Whose public, which public? The challenge for public education

ABSTRACT

Contemporary campaigns for public education rest upon an assumption that public schools are fundamental to an equitable and inclusive society. In this paper, I reflect on this presumption by exploring the inherent tensions of the meaning and practice of ‘public’ education, especially when the ‘public’ in public schooling is linked to political contestation and change in relation to the nation state. In particular, this discussion considers the ways in which the contemporary heightened racial politics of fear of ‘Muslim radicalisation’ structures the ways in which the state creates boundaries surrounding ‘public’ schooling. Here, analysis of recent governmental attempts to addresses the concern of ‘radicalisation’ in schools reveals the difficulties the nation state faces in defining what exactly is the ‘public’, and demonstrates how the politics of race and fear become overarching logics in the constitution of the Australian ‘public’. These logics risk creating exclusions and boundaries in public schooling, which, I argue here, have repercussions for the defence and claim to public education more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational policy
• inequality/social exclusion in education
• public education
• race
• radicalisation

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Gerrard

Dr Jessica Gerrard is Senior Lecturer in Education, Equity and Politics. She works across the disciplines of sociology and history, with particular interest on the relationship of education to social change and politics, the shifting - but persistent - experiences of inequality and injustice, and critical theories and methodologies. Her recent monograph, ‘Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change’, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014.