‘Economics imperialism’, education policy and educational theory

Abstract

This paper examines how economics imperialism (the increasing colonization of other disciplines by neoclassical economics) has affected contemporary education policies. I suggest that an increasing preoccupation with education meeting the needs of the economy, together with the prevalence of economic concepts outside of economics, have contributed to the development of education policies which mimic economic ideas. The specific policies which it considers are outcomes-based qualifications frameworks, which are becoming increasingly prevalent internationally. I argue that in the main, outcomes-based qualifications frameworks can be seen as tools for creating or regulating education markets, and that their underpinning logic is the logic of neoclassical economics. I further argue that the educational ideas that are invoked in association with outcomes-based qualifications frameworks, and which have often been seen as progressive, or empowering, or anti-elitist, have commonalities with the tools of analysis of neoclassical economics. Specifically, ideas about knowledge and the curriculum which have traditionally been seen as progressive have an overemphasis on individuals, and underemphasis on structures. These underlying similarities have facilitated the process whereby education policy has been rewritten using the tools of neoclassical economics, enabling the description of neo-liberal policies in progressive terms.

Keywords:

• theory
• economics

Acknowledgements

I am deeply appreciative to Ben Fine, Hugh Lauder, Ben Scully, Yael Shalem, and Michael Young, who have provided feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. This paper was written under ESRC fellowship PTA-026-27-2166.

Notes

1. The earliest policy version of this idea was the National Vocational Qualifications in the UK, which were explicitly labelled by Gilbert Jessup, one of the chief proponents of this approach, as a ‘new learning paradigm’. Hyland (1994) suggested in 1994 that the competency-based training model which was developed through the NVQs had extended its influence downwards into schools and upwards into teacher education, higher education and professional studies. Despite a large body of literature providing substantial and fundamental critiques of this policy trend in the UK, and despite the widely acknowledged problems of the NVQs, this type of policy now appears to becoming dominant internationally, and is again described as new.

2. See for example (APEC Human Resources Development Working Group 2009; Bjornavold and Coles 2007; Cedefop 2008, 2009; Coles 2006, 2007; Commonwealth of Learning & SAQA 2008; Lythe 2008; OECD 2007; Sellin 2007).

3. There is no space here to consider the contradiction between this body of literature and the body of literature that suggests that narrow subject-based curricula are increasingly and ever more dominant in contemporary education policy, driven by international achievement tests (e.g. Goodson 1994; Scott 2008). One possible explanation is that of a swinging pendulum towards and against subject-based curricula.

4. As I will discuss below, far from being a new paradigm, similar ideas have been central to the history of educational reform. Egan (2002) and Muller (2001) both discuss the tendency for learner-centred and progressivist approaches to be presented as ‘new paradigms’, and Moore (2009) makes a similar point about relativist approaches to epistemology.

5. Although even this is not particularly new (see e.g. Moore and Ozga 1991; Callahan 1962; Egan 2002; Grubb and Lazerson 2004; Wolf 2002).

6. Many if not all of these ideas were associated with the National Vocational Qualifications in the UK, the earliest manifestation of this type of policy approach.

7. As Callinicos (2001, 209) puts it, the idea that ‘efficiency as the market defines it and justice as socialists have conceived it’ is ‘the most politically influential ideology both in the advanced capitalist countries and in the leading Third World states’.

8. See for example (Buchanan et al. 2009; Guthrie 2009; Loose 2008; Wheelahan 2010).

9. Not to be confused with the better-known activity theory.

10. I am not implying here that Bloom’s taxonomy or its revised form is as simplistic or limited as the early Scientific Curriculum movement, or even that they have much in common, but simply showing a thread of development of ideas. What may be in common across different outcomes/objectives approaches, despite substantial and important differences, is an attempt to disembed educational objectives from specific content areas.

11. Both countries drew extensively on the British NVQ model, although in the South African case, more via the Australian competency-based training system than directly. Interestingly, Hyland (1998) predicted the aggressive exporting of this model, notwithstanding its serious problems in the UK.

12. Sedunary (1996, 383) argues that what was described as ‘new vocationalism’ in Australia, including competency-based training, had much in common with progressivist ideas of education usually supported by left wing reformers, as competencies were increasingly accorded a ‘foundational authority in curriculum design and practice’.

