The (absent) politics of neo-liberal education policy

Abstract

Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticising in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticisation is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’, as well as in the apparent consensus around the necessity of particular practices, such as the adoption of ‘standards’ and the implementation of high-stakes testing regimes. The reduction of the political to the technical is not only anti-political but also anti-democratic, with violence often unrecognised behind appeals to consensus, commonsense and ‘rationality’. This study draws on the work of political theorists like Mouffe and Rancière to critique the depoliticisation reflected in recent Australian federal government recent education policy, particularly its notion of an ‘education revolution’ that pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonisation of difference and a reduction of the political to the merely technical and instrumental. This article concludes with some potential starting points for crossing, or traversing, fantasies in education which, along with a recognition of the inescapability of social and political antagonisms, could serve as a basis for a renewed emphasis on the importance of the political in education policy.

Keywords:

• educational policy
• inequality/social exclusion in education
• neoconservatism/neo-liberalism
• philosophy of education
• post-structural/postmodern/critical theory

Notes

1. This document will be referred to by the short title, Quality Education, hereafter and all unattributed page numbers refer to this document.

2. The My School website was developed as part of the ‘transparency and accountability’ agenda that comprises a key plank of the education revolution and is where schools’ results in the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy tests are published for public consumption.

3. COAG refers to the Council of Australian Governments, the peak intergovernmental body comprising the Australian federal, state and territory governments. The dominance of Labor in state governments at the time facilitated the creation of an image of consensus politics, enhancing the perceived legitimacy of the education revolution.

4. For those wishing to read more on this topic, the papers commissioned as part of an ongoing government review of school funding can be found at: http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/Pages/PaperCommissionedResearch.aspx

5. By axiomatic I mean ‘not susceptible to empirical proof – at least not in the positivist sense of the term’; hence, the value of such an axiom ‘can only be judged on the basis of its theoretical and analytical productiveness’ (Glynos, 2001, p. 195).

6. Social capitalist is the label adopted by the Australian Federal (Labor) government to describe its ‘third way’ policy agenda.

7. This is evident in Habermas's (1984) positioning of the practical rationality of the ‘life world’ as a space within which to resist colonisation by the instrumentalism of the technical rationality of the ‘system’; this theme also pervades much of the work of the earlier Frankfurt School, for example, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse.