Abstract
Education is a political process in which a variety of actors compete for the control over the future of society. In this process, the role of technology is construed along ideological lines, and the professional role of educators is a reflection of their political role. This introductory chapter offers a preliminary description of a conceptual framework designed to foster critical and hope-fully emancipative participation in the debate on the role of digital technology in the politics of educational reform. The main point is that some of the most important themes in this debate can be addressed in terms of concepts, assessment and subversions. The chapters in this collection are contributions to the development of a conceptual framework that enables emancipative par-ticipation in the politics of education.
Introduction
The essays collected in this volume discuss the role of digital technology in edu-cation from diverse perspectives and in relation to a variety of issues, but share, coherently with the research programme that has inspired them, the intent of promoting informed and active participation in the reform of education in late capitalist societies. In this volume we have deliberately tried to avoid forcing the reader into the discussion of intra-disciplinary theoretical or conceptual devel-opment. Those issues are surely relevant and effectively discussed in other fora.
In this introductory chapter, however, it seemed a good idea to briefly describe the conceptual co-ordinates of this collection – its starting points, its goals, and the analytical strategy that links them. Informed participation is possible when the participants are in some measure familiar with the relevant debates, issues and positions that constitute the communicative environment of the reform process.
Active participation, furthermore, requires the participant to have opinions about desirable or undesirable outcomes of the reform process and about the way to bring about the former and oppose the latter. This goal is important because edu-cation is about the future of society and, as I shall argue to a greater length in a moment, this future is always, in one form or a another, a stake in the competition between ideologies inspired by and grounded in competing hierarchies of values.
The politics of education, technology and participation
This collection invites the reader to engage with one particular aspect of this pro-cess, i.e. the role of digital technology in education. This is only one, but in my opinion, especially important dimension of the debate about educational reform.
The analyses and the arguments presented in this collection contribute to a con-ceptual framework that interprets some of the most relevant aspects of the current debate in terms of meanings or ‘concepts’, the evaluation of the role of digital tech-nology in education or ‘assessments’, and the opening of intellectual and educational spaces to resist oppressive interpretation of this role, or ‘subversions’. To make my case about the analytical value of this framework, I will now present for the attention of the reader three main tenets. First, education is not a technical but a (very!) politi-cal process with ideologipoliti-cal roots that cannot be ignored. Second, the role of tech-nology is not politically neutral but rather politically indeterminate – subordinated to interpretations that reflect the ideological roots of the political competition. Third, educators must become aware of the key political relevance of their role even and especially when the relevance of this role is challenged by the influence of techno-centric culture in educational discourse.
The politics of education
The idea that education is a fundamentally political process construes education as a process in which a number of participants compete for a variety of goals, depending on the nature of the issues at stake. A classical tradition in political sci-ence defines the core aspect of this process as a competition for control over the distribution of values in society. In this perspective, the study of politics is, in prac-tice, the study of ‘who, gets what, when and how’ (Lasswell, 1950 (1936)). Seen as a political process, the study of education is the study of who gets what, when and how in the competition for control over the future of society. This includes the study of the main cleavages, or the fault lines defined by relevant issues at the core of the competition between the main actors, the strategies, or the moves through which main actors try to gain political influence and the nature of the stake. While shared in political studies and also in critical contributions to the analysis of edu-cation (Youdell, 2011) this position seems nevertheless far from mainstream in much of the current discussion on media and education. For too many, education is a technical problem: one which has to do primarily with the effective manage-ment of available resources, with the identification and implemanage-mentation of cost-efficient educational models, curricula and technologies, with the co-ordination between the training of teachers and the education of students with the needs of the productive system, or the national economy, or the global markets, and so on.
This technical approach seeks ‘optimal solutions’ for the role of digital technol-ogy in education based on a notion of society interpreted through the organicistic metaphor as the place of order and harmony and on a notion of education as the activity to assure the integration of the individual in a social order endorsed with transcendental traits (e.g. Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ or Hegelian ‘Spirit’) and immu-table. Education therefore consists of the transmission of knowledge and values or, more precisely, the knowledge and the values that are necessary to preserve not only the material basis of this society but also the ideas and beliefs supporting its representation in terms of a harmonious whole. In the critical tradition, society is not a place of harmony but rather a place of incessant struggle between the forces that seek to influence the nature of the social order. This order, and the inequali-ties associated with it, is a more or less contingent outcome of this struggle. In this tradition, education is a crucial battlefield because it is through the control of education – the control of the nature of knowledge and values informing the upbringing of younger generations – that it is possible to control the future of any existing social order: the future distribution of power and the structure of inequali-ties in society.
One can argue that the stake of the politics of education is fundamentally peda-gogical to the extent that the forming of a person, as a citizen, a producer/consumer or as an individual, is the ultimate stake of the competition for the control over the knowledge and the beliefs that formal education is supposed to preserve through generations. This competition, however, does not happen in a vacuum but in a social environment rich in ideas, beliefs, hierarchies of values, understandings of the past, and visions of the future organized in more or less coherent interpretative systems usually referred to as ideologies.
