Una Hanley
National Politics and Policy
Education as it ‘should be’ according to
Stake-holders …
Local circumstances
Education as lived out by participating
teachers, students, parents and others …
But the devil is in the
detail…
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Rolling back the support of the state for
individuals.
Moving public services to a business model
characterized by competition, accountability
and profitability. Schools are very much part
of this.
Freedoms for ‘the market’ and de-regulation
of business practices, but intervention and
micromanagement for public services.
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An absolute concern for visible short term
gains to appease shareholders often at the
cost of investment, and the withdrawal of
policies and practices which take longer to
yield benefits.
Change, change, change - this is inevitable
and necessary …
…. new layers of management equally
necessary in order to deal with it.
The orientating of citizens as consumers.
The idea that the market should be allowed to
make major social and political decisions; the
idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its
role in the economy, or that corporations should
be given total freedom, that trade unions should
be curbed and citizens given much less rather
than more social protection--such ideas were
utterly foreign to the spirit of the time (George,
1999, p.1).
Extract from ‘A short History of Neoliberalism’ Presented by
Susan George at the Conference on Economic Sovereignty in a
Globalising World, Bangkok, 24-26 March 1999.
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For Foucault (1979, 1980, 1981) a discourse is
a body of knowledge whose major
characteristic is its disciplinary power. It
fabricates a domain of reality by naming and
signifying aspects of experience and
constituting experience into thought.
This process enables documentation,
computation, and evaluation of particular
aspects of existence, rendering them thinkable,
calculable and thus amenable to intervention.
There is a significant and increasing
connectivity between governments and social
policy, banks and financial institutions and
the Institutes they support,
Increasing numbers of for profit edubusinesses
PISA envy