The ‘grand simulation’ and dreams of success by assessment: Baudrillardian reflections on (trans-)national school policy

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, European school policy has been steered by management dreams that systematic monitoring and assessment would guide schools and society toward a future of greater quality, efficiency, and growth. This article, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, explores whether it makes sense to rearticulate this dream of optimization by assessment in terms of a ‘grand simulation’ that brings into circulation a play of signs in terms of global quantifiable comparability supported by the aura of objectivity, statistics and big data. Does this dream of optimization suck us into a virtual world of ‘ingrowing obesity,’ where an uninterrupted supply of statistics and digital platforms loosens our grip on the real by the alchemical use of numbers, algorithms, and signs? The article argues that by observing school policy as seductive effects of a larger crisis-producing and competition-motivating (self-)assessment simulation, it becomes possible to rearticulate a persistent trend in (trans)national school policies in a language different from this trend’s own self-referencing logic – and thus to question the trend itself. Danish school policy demonstrates as a European national case how the simulation changed local educational traditions by building up a national curriculum that made schools and students comparable and hereby amenable to increased assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• simulation; Baudrillard; transnational school policy; governance by numbers; theory development

Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my gratitude to Stephen Carney, Associate Professor at Roskilde University (Denmark), and President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe, for engaging in challenging debates about Baudrillard and education policy as well as for several turns of critical comments to this article.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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John Benedicto Krejsler

John Benedicto Krejsler is Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, DENMARK. His research on new conditions for (pre-)school and teacher education in a transnational perspective brings together research on education policy, new conditions for producing ’truths’ & social technologies. His work on theory development draws on Baudrillard, Deleuze and Foucault among others. He is President of the Nordic Educational Research Association and council member of the European Educational Research Association (2009-2018). He was a Visiting Professor at Kristianstad University (Sweden) (2009-2010) and at UCLA (2015-2016).