Reframing educational governance and its crisis through the ‘totally pedagogised society’

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the critical policy studies of educational governance and its crisis, through canvassing Basil Bernstein’s concept of the ‘totally pedagogised society’ (TPS). The TPS witnesses not only the growth of transnational private actors, but also the disjuncture between global and national agendas of reform, on the governance of knowledge and subjectivity. This argument is illustrated through a court case surrounding the invalidation of a history exam question in Hong Kong, which occurred after the 2019 social unrest. At the heart of this crisis is a dislocation of pedagogic discourse. The history exam can be considered as an indirect outcome of recontextualising the global policy imaginary of producing subjects of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘knowledge economy’, but it is incommensurate with China’s regulative discourse, that is, to govern the political consciousness of its postcolonial subjects and legitimise its rule through pedagogic means. The concept of TPS considers the other side of a high-performing regime in Asia: the crisis of reform, the return of a strong state, the evolving power and control relations inside/outside the education system, and the rising tensions between pedagogic agents/agencies, in a period of rapid social change as revealed in Hong Kong today.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernstein
• education reform
• governance
• crisis
• politics of knowledge
• totally pedagogised society

Acknowledgments

The author is enormously grateful to the editorial board, five anonymous referees, Professor Parlo Singh and Dr Stephen Heimans, who provided not only insightful comments and suggestions but also stimulated my thinking during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The official historical discourse about the Second World War propagated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often argued to be used as a device to cement its ruling legitimacy (Renwick and Cao 1999). Despite the discursive shift from ‘national victimisation’ to a more self-assertive ‘national victory’ and ‘national greatness’ under Xi Jinping’s rule, Japan during the first half of the twentieth century is still primarily portrayed in the CCP discourse and school curriculum as a foreign imperialist and militarist aggressor causing countless atrocities to the Chinese people (see Chang 2021, 1162–63).

2. The candidate challenged the HKEAA’s decision based on the grounds that the HKEAA ignored post-examination review procedures and misinterpreted the History curriculum and assessment guide. All stated grounds were dismissed by the judge Russell Coleman, who argued that the focus of legal reasoning is mainly concerned with the ‘procedural fairness or rationality of a decision’ (2020, 5) and ‘integrity of the decision-making process’ (2020, 7), not the opinions of bureaucrats on the exam question.

3. Foucault refers ‘governmentality’ to: (1) the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, tactics and analyses which allow the exercise of complex form of power, with population as its main target; (2) the tendency in the West which gradually brought about the formation of a whole series of specific disciplinary apparatuses, such as schools, hospitals, asylums, and so forth; and (3) the process through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state (see Foucault 1991, 102–3).

4. As a number of Bernstein’s former students from the global South have recalled (see Cox 1984 in Chile; Diaz 2001 in Colombia; Singh 2015 in Australia), Foucault’s writings have been pivotal to Bernstein’s later theoretical development, as revealed in the concepts of ‘pedagogic device’ and ‘pedagogic discourse’ (see Bernstein 2000a, 171–72; 205–6). Both Foucault and Bernstein are concerned about how power is immanent in the production and articulation of knowledge (Atkinson 1985, 178; Singh 2015, 147). But unlike Foucault, Bernstein is also interested in empirically investigating the social division of labour, the agencies and actors in the field of symbolic control, their social bases, the distribution and recontextualisation of new knowledge forms (Singh 2015, 149).

5. Hong Kong has always mirrored some aspects of ‘new governance’. It has a long history of using high-stakes selective standardised tests for allocating secondary school places and managing university admission. The majority of schools are not directly managed by the state. They are operated by different school-sponsoring bodies (SSBs, including religious organisations, charities, hospitals, chambers of commerce, fraternity associations, teachers’ unions, and other civil society groups) financed by public funds upon conditions set in the Code of Aid. Private actors from finance and banking sector also play an important role. For example, Hang Seng Bank, which is part of the HSBC Group, is well known for establishing the erstwhile Hang Seng School of Commerce (now the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong), which is a not-for-profit sixth form college for students preparing for A-level exams.

6. For ‘government’, Foucault defines it as ‘the conduct of conduct’, that is to say, a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or influence the conduct of some people (Gordon 1991, 2–3). In short, the meaning of ‘government’ in Foucault’s writings is concerned with an activity or practice, who can govern, how, what or who is governed, and hence, it points to the issue of political sovereignty. Bernstein’s definition of ‘pedagogy’ takes up the Foucauldian meaning of ‘government’, that is, a ‘sustained process whereby somebody(s) acquires new forms or develops existing forms of conduct, knowledge, practice and criteria from somebody(s) or something deemed to be an appropriate provider and evaluator – appropriate either from the point of view of the acquirer or by some other body(s) or both.’ (2000a, 78)

7. Bernstein (1990, 2001b) describes the social space where discursive resources are distributed and constructed as ‘the field of symbolic control’, which is made up of a set of agents and agencies with distinctive functional roles and specialised forms of communication. They include regulators (religious priests and lawyers), repairers (social workers, counsellors), reproducers (schoolteachers), shapers (academics, researchers, private foundations), and executors (civil servants). They are responsible for shaping ways of relating, thinking, and feeling, and thus, influential in governing consciousness, social relations, dispositions and desires (Bernstein 2001b, 22).

8. No example of pedagogisation is clearer than an unprecedented professional development workshop on 24 November 2021 in which schoolteachers and principals were positioned as learners to be lectured by the Chief Executive Carrie Lam herself, about China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong, national identity and national security (see Yiu 2021).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was supported by the publication scholarship awarded by the Griffith Institute for Educational Research

Notes on contributors

Henry Kwok

Henry Kwok is a PhD candidate and senior research assistant at Griffith University, Australia. His research interests include critical studies of curriculum, sociology of knowledge, politics and policy of education reform in Hong Kong and East Asia, and Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories.