Cultural complicities: elitism, heteronormativity and violence in the education marketplace

Abstract

Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in the public sector. Amid rhetorics of excellence and accountability that pervade discourses of private schooling, however, recent high‐profile incidents of violence involving students at elite private schools provide a powerful provocation to these dominant discourses, and call into question a range of cultural practices associated with elite schooling. In this paper, the author draws on data generated from a three‐year study of sexually violent incidents that took place at an elite boys’ school in Sydney, Australia and their representation in the public domain, to consider how discourses of elitism, heteronormativity and violence circulate in dialogue. Through analysis of school‐ and media‐generated texts, and interviews with a former student and parents of the school, it is argued that the education marketplace is a site of disjuncture and contradiction, in which the privileges of private school consumption are simultaneously upheld and revoked in a complex interplay of school, media and social discourse. In so doing, the author considers how a range of cultural and institutional practices are complicit in the production of violence.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges with thanks the support of Macquarie University, which funded this research through a Research Award for Areas and Centers of Excellence, and the Macquarie University Ethics Committee, whose support for the project was invaluable. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments on an earlier draft of this paper were immensely helpful.

Notes

1. This study considered how practices of representation and consumption figured in the production of school violence, with particular reference to a series of sexually violent incidents between students in an elite private boys’ school in Sydney, Australia in 2000. The larger study draws extensively on poststructuralist theory to analyse school history and promotional material, correspondence between the school and parents, media representations of the incidents, and interviews with a former student, parents, a journalist and a media management consultant. This research was approved, and conducted within the parameters established by the Macquarie University Ethics Committee, and was awarded the Macquarie University Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence and the Australian Association of Research in Education Doctoral Thesis Award 2005.

2. Pseudonyms have been used to safeguard the anonymity of research participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sue Saltmarsh

Sue Saltmarsh is a Senior Lecturer in the Cultural Politics of Education in the School of Teacher Education at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst. Her research concerns the discursive production of subjectivities and social relations, with particular reference to issues of institutional violence and educational consumption.