"Neoliberal education and neoliberal education policy"

Stephen J BallInstitute of Education, University of London

Neoliberal education• Much used often with little precision

• A “ principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relations” (Foucault 2010 p. 243)

• ‘The possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic” (2010 p. 219)

• Lazzarato - 5 interdependent/interrelated ‘states of being’• Individualisation • Inequality• Insecurity• Depoliticization• financialisation

individualisation• visibility and opportunity - comparison by performance• Making ourselves into an enterprise a molecular fraction of

capital, a firm, a business.• Make an enterprise of ourselves – in competitive relations• Responsibility for ourselves. • To improve ourselves, to make ourselves more productive,

acquiring new skills, dispensing with antiquated commitments. Invest in ourselves for future returns.

inequality

• Competition thrives on drive, aspiration and inequality, it requires inequality.• The technologies of neoliberalism – ranking,

comparison, performance measurement only make sense by linking inequality to reward, esteem and survival – inequality• Inequality also inter-relates with market

segmentation, the articulation of supply and demand.

insecurity

• Measurement and differentiation• Are we doing enough?

• Contracts

• Flexibilisation • Profit.

• “a micropolitics of little fears” (Lazzarato)

depoliticisation

• Changing issues of value into technical issues• Deliberation and debate displaced by choice• Necessarian logics of international competition• Rendering collective conditions of experience

into personal problems• A reconceptualisation of government (and other

actions) in relation to cost and efficiency rather than rights or values

we have to reconnect education to democracy

and work towards an educative relationship between schools and their communities. Put simply “we should recognize the centrality of education to larger projects of democracy and community building”. Among other things schools should have a responsibility to develop the capabilities of parents, students, teachers, and other local stakeholders; to participate, to discuss, to challenge and critique. It is time to get back to basics – to think seriously about what is the purpose of education and what it means to be educated, what schools are for, and concomitantly and crucially who should decide these things.

financialisation

• PRP. • economies of student worth, investment and

return. • Complexity, IOE contracted to deliver MA for TF.• Calculating ourselves in relation to an uncertain

future.• USS.

What’s this got to do with us????

Neoliberalisation as a dispositif

•an apparatus: discourse, practices, relationships, organisation forms, ethics and subjectivity.

Out there and ‘in here’

• An economisation of the social and a depoliticisation of the political.• How we think about ourselves, and others,

what we value, and how we value other.• Our relation to ourselves.• Neoliberalism “the ‘economic politics’ of

enterprise appears to know no boundaries either in terms of where it might be applied” or to whom. (Du Gay 2004 p. 40)

subjectivity• Changes what it means to be a teacher, to teach and

learn, who we are. • The re-articulation of teaching as a bundle of skills and

competences, as depthless, as a matter of performance rather than principles, erasure of reflection, instead - responsive.• It may seem that we are oppressed by neoliberalism but

we are also produced by it, animated, activated, 'made up’.• Systems of recognition and esteem. • A grid of intelligibility• Systems of appraisal and comparison, review and

measurement.

emotions•Our relations with others, what and

who we value. Emotions, fear, guilt, pride and envy. Over and against this is a sense of loss, meaninglessness.•We do not recognise ourselves where

we expect to be.• – “a regime of truth offers the terms

that make self-recognition possible” (Butler 2005 p. 22)

Out there• Changes in the form and modalities of the state, new forms of

governance. Done in new places by new actors, a dis articulation and reconstitution of the state in a set of relations, a network, which is diverse, dispersed and unstable. New sites of discourse and of legitimation, new causal stories and narratives of success.

• Teach First, Teaching Leaders, Troops into Teachers. HSBC ‘financial literacy’. Reading Readiness (KPMG). Pearson (Primary Review). Academy and Free school providers, Teaching Schools, unqualified teachers (professionalism).

• Philanthropy –• Bill Gates• Broad• KIPP and TFA.

Form and modalities of the state• The state manages the definition and boundaries of the

economy, almost anything is now subject to economic relations, to 'investment'. The state divests itself of certain responsibilities, practical and moral, but takes on out, new forms of power relations - funding, contracting, target setting, monitoring and measurement - although in practical terms the work of these forms of governance can also be out-sourced.

The neoliberal economy

• The economy is an ensemble of “regulated” activities, which is constantly instituted and reordered (Lazzarato 2009), supported and monitored by the state.• The state is a ‘market maker’.

We are all neoliberals now?• New neoliberal teachers, trainers, scholars and academics.

• Is there something we might call neoliberal research, refining the discourses and methods of the 'management' of education - leadership, statistics of measurement, systems of comparison, techniques of visibility.

• Related to new forms and priorities for funding (more economisation), a relation to research increasingly driven and articulated in terms of income and impact rather than other systems of worth.

• We come to be measured in these terms, research income and outputs - responsibility, worth, esteem.

• Regimes of truth, truths that are told about ours.

Refusing neoliberalism• 1. Thinking in terms of abstractions is disempowering,

debilitating, but when we recognise the immediacy of the neoliberalisation, it's presence in our quoditian practices, our social relations, our relation to ourselves then there are possibilities for struggle, for refusal.

• 2. An ethics of opposition is safe and familiar, it this is limited to opposing ‘others’, rejecting what is intolerable. But what about our relation to ourselves and to others, what about the everyday, what stance do we take toward ourselves, what truths do we tell about ourselves?

• “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” (Foucault).

• Stephen J. Ball & Antonio Olmedo (2013): Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities, Critical Studies in Education, 54:1, 85-96