13. John Dewey was, of course, a highly prolific philosopher whose views shifted substantially, and cannot always be pinned down; his pragmatism has been described as a ‘broadened positivism which is exclusively concerned with experience’ (Parodi 1951, 230). However, Novack (1975, 181) argues that ‘He himself was an unrestricted relativist. This viewpoint molded his theory of knowledge and his conception of the nature of truth. He regarded truth as relative through and through; it did not possess any objective quality’. This follows logically into his idea of curriculum, that ‘When education is based in theory and practice upon experience, it goes without saying that the organized subject-matter of the adult and the subject specialist cannot provide the starting point’ (quoted in Wheelahan 2010, 114).

14. Gramsci (1971, 1986) for example.

15. For example, some policy mechanisms may support the one (a curriculum based on learning outcomes and thematic areas) while others tend towards the other within the same curriculum (examinations in specific subjects leading to an implicit syllabus, and therefore teaching of subjects).

16. Like all terms that analyse policy, what ‘new public management’ really means is contested and debated. But a key aim of it has been ‘lessening or removing differences between the public and the private sector and shifting the emphasis from process accountability towards a greater element of accountability in terms of results’ (Hood 1995, 94). This has been associated with the introduction of economic standards for the evaluation of governance (Wolf 2010).

17. Significantly, the qualifications framework developed in Scotland was led by education institutions (Raffe 2003, 2007, 2009a). Whether this provides a significant alternative type of qualifications framework, and whether it provides a model that can be adopted by other countries, remains to be seen.

18. Other schools of thought within economics, although not part of the mainstream, such as institutionalist economists and traditional political economy, instead regard the market as only one of the many institutions that make up the capitalist economic system (Chang 2002, 546).

19. For example (Ashton and Green, 1996; Blackman, 1987; Brown and Lauder, 2001, 2006; Dunk, McBride, and Nelson, 1996; Fine 2001Lapavistas, 2005; Vaizey, 1972).

20. Although a remnant of its colonizing of the social sciences can be seen in the continued (although contested) presence of rational choice theory within sociology.

21. Behavioural economics even goes so far as to acknowledge that choices are not always (and frequently not) rational, but this is not addressed as a challenge to the tools and ideas which are built on the notion of the utility-maximizing individual, but rather seen as something to be added on to it.

22. Novoa (2002, 135) draws on Bourdieu, 2000 in positing the notion of the spread of ‘banalities’ around the world, which become universally accepted as truth, and are then transformed into ‘magic concepts’ which provide solutions. I suggest, though, that they are not so much ‘banalities’ as economistic ways of thinking about education.

23. Morrow (2007) suggests that in this sense, a focus on lifelong learning may come at the expense of basic education in countries where policy-makers have very limited budgets and existing institutional resources.

24. For example, Markowitsch and Luomi-Messerer (2008) show the process of shifting terminology and contested interpretations that lay behind the (still to be interpreted) levels of the European Qualifications Framework.

25. As Egan (2002, 135–6) argues, ‘schools can be quite good institutions when they concentrate sensibly on intellectual education, but they are less good at developing the whole person or producing good citizens or ensuring parenting skills …. That so many problems that the young face today are urgent and desperate still doesn’t make the school an adequate institution to deal with them, but in trying to deal with them, however ineffectually, schools guarantee that they will not accomplish the traditional academic job adequately either’.

26. There are of course strong left-wing voices that argue for realist approaches to knowledge and who have taken issue with post-modernism and social constructionism (e.g. Callinicos 1989; Hill et al. 2002).

27. Lea (2008), for example, in a finely argued and nuanced discussion of political correctness and the politics of higher education in the UK and USA, clearly articulates both the left and right wing variants of subject-based approaches to education, and left and right wing realist approaches to epistemology. But he suggests that relativist approaches to knowledge, captured in particular as multi-cultural and learner-centred approaches to curricula, are exclusively associated with the left.

28. As developed in the writings of John Beck (2002, 2008), Gamble (2004a), Gamble (2004b), Moore (2004, 2009), Muller (2009), Wheelahan (2010), and Young (2008), Young and Muller (2010), who in turn draw substantially on thinkers such as Emile Durkheim, Basil Bernstein, Randall Collins, and Andrew Abbott.