The ‘Great Refusal’? A Marcusian response to the Bright Blue vision of education in the ‘Big Society’

Abstract

The modernisation of education and other public services remains a major political objective of the current Coalition government in the UK. This paper focuses on Tory Modernisation 2.0, a blueprint for the second stage of the public sector reform produced by the Conservative pressure group, Bright Blue. From the critical theory perspective expounded by Herbert Marcuse, the Conservative vision of the ‘Big Society’ is a one-dimensional conceptualisation of social relations. In the guise of pragmatic, sensible prescriptions for how the institutions of society should be reformed, Tory Modernisation 2.0 advocates an acceleration of marketisation, which is both potentially destructive and irreversible. Against the backdrop of a bleak, one-dimensional society promoted by the Conservative Party, education has become a site of struggle between what Marcuse terms the dialectic of domination and the ‘Great Refusal’.

Keywords:

• modernisation
• education
• neoliberalism
• Big Society
• critical theory
• qualitative change

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Agnieszka Bates lectures in education at the University of East Anglia, specialising in education policy.

Notes

1. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition replaced the New Labour government following the 2010 general election in the UK. The Coalition government is led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

2. The Coalition tripled university tuition fees in England on coming to power in 2010. Despite this, Shorthouse and Stagg (2013, p. 69) claim that university education is still ‘affordable'.

3. For example, in 2012, Downhills Primary School was forced to become the Harris Primary Academy after losing its legal battle in the High Court (Anti Academies Alliance 2012). Such examples illustrate the irony of the ‘Big Society' in its substitution of ‘localism' for the enforcement of centralised planning.

4. A framework of ‘critical thinking tools' for the analysis of education policy and leadership has been developed by the Critical Studies in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Series (e.g. Niesche 2012, Gillies 2013, Gunter 2014).