Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution: the social, political, and fantasmatic logics of education policy

Abstract

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government’s education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools. It seeks to problematize the government’s claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive strategies of the Australian government’s revolution talk. My analysis draws on the work of political theorists Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their synthesis of key ideas from Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a framework of explanatory ‘logics.’ This framework provides conceptual tools for conducting critical policy analysis, including: characterizing a discursive regime on a synchronic plane; accounting for its constitution, reproduction, and/or subversion on a diachronic plane; and explaining the ways in which it grips or seduces subjects at a nonrational level. Overall, the analysis of the education revolution in this paper demonstrates the value of this framework of explanatory logics for education policy analysis, in the process shedding some new light on the Australian government’s education revolution policy agenda.

Keywords:

• discourse/analysis
• politics
• neoliberalism
• Australia

Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to my colleagues, Kalervo Gulson and Michael Michell, as well as four anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Though as Dean (2009) notes, revolution is a term that the left has largely abandoned, while the right has embraced it to name their triumphs, pace the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions.’

2. The document was published in 2008 under the co-authorship of education minister and deputy prime minister (now prime minister) Julia Gillard and the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who led the Australian Labor party to victory in 2007 after 11 years of the conservative, liberal–national coalition government of John Howard. The document can be found at http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/Programs/Documents/QualityEducationEducationRevolutionWEB.pdf.

3. By social imaginary I mean ‘that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 2007, 172). The point made by authors such as Arjun Appadurai, Manfred Steger, and others is that, rather than restricting this notion to the nation-state, it now makes sense to think in terms of a global social imaginary.

4. References to specific pages of the document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools, are forthwith denoted ‘ER, xx.’

5. The complexities of this aspect of Australian education policy are beyond the scope of this paper; but for a detailed account see Dowling (2008).

6. COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, is the peak intergovernmental forum in Australia, comprising the Prime Minister, State Premiers, Territory Chief Ministers, and the President of the Australian Local Government Association.

7. See Bonnor and Caro (2008), for a discussion of the discourse of ‘choice’ in the context of Australian education; see O’Neill (2011), for another antipodean-based discussion of privatization in education.