Between orders and others

Education is perhaps one of the most relational and situated endeavors of human societies. Central to the process through which societies are produced and reproduced, educational projects require that we pay attention to the needs of others as well as to securing particular orders. In modern nation states, in which the need for public education has been largely bureaucratized into formal schools, the need to secure order has largely overridden attention to the needs of others. In fact, public schools have become one of the key structures through which social exclusions are secured and marginalizations are produced through the production of hierarchical social orders. This might seem paradoxical, given how public schooling is imagined to ensure equity by integrating others into existing orders. Yet, as the four articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry document in different ways, from different contexts, and through different analytic lenses, the tension between securing bureaucratic orders and the responsibility to the well-being of others is part and parcel of what it means to educate within the parameters of the modern nation state.

From Myanmar (Maber) and India (Syeed) to Spain (Hernado Lloréns) and the United States (Spector), the four articles in this issue take on philosophical, discursive, and empirical approaches to both answer and raise questions about how curriculum is shaped by bureaucratic orders in ways that undermine the educational responsibility to particular others. While diverse in terms of context and approach, all four articles share a concern with the conditions that order lived experience and bring attention to the ways in which institutions and cultural practices both create as well as delimit possibilities for attending to the needs of those who are marginalized as others.

In the first article, “Bureaucratization, Education and the Meanings of Responsibility,” Hannah Spector brings together two perspectives on bureaucracies, a sociological one, informed by Max Weber’s theorization of bureaucracies, and a philosophical one, informed by Hannah Arendt’s work, particularly her analysis of totalitarianism. Using these two angles, Spector points us to the problem of how tending to bureaucratic orders within education undermines ethical responsibilities to others. While acknowledging the necessity of bureaucratic rationalization for the implementation of mass public schooling, Spector points to the ways in which the depersonalization of effective bureaucratic organization in the name of efficiency leads to a breakdown in the relationship between order (my responsibility to the bureaucracy) and ethics (my responsibility to others). This “diffusion of responsibility,” as Spector calls it, creates a situation in which no one is ultimately responsible for the well-being of anyone and where, in the name of efficiency, negative outcomes are no one’s responsibility.

Spector’s speculative line of argument is to some extent illustrated in the three articles that follow, as each illustrates how policies put forward through educational bureaucracies encounter institutional limits and are shaped by cultural context as they are implemented in practice. The policy trajectories of the concept of convivencia in Spain offers a strong and clear case in point, as examined by Belén Hernando-Lloréns in her article titled, “Differentiating Citizenship, Criminalizing Diversity: Problematizing Convivencia in Education in Spain.” A concept that has had a long and complex trajectory in many Spanish-speaking countries, convivencia refers, at a very basic level, to the intention of “living together in harmony” with others (p. 521). By tracing the trajectories of this concept through Spanish educational policy, Hernando-Lloréns shows how the concept has become a technology of exclusion that orders and demarcates ideal citizens, while excluding (non-white) others from citizenship.

Shifting the unit of analysis from policy to printed media, Hernando-Lloréns goes on to show how public discourses also play a significant role in how the problem of convivencia has become a problem of the ordering of diversity in the broader society. She shows how convivencia has been deployed beyond schooling to uphold a particular conception of the ideal Spanish citizen, functioning “as a salvation project to protect the boundaries that make practices of exclusion possible in education and society” (p. 533). Extending Spector’s argument about bureaucracies, Hernando-Lloréns demonstrates that the negative consequences of bureaucratization are not simply a failure of ethical responsibility caused by rationalization because “what transpires in education can never be dissociated from the larger domain of cultural politics” (pp. 531-532).

