Educating the Neoliberal Whole Child

A Genealogical Approach

Bronwen MA Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032050195
• eBook ISBN: 9781000511567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book questions what 'educating the whole child' means in the context of our current neoliberal education system. In analysing the impact of how education policy is enacted and understood, it examines how this 'neoliberalisation' has shaped the personal and ethical relations of education.

The book is unique in raising questions about the way in which a common and universally held truth about the importance and value of educating the whole child is conceptualised and articulated in education policy. Employing Foucault's concepts of bio power, governmentality, the dispositif and subjectivities, this book explores the importance of psy-scientific knowledge, systems of education governance and classroom practices in constructing a neoliberal whole child. It examines how government policy structures the relationship between the child, school and government and claims that current policy and practice operate as forms of bio power that extends neoliberal governance to the emotional and moral life of the child.

Educating the Neoliberal Whole Child will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of education policy, sociology of education and critical pedagogy. It is also a valuable addition to studies of Foucault and education.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201663-1

It seems that the education of the whole child is experiencing something of a renaissance. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of policy on children’s physical, mental and emotional well-being and personal development. In global education policy, this is evidenced by the extension of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to incorporate assessment of childhood well-being (OECD, 2017, 2019). Worldwide schools and educational institutions have sought to make clear their commitment to a more holistic approach to education. The increasing popularity of character education across many different countries and education systems including Australia, Singapore, Canada, Taiwan and Italy bears witness to this (Cranston et al., 2010; Ho et al., 2013; Maccarini, 2016; Tan and Tan, 2014; Winton, 2010). Closer to home in UK schools, programmes of social and emotional learning, personalised learning, resilience training, mindfulness and growth mindset courses, positive education and character education are all part of an educational landscape pushing back against education systems too narrowly focussed on academic achievement. The concern seems to be that the relentless grind of competition, measurement, testing and assessment has taken its toll on children’s mental health and emotional development. Coupled with a wider anxiety about the pressures of social media and global, competitive job markets, the importance of rebalancing education systems to promote the development of the whole child, ensuring their mental and emotional resilience, has become de rigueur.

As we shall see, this renewed focus on educating the whole child is welcomed by many both in and beyond the classroom. However, critique or even examination of how the education of the whole child plays out in practice seems to be sparse. In a neoliberalised education system of private providers, programmes and companies the whole child has become big business and this is problematic. But more broadly and arguably more profoundly, education policy that prioritises the development of the whole child raises important questions about the role of the school and government in the lives of children. These are questions that this book attempts to address.

The initial aims of the book were modest and limited. It was intended to prompt greater scrutiny or critique of current policy and practice concerning the education of the whole child in England and Wales. It was written in the hope of generating a degree of unease about what is happening in schools in the name of educating the whole child. However, those hopes and intentions were pre-COVID-19. The national school closures that have been such a devastating feature of our global pandemic have prioritised questions about the role of the school in the social, personal and emotional development of children. Children’s educational experiences in 2020 and 2021 have thrown new light upon age-old questions concerning the purpose and value of education. Perhaps the time is right for us to think more urgently, practically and critically about what it means to educate the whole child and what this could or even should look like.

Motivation and rationale

As a student, parent and teacher, it seems evident that compulsory schooling can be damaging to many of those involved. Boredom, bullying, academic failure or simply the relentless, rigid and all-encompassing regime of institutional life and overbearing performativity can erode the confidence and enthusiasm of adult and child alike. Interaction between children and adults in schools is often heavily circumscribed by narrow understandings of the role of the pupil and teacher and by what it might mean to be educated. Some contend that the emphasis on academic standards measured largely by examination performance has produced a rather lopsided schooling experience that can be negative for many students (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Pring, 2012; Winter, 2017; Youdell, 2004). In addition, the pressure to survive and succeed in this system limits the time, energy and opportunity for teachers and students to develop more personal and meaningful relationships with each other (Cooper, 2004; Gewirtz, 1997). The media have reiterated this feeling by routinely flagging up the pressures of our current educational regime on teachers and students alike from early years to higher education. Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that such a system of education, based on a factory model is an odd place to put young people when they are at their most vulnerable, energetic and receptive (Robinson, 2008). Even odder, if we are told that the intention of the education system is to educate and develop the whole child. Witness recent Secretaries of State for Education conviction that the intention of the education system should be to educate and develop the whole child:

This is not just about academic attainment, the Every Child Matters agenda is about developing the whole child, fostering new experiences and learning new skills.

(Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education, in Linden, 2006)

You won’t get good grades in schools unless you are happy and fulfilled and unless the whole child is looked after.

(Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, in Dimbleby and Vincent, 2013, p. 20)

A strong academic core is the start, but it’s just that: a start. It’s not enough. We need to address the whole child. We send our children to school to learn, yes, but also to grow as people. To mature and gain confidence. To learn valuable life lessons, in the classroom and on the playground.

(Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education, 2015)

You and I know that education is about more than just academic achievement, important though that is. It’s about more than what happens in the classroom. So how can we ensure that what young people become is the very best version of themselves they can be? How do we instil virtues? How do we build character?

(Damian Hinds, Secretary of State for Education, 2019)

Of course, such observations about schools are not new and there have been a number of attempts since the advent of compulsory mass schooling to address concerns about the impact of such ‘factory schooling’. Plowden and child-centred pedagogy and indeed alternative forms of schooling and educational provision, such as A.S. Neill’s Summerhill or different forms of home education now supported by organisations such as Education Otherwise are all evidence of attempts to take a more holistic approach to educating the child. The advent of the Internet has certainly aided an increasing home education movement with organisations such as Net School and Cambridge Home School offering Internet teaching with virtual and interactive online classrooms. Indeed, it would appear that the increase in homeschooling has been substantial with a study conducted by the BBC revealing a 40% rise in children being homeschooled from 2014 to 2017 (Issimdar, 2018). Whilst not necessarily solely motivated by concerns about the development of the whole child, Paula Rothermel’s research indicates that home educating families valued the ‘space to develop non academic intelligences’ (Rothermel, 2002) and ‘had a strong commitment to a “child-centred” approach to teaching’ (Rothermel, 2003, p. 83). Parents who home school certainly expressed the conviction that the consequent discussion, spontaneity and shared experience with their children, ‘contributed to the children’s education in a way that school could not’ (Rothermel, 2002). Within mainstream schooling also, a glance at my own children’s curriculum confirms government gestures towards developing an education system that attends to the development of the whole child; programmes of personal and social education (PSE), citizenship studies, positive psychology programmes, resilience training, personalised learning, character education etc. Furthermore, the increasing tendency to ‘outsource’ some of these programmes, detailed and discussed in subsequent sections, bears witness to a developing cottage industry of organisations dedicated to the development of the whole child. It would seem that more than ever, the education of the whole child is big business.

It is this apparent paradox that initially perturbed me. I was convinced many schools were places where children were too often not related to as individuals, where educational experience failed to engage or respond to the whole child. Yet aspects of current curricula appeared to challenge this view and suggested that great care was taken to ensure that a range of aspects of a child’s development were tended to. How could there be an educational system that placed so much ostensible emphasis on the development of the whole child yet was apparently and simultaneously so alienating in practice? I have Michael Gove to thank for highlighting this paradox and helping me to explain it more clearly. As quoted above:

You won’t get good grades in schools unless you are happy and fulfilled and unless the whole child is looked after.

(Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, in Dimbleby and Vincent, 2013, p. 20)

I had been surprised by this quote because it had seemed, probably reflecting a degree of prejudice on my part, an unlikely sentiment to hear from Mr. Gove given his trademark emphasis on a rigorous academic curriculum (Gove, 2014). However, once I had realised that far from advocating child focused, whole child teaching, Mr. Gove was in fact referencing the diet of school children in the School Food Plan, all was clear (Dimbleby and Vincent, 2013). Mr. Gove and I did not mean the same thing when we talked about educating the whole child. This misunderstanding was important because it indicated that the whole child was being produced and understood in different ways, in different discourses and with different audiences. This raised the questions; how is educating the whole child understood? What is the ‘whole child’?