In this part of the century, the main ideological protagonists of this competition are global capitalism, with its political corollary usually referred to as neoliberal-ism, and democracy. These two ideologies have much in common. Inheritors of some of the great intellectual traditions of the 19th and 20th Centuries, they both contain utopian elements and seek the support of technology to enforce them. The core differences between these two ideologies, however, can be described in rela-tion to the problem of social change or, more precisely, in relarela-tion to the problem of change and continuity in the fundamental traits of the social order, and the prob-lem of freedom. In the democratic tradition, egalitarianism is necessary for the participation of the majority of the population in the political competition on the assumption that the legitimacy of decisions is in direct proportion to the extent of the participation. If and when people have equal entitlements and, at least in prin-ciple, equal opportunities to effectively participate in the political competition, responsibilities are shared, political violence less attractive, and the possibility of
social change less threatening for all. In this ideology, thus, the twin problems of social change and freedom are addressed by prioritizing egalitarianism and col-lective freedom – the control of the democratic community over its future – over individual freedom.
At the origins of the free-market utopia, in its early formulation, is the idea that societies could be spared the troubles and the violence associated with political competition by establishing the ‘free market’ as a self-regulating mechanism for the distribution of values in society. The history of this idea, its evolution and its profound consequences on capitalist societies of the 19th and 20th Centuries has been famously described and discussed by economic historian Karl Polanyi in his classic The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 2001 (1944)) (Dale, 2010) (Gammon, 2008). Polanyi argues that the free-market utopia annihilates the ‘human and natu-ral substance of society’ (Polanyi, 2001 (1944): 3–5) and establishes economic freedom as the fundamental freedom for the sake of which other freedoms have to be sacrificed (Polanyi, 2001 (1944): 265). The effort to establish a non-political order, however, creates inequalities that trigger the reaction of society against the free-market utopia and interpretation of freedom associated with it in the form of communist and fascist dictatorships.
For our purposes, and the understanding of the role of digital technology in education as a dimension of the competition for control over the future of society, the single most important difference, in my opinion, is in the nature of the peda-gogical ambitions associated with the utopian elements of these ideologies. By endorsing the utilitarianism of the free-market utopia and seeking to establish a political order based on (in our age, corporate) economic freedom, Neoliberalism needs a dual pedagogy: one for the elites or ‘leaders’ and one for the masses; one for those in charge of the administration and ideological reproduction of the politi-cal order and another one for those who, as producers and consumers, will assure the material reproduction of the same order. Conversely, by endorsing egalitarian-ism and seeking to establish a political order based on universal participation and consensus, democratic utopia needs a single pedagogy for individuals expected to participate with equal entitlements in the reproduction of a political order based on and legitimated by the endless possibilities of emancipative social change.
The different pedagogical needs of these ideologies and the utopias that inspire them encourage different visions of what education is all about. In the democratic tradition, education is construed as a fundamental resource to pursue the egalitar-ian ideals through the broadening of participation. Education is therefore a public good, not out of charitable morality but because educated individuals are nec-essary for the establishment and preservation of an egalitarian society and the participatory management of social change.
In the capitalist tradition, the pedagogical dualism necessary to support a social order that places economic freedom over social justice implies the problem of convincing many that their subjugation to the leadership of the privileged few is both legitimate and immutable. An ideology aiming at the establishment and the preservation of a political order based on inequalities needs a dualistic concept of education. Whereas education for participation in the political process is restricted to the ‘leaders’, education for the masses takes the connotation of ‘professional training’: the transmission of skills and beliefs relevant for the functional but ulti-mately passive participation of the vast majority of the individuals in the process of production and consumption.
As Bertrand Russell noted ‘in all education, propaganda has a part’ and ‘the question for the educator is not whether there shall be propaganda but how much, how organized, and of what sort’ (Russell, 1932: 213–214). For both these ideolo-gies, education is not only about knowledge and skill but also about beliefs trans-mitted in the form of propaganda. The important difference here is that democratic propaganda fosters emancipation and the possibility of more egalitarian social order through education, whereas neoliberal propaganda fosters education to fa-cilitate the control of the many by the few in the effort to avoid the subversion of a social order based on inequality.
In democratic propaganda, education is about the transmission of beliefs about the moral quality of egalitarianism, and the importance of participation as the or-ganizing principles of societal order and in the legitimization of political authority.
The fundamental skills here are not primarily those that allow the individual to become a capable leader or an efficient worker, but rather those that enable one to actively participate in all the processes through which a democratic society gains and keeps control of its future.
In the educational propaganda of global capitalism, human relations are all contained within the relations of production. People are construed as ‘human re-sources’, as producers and consumers; students are seen as ‘consumers’ (Newson, 2004) of educational services and educated in accordance with the ‘need of the labour-market’. The explicit objective of educational reform in neoliberal propa-ganda is to increase the productivity of the educational process: meaning forming more efficient workers in a more efficient way. The implicit assumption in this discourse is that the problem facing global and national economies is one of pro-ductivity or efficiency instead of one of distribution or equity: too much injustice in the distribution of whatever is produced.
