Eyes wide shut: the fantasies and disavowals of education policy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the tensions between education policy’s attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes wide shut. My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government’s 2016 White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Specifically, I read the White Paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be ‘reality’, education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• politics
• psychoanalysis
• Lacan
• fantasy
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is important to note that New Labour should not be seen as responsible for emptying education as a signifier; rather, they were exceptional enthusiasts in a process that has been part of modern education since its inception.

2. For a signifier to act as a ‘master’ signifier it must empty itself of attachments to specific signifieds (Laclau, 1996, 39) and in this sense, master signifiers are also ‘empty’ signifiers.

3. Richardson, H. (2017). ‘Teacher training target missed for fifth year in a row in England’. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-4218703

4. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/secretary-of-state-for-education-michael-gove-gives-speech-to-iaa

5. Academies are state-funded schools in England that are directly funded by the Department for Education and thus independent of the local education authority. A multi-academy trust, or MAT, is a group of academies that operate as a single legal entity. See: http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07059/SN07059.pdf

6. http://www.pubications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmeduc/uc1786-i/uc178601.htm

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Clarke

Matthew Clarke is Professor of Education at York St John University in England and has also worked in universities in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. His research interests focus on education policy and politics, particularly their implications for teachers, and his work draws on psychoanalytic, political and social theories.