For me, these questions are posed and reflected upon in the context of a neoliberal education system that does not truly tend to the education of the whole child or does so in a paradoxical way. It seems to me that modern schooling is disaffecting and fails to engage a child’s personal self. In particular, it pressures and distorts the nature of the relationship between teacher and student, which represents the most obvious opportunity for the child to be engaged and appreciated as a whole person. Certainly, this is the experience of my own children who enthusiastically recall those teachers who they felt were interested in ‘them’. Further, my own experience of teaching suggests that this is an aspect of school life that had been significantly and detrimentally impacted by changes in the system over the past 30 years.

The neoliberalisation of the education system has brought about widespread change to teachers, pupils and their relationships. Academic research has identified concerns about the impoverished, arguably colonised, relationship between students and teachers that result from neoliberal policy and practice (Ball, 2003; Cooper, 2004; Gewirtz, 1997; Jeffrey and Woods, 1998). Teacher stress, generated by work overload resulting from the pressure to perform, has allowed little space in the day for teachers to develop relationships with students or indeed to care for them in a way that many teachers feel they wish to (Gewirtz, 2002). In addition, the increased focus on administration with new emphasis on the use of databases and tracking software such as Different Class has distanced the person of the teacher from the person of the child and further objectified the child. Such change has made it increasingly difficult to maintain personal relationships. Cooper vividly summarises what this looks like:

Empathic teachers exhaust themselves finding pockets of profound empathy for needy children in corridors and in the entrances and exits to lessons, but it is never enough.

(2004, p. 20)

Concern about this loss or transformation of personal, social, moral and emotional dimensions of the teaching relationship is often expressed in the language of the whole child. Witness the quotes from Woods and Jeffrey (2002)’s interviews with teachers:

We’re not saying that the education system didn’t need a review because I’m sure it did, but it has meant that children have become slots in a machine who have to come up with the right numbers and we’re the ones that have got to make them come up with the right numbers whereas before you were dealing with the whole child. You were dealing with its emotions, you were dealing with its social life, you were dealing with its grandma, you were dealing with today (Cloe).

My teaching is about the whole child, whether they’re in the classroom, walking along the corridor, in assembly. It’s the interactions that go on all the time that helps to bring that child ‘together’. But my immediate reaction to the Ofsted inspector’s questioning of the children was that it seemed like attack, attack, attack as they quizzed them on specific pieces of knowledge (Shula) (Woods and Jeffrey, 2002, p. 94).

The complication is that this language of the whole child is also employed to justify and explain multiple curriculum initiatives and practices such as healthy eating and sex education. These programmes and their concerns reference a different kind of concern for the whole child to those expressed by the teachers above or in the work of academics such as John Smyth (2007). Therefore, it appears that the terminology of the whole child is employed to address different, though not necessarily unrelated, concerns. The upshot is that there is no common understanding or conceptualisation of what the whole child is. The following quotes from the ex-Master of Wellington College, Anthony Seldon, the UK’s leading Green politician Caroline Lucas, and well-known, perhaps notorious, journalist and former Director of the New Schools Network Toby Young demonstrate further the diversity of interpretation and dichotomy of opinion that surrounds the education of the whole child. It is clear that the education of the whole child is a lauded goal. It is however far from clear what this means:

Schools have major responsibilities for developing the whole person, not just their intellect. The traditional model of large, de-personalise...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Problematising the whole child
• 3 Psy-scientific discourses and policies of well-being and character: The extension of bio power
• 4 The discourses and architecture of neoliberal education policy: An expanding neoliberal dispositif and governmentality
• 5 Classroom practice: Neoliberal technologies of the self
• 6 The neoliberal whole child: A cuckoo in the nest
• Glossary
• Appendix: Summary of preliminary research
• Index