Education, Globalisation and New Times

21 Years of the Journal of Education Policy

Stephen J. Ball, Ivor F. Goodson, Meg Maguire, Stephen J. Ball, Ivor F. Goodson, Meg Maguire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134093274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Education, Globalisation and New Times comprises a selection of the most influential papers published over thetwenty-one years of the Journal of Education Policy. Written by many of the leading scholars in the field, these seminal papers cover a variety of subjects, sectors and levels of education, focused around the following major themes:

• education, globalisation and new times
• policy theory and method
• policy and equity.

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Compiled by the journal's editors, Stephen Ball, Ivor Goodson and Meg Maguire, the book illustrates the development of the field of education policy studies, and the specially written Introduction contextualises the selection, whilst introducing students to the main issues and current thinking in the field.

1 New education in new times

Jane Kenway,¹ Chris Bigum² and Lindsay Fitzclarence¹ with Janine Collier and Karen Tregenza

¹ Monash University, ² Deakin University, Victoria, Australia

Source: Journal of Education Policy, 9 (4): 317–33, 1994.

Introduction

As the title implies, this paper is concerned with the new: with the new times we are going through; the new education policies and new and pseudo-new education forms that both reflect and help to effect such times; and with the new issues for education that arise as a result of the new. We will begin with a brief overview of the current education policies that are seeking to effect ‘new’ education and will point to one particular consequence of such policies. We will then briefly identify some of the key features of ‘new times’ and some of the debates about this concept. The rest of the paper will focus on the new educational forms which have emerged as a result of the heady mix of new policies and new times. It will identify their key features, put them into historical context, and identify a framework which helps to conceptualize the structural shifts which these new forms represent. We will conclude by raising a number of issues about new education in new times.

The research project from which this paper arises is called ‘Marketing Education in the Information Age’. The project began in 1992, during which time we: identified the many ways in which Australian education is assuming a market identity; examined the different national and international literatures in education that have promoted the marketization process; explored the different ways in which this marketization process has been conceptualized and explained; examined the arguments of those who have been critical about marketing education and identified the political, education and ethical grounds on which such critiques have been developed; and identified and critically examined the empirical research and theorizing which has been conducted in Australia, the UK, New Zealand, the USA and Canada (Kenway 1993b).

All of this was, in a sense, background work for current documentary, empirical and theoretical work being conducted on a number of case and cameo studies of different examples of market forms in education. The focus is particularly on those education markets within which information technology plays a role and it is our contention that this is the site at which new forms of education are emerging. Our intention in this project is partly to explore the origins of a marketbased culture (Fitzclarence et al. 1993), the ways in which the conditions of postmodernity have further contribution to the development of this market form (Kenway, with Bigum and Fitzclarence 1993), the ways in which it helps to sustain the conditions of postmodernity and the ways in which markets may work within and against the more oppressive dimensions of postmodernity. And, finally, our ultimate intention is to identify and explore the implications of these various market forms for policy, curriculum, teachers and pedagogy and more particularly to ask ‘what new notions of teachers, pedagogy, curriculum and policy do these new forms generate?’.

New education policies and new times

Since the mid-1980s, Australia has experienced rapid and extensive changes in education at the Commonwealth, national and state levels. Such changes have impinged to varying degrees on almost every sector and aspect of education. Observers of education politics tend to agree that, at all levels of education, economic restructuring is the master discourse which informs all policy decisions (see further Lingard et al. 1993). In broad terms policy makers have decided (1) that education’s prime purpose is to enhance the economy, (2) that if the economy is to change in response to international economic and technological trends, then education must also change in line with these trends, and (3) that despite education’s central role in reshaping the economic future of Australia, its costs to the state must be kept down.

According to this logic, the ‘education industry’ is to ‘get smart and get real’. And, to help it do both, two dominant restructuring tendencies have emerged – one centralizing, the other decentralizing. The centralizing agenda is largely concerned with curriculum and professional development. It is made possible by the imperatives of consensus, corporate federalism and new nationalism.¹ It is guided by two principles: one is vocationalism and the other is scientific rationality. As a result of the vocationalist logic, worthwhile knowledge is defined as that which prepares students for paid work. More specifically, the most worthwhile knowledge is defined as that which can assist Australia to ‘gear up’ economically and technologically; hence the stress on mathematics, science, technology, Asian languages and commerce. Alongside this, principles of technical/ scientific rationality increasingly inform curriculum design and professional development; hence the somewhat behaviourist, reductionist and instrumentalist emphasis on competencies (Collins, C. 1993) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, profiles. Given these emphases it could be argued that the current centralizing agenda is, in many ways, offering old forms of education disguised as new education for new times. The decentralizing agenda is largely concerned with money, management and industrial relations. It is organized according to principles of deregulation, devolution, privatization, commercialization and commodification. Educational institutions are encouraged into the market by anorexic funding policies and the principles and morals of the market are increasingly driving the decentralizing agenda.

These two strategies come together in the sense that the state produces the frameworks within which decentralization and marketization are supposed to happen; it promotes certain values to guide these processes and undertakes certain ideological work in an attempt to ensure they are publicly accepted. For instance, the Australian Education Council (AEC), consisting of Commonwealth, state and territory Ministers of Education, has recently developed a policy statement and set of guidelines for the relationships between schools and industry, with particular reference to sponsorship (AEC 1993). Social justice is included on the planned decentralization agenda in an important way. While it is subordinate and marginal to these dominant logics, it is used as a form of legitimation to help reinforce the main agenda (see Fitzclarence and Kenway 1993). What we have, then, is a system of planned decentralization.

Planned decentralization arises from the values, aspirations, fears and fantasies of the Captains of Educational Consciousness – an affectionate title we have drawn from Ewen (1976) and given to senior policy makers from the Commonwealth Department of Employment Education and Training (DEET), the AEC, state and territory education ministries/directorates/ departments and peak business, industry and union bodies.² These people’s constant fear during the 1980s and 1990s has been that education is insufficiently responsive to new economic times; that is, to the changed conditions of the emerging global economic village, and so is unable to play a role in shaping these new conditions in ways favourable to Australia’s economic interests. Their ambitious aspirations for education are played out in the welter of policy documents which have emerged from DEET, the AEC and state education ministries since the mid- 1980s. One of the fantasies of the Captains of Educational Consciousness is that Australia will soon have a perfect match between education and new economic times; each fulfilling the needs of the other and both contributing to Australia’s success on the global economy. Another fantasy is that this can be achieved through the system of planned decentralization outlined above. However, this system depends very much on the stability and continuity of consensus politics, on the obedience of all the respective parties ‘down the line’ and on the expectation that neither side of the restructuring agenda will subvert the other. Wishful thinking aside, there clearly can be no guarantees on any of these matters – particularly when the national interest seems to be defined so narrowly and when certain interests seem so constantly to be privileged over others.

The extent to which the system will work in the ways prescribed is indeed another story, one we will begin to explore in this paper which is concerned with the decentralizing side of the policy agenda. In this regard, our focus is on one particular aspect of its privatization, commercialization and commodification dimensions.³ It is our contention that in exposing education to various market forces – global, national and local, state policy makers have both placed themselves in a paradoxical position and contributed to the development of new and somewhat problematic forms of education which are potentially outside their control. As we see it, not only have they put at risk the vulnerable steering capacity of the state with regard to education, economics and, we might add, social justice, they have encouraged on to centre stage a range of relatively new ‘players’ in education. In effect, it is these new players who are currently developing new educational forms which, while apparently supporting governments’ agendas, also take education into the zone of the unknown. The likely long-term consequences of these new directions are not at all clear, although we can make some informed guesses. They suggest that now that the market genie is out of the bottle, policy makers’ fantasies about consensus, about rational, goal-directed change ‘in the national interest’, and about symmetry and control are likely to be unfulfilled. At the same time some of these new forms also suggest that some loss of control on the part of policy makers may not necessarily be a bad thing. We will elaborate on these points shortly. Meanwhile, the broad points to be made here are (1) that policy – on many educational fronts – is claiming and seeking to effect educational forms which will both reflect and effect new economic times; and (2) that as a result, new educational forms are emerging which both support but also have the potential to subvert policy agendas. It is these new forms which reflect and effect new times.

But what are these new times that have led to such dramatic policy shifts and why is it that the development of a market mode in education has shaped so quickly and had such rapid acceptance? Without going into detail, such changes are usually seen as arising from economic changes and imperatives overlain by the political and social values and orientations of powerful political groupings. The term often used to describe these changes is post-Fordism⁴ which commonly, although not unproblematically, refers to an unevenly emerging movement away from the mass manufacturing base and assembly line practices of the Fordist era towards ‘flexible’ and decentralized labour processes and patterns of work organization brought about by the rapid growth, development and application of new information and communications technologies. This is accompanied by:

the hiving off and contracting out of functions and services; a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on marketing packaging and design, on the ‘targeting’ of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture . . . a decline in the proportion of the skilled, male, manual working class, the rise of the service and white collar classes and the ‘feminisation’ of the work force.

(Hall 1988: 24)

The economic imperatives which are having such an impact on education policy are associated with significant changes in international economies too. These changes include the growth of world trading blocks and super-national corporations, the internationalization of the labour market and the money market and the rapid growth, and extensive application of new information and communications technologies which have facilitated the development of this global economic village (Mahony 1990; Probert 1993). These changes are said to have resulted in crises both for the nation-state, which loses much of its capacity to control the economy, and for certain segments of capital, which seek out new and often very exploitative ways to survive in times which threaten their annihilation. Needless to say, as the unemployment figures and the attack on unions indicate, these changes have in many instances been disastrous for workers (Levidow 1990). Governments’ particular approaches to addressing these crises are seen to arise from the profoundly successful discursive and inter-discursive work of disparate but powerful social and political groupings which have reshaped public and political opinion in favour of economic rationalism (Pusey 1991), corporate managerialism (Yeatman 1990) and market forms in public services (Marginson 1986). While we have some considerable sympathy with the lines of argument which focus on the economic and on the politics of discourse, we do not believe that they are fully able to explain either such dramatic shifts in policy or why such policy imperatives seem to have gained such ready and rapid acceptance ‘down the line’ and in popular consciousness. In our view, these sea changes are better explained by theories of postmodernity.

It is necessary that we begin our discussion of postmodernity with two qualifications. First, when we talk of postmodernity, we are focusing on broad material, social and cultural shifts and conditions. We are not focusing on the philosophical/ intellectual shifts⁵ often defined as postmodernism or the artistic/cultural products defined as postmodernist. Second, we acknowledge that as a descriptor of current times this is a highly contentious and contested term,⁶ particularly when it is used to imply a sharp distinction between the historical periods of modernity and postmodernity, a global applicability without different implications for different regions, and when it suggests that all its defining characteristics are necessarily historically unique. As Featherstone (1991: 3) points out, ‘the post-modern is a relatively ill-defined term as we are only on the threshold of the alleged shift, and not in the position to regard the post-modern as a fully fledged positivity which can be defined comprehensively in its own right’. In this sense then, postmodernity emerges from or ‘feeds off ’ (1991: 6) rather than dramatically breaking with modernity. While we acknowledge a certain discomfort in using the concept, we none the less find it useful as a shorthand which points to the ‘cultural logic’ or ‘cultural dominant’ (Jameson 1984) or key features of contemporary times in the First World countries of the West – features which clearly also have an impact on Third World countries.

How, then, do we regard postmodernity? There is clearly not the space here for any detailed discussion on this point, so let us, first, refer readers to Hinkson (1991) for an elaboration of the ideas which help to inform this paper and, second, simply list what we consider its key features and then elaborate a little on its implications for education markets.

The key ‘logics’ or features of postmodernity include the techno-scientific and communications revolutions, the production of what can be called techno or media culture, the development of a form of techno-worship, the collapse of space and time brought about by the application of new technologies, the cultural dominance of the commodity and the image, the internationalization and post-industrial technologization of the economy, and an identity crisis for nation-states accompanied by the decline of the welfare state and the intensification of state-inspired nationalism. And, of course, all of this has implications for human relationships and subjectivities and for cultural ‘sensibilities’ or ‘moods’, as do the new social movements and philosophical and artistic/cultural trends which are part of postmodernity.

As we have argued in a previous article in this journal (Kenway et al. 1993) the rise of markets and the cultural dominance of commodity forms are amongst the defining features of postmodernity. The dramatic expansion of capitalist commodity production and of, ‘material culture in the form of consumer goods and sites for purchase and consumption’ (Featherstone 1991: 13) have produced what is called ‘consumer culture’ – a culture which owes much of its force to the techno-scientific and communications revolutions. Within consumer culture people’s lives are saturated with a plethora of seductive commodities and images which generate various dreams, desires and aesthetic pleasures. As a result, people are dispersed across an ever-changing flow of commodities and images, often in strange juxtapositions. Jameson (1984) calls these decentred human subjects of postmodernity ‘desiring machines’ who are perfect subjects for the endless array of new images and identities offered by the advertising industry, which extends its reach into more and more aspects of social life as non-market relationships become increasingly redefined according to the logic of the market. Indeed, in this context, consumption becomes a primary source of identity. And, as stated earlier, drawing on Ranson (1990):

markets require a shift in focus from the collective and the community to the individual, from public service to private service and from other people to the self. Markets redefined the meaning of such terms as rights, citizenship and democracy. Civil and welfare rights and civic responsibility give way to market rights in consumer democracy.

(Kenway, with Bigum and Fitzclarence 1993: 116)

In promoting the marketization of education ‘in the national interest’, it would seem that the Captains of Educational Consciousness seek not only to redefine education as a commodity and to promote and tap into a cult of educational selfishness but also to produce in Australia’s young people a consumer identity. As we will later suggest, other and new ‘players’ in the educational market-place also have a strong investment in the production of consumer identities but appear more interested in sectional rather than national interests. Overall, educational democracy is redefined as consumer democracy in the education ‘industry’. Investors are encouraged to see education as a site worth cultivating for various sorts of profit, and consumers are encouraged to seek the competitive edge at the expense of others and to look for what is increasingly called ‘value-added education’. Information technology is often seen by ‘investors’, consumers and producers ...