The interaction between bureaucracies and the larger domain of cultural politics is also evidenced in Esa Syeed’s article, “Conflict Between Covers: Confronting Official Curriculum In Indian Textbooks.” Focusing on the production of textbooks, Syeed shows how even the most progressive shifts in education policy encounter resistance not just in and through bureaucratic orders, but in the hegemonic conservative tendencies of the broader social and cultural context in which hierarchies and otherness are produced. Here, again, the effort to advance an equity agenda – this time through the rewriting of textbooks – is undermined by both bureaucratic procedures that remove responsibility, as well as by individuals who deliberately take it upon themselves to restore a sense of order by securing inequality. Despite the Indian government’s efforts to create opportunities for broad participation across sectors of government and civil society, even progressive participants often felt beholden to (or limited by) procedural orders, undermining their own commitments to securing justice and inclusion for others.

Consistent with Spector’s argument, Syeed shows how education bureaucracies enforce the status of hegemonic ideologies, particularly around hierarchical social orders that secure inequality, even as they make flexible adjustments to the way teaching and learning are conceptualized to engage others. Syeed examines how the authors involved in the process, all coming from different sectors of government and civil society and representing different interests, strategically negotiated the process in order to secure some gains, particularly around the representation of inequality. The detailed account that Syeed provides adds further nuance to our understanding of the relationship between bureaucracies and social agents, showing how responsibility to bureaucratic and hegemonic orders does not always override responsibility to marginalized others. Instead, the analysis shows how authors from civil society negotiated complex micro-politics in order to challenge institutionalized official knowledge. Still, while these actors were successful at integrating a more progressive constructivist approach based on critical pedagogy, their attempts at challenging inequality were met with both bureaucratic as well as individual resistance, including their own internalized sense of what was possible within the constraints of their engagement with the orders of the educational bureaucracy.

A similar kind of negotiation is evident in the case of non-formal educational programs, as examined in Elizabeth Maber’s article, “Undoing Exclusions/Expanding Inclusion: Conceptualizing Spaces for Gendered Learning and Citizenship Constructions in Myanmar’s Transition.” Maber takes us outside the context of schooling, to show how non-formal education is also shaped by, while also providing opportunities to counter, the influence of state educational bureaucracies. Giving particular attention to gender-based exclusions, Mabers points to how various kinds of negotiations enable opportunities for young women to take on leadership and contest their subordination to a particular gender order. Without romanticizing non-formal schooling as being exempt from exclusionary practices, Maber explores how teaching and learning practices within non-formal environments reinforce the orders of “exclusive hierarchies” while at the same time fostering “greater inclusivity” of others (p. 561).

Maber’s work furthers the larger debate about the relationships between sustaining bureaucratic orders and addressing the marginalization of others by bringing attention to a context that has been greatly affected by political upheaval following authoritarian military rule. While we might expect that the tendency to secure bureaucratic orders at the expense of being responsible for the well-being of others, as theorized by Spector in the first article, might be exacerbated in the context of civil unrest, Maber shows that opportunities for agency and negotiation persist, at least within the non-formal education sector. Like Hernando-Lloréns, Maber shows that the larger social cultural context has a significant impact on shaping the negotiation between securing orders and addressing the needs of others. Yet, like Syeed, Maber also shows that this is indeed a negotiation, and that when formal education fails to address structural violence – or when it becomes its most formidable enforcer, non-formal education can create “transformative learning environments that attempt to break with cycles of exclusion” (p. 574).

Whether it is possible to sustain a commitment to addressing the particular needs of others within a rationalized system that is based on the premise that bureaucratic orders should take precedence and apply to everyone the same way everywhere is a problem for those who advocate for state supported public schooling. The neoliberal alternative of shifting the orders of public schooling to increasingly local and individual schemes have failed to address inequality, as Spector reminds us in her article. This is in large part because these schemes ignore unequal access to resources and opportunities that can only be equally distributed to a large population through the very bureaucracies that, in turn, undermine local and particular needs. This quandary is perhaps unresolvable, and therefore the work of scholars like Spector, Hernando-Lloréns, Syeed, and Maber is crucial in order to remain alert to the ways in which our responsibilities to order undermine our responsibilities to others. Spector suggests that this requires a constant revisiting of precisely what we mean by educational responsibility, and the articles in this issue provide additional fodder for considering this responsibility while remaining thoughtful about what kinds of actions we take as educators.