This emphasis on production rather than distribution and on economic free-dom rather than social justice is a fundamental difference between the hierar-chies of values fostered by neoliberal and democratic propaganda, and one with
profound pedagogical implications. The neoliberal belief that ‘society does not exist’1 has the pedagogical implication that individuals need not be educated as parts of a community of equals. And they should not since, as the new psychology of leadership suggests, effective leadership depends on the formation of ‘collec-tive identities’ around the leader constructed as ‘entrepreneur of identity’, an in-group ‘prototype’ and ‘champion’ (Haslam, Reicher, & Platow, 2011: xxii–xxiii).
While in democracy people are educated to take pride in the achievements of the community they participate as equals, in neoliberal propaganda people are effec-tively educated to identify with their ‘leaders’ and be happy when their leaders are happy.
The sense of urgency that inspires the debate and the call for reform in the edu-cational domain, as well elsewhere, may have to do with the fact that capitalism and democracy are increasingly perceived as incompatible ideologies and, per-haps, with the growing discontent about global capitalism among a large variety of political actors worldwide. To describe this increasing awareness in terms of a
‘politicization’ of the process of educational reform seems to me a bit naïve and uncritical – as if the reform of education could ever be non-political – but it nev-ertheless gives us a reason not to ignore the current debate on the reform of educa-tion. It shows that what is at stake are not only curricula but very different futures based on different notions of the individual, of freedom, justice and ultimately different ideas about what the future of humanity should look like.
With its emphasis on ‘leadership’, management and productivity, neoliberal education seeks to enforce the kind of administrative control that, as Herbert Mar-cuse and others noticed about half a century ago, aims at ‘closing the universe of discourse’ (Marcuse, 2002 (1964)) and removing the possibility of structural social change at his roots: in the discursive construction of the problem of change itself in terms of production instead of freedom and in terms of the preservation rather than elimination of inequalities. Global capitalism is therefore a threat to democracy because the material opulence of administrative control is exchanged with individual freedom and, most importantly, with the practical possibility of bringing about a more egalitarian social order. Conversely, with its emphasis on egalitarianism principles and participatory skills, democratic education can be a serious obstacle to the spreading of neoliberal ideology in society and, conse-quently, to the consolidation of global capitalism and the interests of the elites with which it is associated. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that these elites
1 This is a sentence attributed to Margaret Thatcher but quickly endorsed among supporters of neoliberalism.
will do whatever is in their capacity to promote the ideology and the education that best serve their interests and oppose the alternative that threatens them.
The sense of urgency, however, may also reflect the impression that, in the cur-rent conditions, while the economic crisis inspires both intellectual opposition and social discontent about neoliberalism and the workings of global capitalism, the competition between capitalism and democracy has entered a crucial phase: one in which both the control of education and of the role of technology in education are stakes of strategic importance. The crisis of capitalism and the ‘free-market’
utopia is nothing new. What in the present situation seems unprecedented, how-ever, is the fact that both the current crisis and its response – in support or against global capitalism – are global in scope. In this situation the globalization of the
‘free-market’ utopia and the globalization of dissent, are twin processes depending on ambivalent communicative affordances associated with digital technology that education can disambiguate in support of or against global capitalism.
Questioning technology
Democracy needs technology to fulfil the egalitarian and participatory ambitions of its utopia through the free circulation of information and knowledge. In demo-cratic discourse, digital technology is the material interface for bringing about uni-versal education and the communicative conditions for the legitimization of politi-cal power. Global capitalism needs technology to unite humanity under the rule of the ‘free market’ and to control the conditions of its stability. In neoliberal dis-course, digital technology is the material interface to support its dualist pedagogy and the legitimization of the structures of inequality with which it is associated.
If education is seen as a political process, to discuss the role of digital technol-ogy in this process means to look at the impact of this technoltechnol-ogy on the competi-tion for the control of society. Thus, the second tenet of the conceptual framework I propose here is that this role is not politically neutral2, or irrelevant for this com-petition, but rather politically indeterminate: capable in principle of serving the ambitions and hierarchies of values and the strategies of both global capitalism and democracy – and presumably of other ideologies as well. The main reason for this indeterminacy is that the ‘power’ of technology is not in technology itself but in its usage as a material interface for practices, purposes, goals, and objectives, etc. that are established and justified in relation to ideological ambitions, values
If education is seen as a political process, to discuss the role of digital technol-ogy in this process means to look at the impact of this technoltechnol-ogy on the competi-tion for the control of society. Thus, the second tenet of the conceptual framework I propose here is that this role is not politically neutral2, or irrelevant for this com-petition, but rather politically indeterminate: capable in principle of serving the ambitions and hierarchies of values and the strategies of both global capitalism and democracy – and presumably of other ideologies as well. The main reason for this indeterminacy is that the ‘power’ of technology is not in technology itself but in its usage as a material interface for practices, purposes, goals, and objectives, etc. that are established and justified in relation to ideological ambitions, values