 50 per cent of each age cohort attend university (currently some 44 per cent attend). But in 2010 the new coalition government has refused to fund places at university for some 210,000 eligible students. At the very time when it might be thought that investment in the future was paramount, the concern is increasingly of a ‘lost generation’ of those without education or employment opportunities. Youth unemployment is double that of the overall level of unemployment.

In the United States, there has been a 6 per cent increase in enrolments in tertiary institutions, a response in part to the very high levels of teenage unemployment (21 per cent), with an 11 per cent increase in two-year community colleges in contrast to a 4 per cent increase at universities. However, while American tertiary education enrolments have expanded, the demand for skilled workers, especially graduates is in doubt. Unemployment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Educating for the knowledge economy? Critical perspectives
• PART I. The ‘knowledge economy’ and education
• PART II. Knowledge and the economy
• PART III. Pedagogy, assessment, the demands of the knowledge economy and social justice?
• Index