Abstract
Raymond Williams’ (1976/1983) Keywords carries the subtitle, “a vocabulary of culture and society.” The wordlist took “key words” in contemporary social and political debate and used their philological history as a means of engaging with their contradictory contemporary uses and meanings. For Williams, meanings of words change in relation to the changing political, social, and economic circumstances of the times. Words with previously understood and commonly accepted meanings take on new and significant meanings in response to new social movements and political concerns. Contemporary Western preoccupation with risk is historically unique, and never made either edition of Keywords. The use of risk in ordinary vocabulary became more common in the late 1970s, with a sharp increase in occurrence beginning in the 1980s. 1 Social science only began using risk as a unit of analysis after the English publication of Ulrich Beck’s (1992) Risk Society. The inclusion of risk in New Keywords (Bennett et al., 2005) reveals the concept to be one of the most significant ideas to have emerged in society over the past 30 years. Risk frames identities, shapes social relations and institutions, and extends decision-making and other forms of power to some groups while excluding these things from others.
This issue takes up the lens of risk with empirical and theoretical articles that focus on the ways in which risk is enacted through a broad context of education. Re-embedding the analysis of risk into education is crucial for at least two reasons. First, discourses of risk are produced by and woven into the fabric of schools. Risk lives in and through educators, students, and the policies that govern them at local and national levels, independent of political ideology or party affiliation. Second, while scholars have examined and deconstructed racial and social class pedagogical and policy implications of the “at-risk” category, contemporary theories of risk have been almost completely neglected; hence, the role that education plays in management and prevention of risk—as well as with the production of risk taking—needs to be conceptualized within sociocultural theories and perspectives on risk. Thus, this symposium seeks to address the meaning and institutional implications of risk, and the ways risk is imagined and interpreted by individuals, educational institutions and their attenuate policies.
The meanings of risk
Risk is a central topic in the field of education, but Ulrich Beck’s neologism—the risk society—has become the lingua franca across an extraordinarily wide and diverse range of scholarship: politics (Sidnell, 2004), security (Seddon et al., 2008), social work (Webb, 2006), business regulation (Alemmano et al., 2013), climate change (Culver et al., 2011), criminology (Mythen and Walklate, 2011), terrorism (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007), welfare (Briggs, 2013), and youth (Woodman, 2009). These approaches capture the complexity of the varying factors that influence risk responses in different social and cultural contexts, revealing risk to be a requisite way of understanding contemporary uncertainties and our times. Humans are embroiled in—and forced to negotiate with—a matrix of day-to-day uncertainties in work, relationships, leisure, and family life. Experts warn of the risk of pandemic diseases, and—as I write this—the United States Congress debates a Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. If Umberto Eco is correct, and 70% of our knowledge comes from watching Hollywood movies, then most of us fear that terrorism—homegrown other otherwise—is just around the corner, or perhaps that snakes really can potentially run loose on a plane. Discourses of risk frame our understanding of our world, although it can be easier to describe the perils of living in such a society consumed with risk than it is to define the actual term (Strydom, 2002). The sociology of risk typically introduces the topic in the following manner: In everyday lay people’s language, risk tends to be used to refer almost exclusively to a threat, hazard, danger or harm: we “risk our life savings” by investing on the stock exchange, or “put our marriage at risk” by having an affair. The term is also used more weakly to refer to a somewhat negative rather than disastrous outcome, as in the phrase “If you go outside in this rain, you’ll risk catching a cold.” In this usage, risk means somewhat less than a possible danger or a threat, more an unfortunate or annoying event. Risk is therefore a very loose term in everyday parlance … Risk and uncertainty tend to be treated as conceptually the same thing: for example, the term “risk” is often used to denote a phenomenon that has the potential to deliver substantial harm, whether or not the probability of this harm eventuating is estimable. (Lupton, 1999: 8–9)
The histories of risk
The Oxford English Dictionary’s contemporary definition of risk as “exposure to the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance” belies the term’s long and complicated history. Although there is a lack of consensus about the actual origins of the word, the roots of risk are most likely in the Italian risco, a derivative of the verb riscare meaning to run into danger. Humans have, of course, always lived in an uncertain and dangerous world, but fate (fatum) and chance (tyche) provided ancient explanatory systems for shortages of food, epidemics, rampant death, and various other misfortunes and mysteries of nature. The notion of risk did not make its appearance in common language until the mid-sixteenth century, originating from the Spanish maritime word meaning “to run into danger on a rock.” Here, risk was linked to maritime trade and the safety of ships, as well as their financial investment and sailing into uncharted waters (Ayto, 1993; Giddens, 1991).
The beginning of mathematical probability has been traditionally located with the 1654 correspondence between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat regarding the mathematics of games of chance (Hacking, 1986). In the seventeenth century, Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli extended the use of probability beyond games of chance to methods of demanding a sufficient amount of real life information to compute a probability about the future. Bernoulli’s law of large numbers ultimately led to the creation of the modern protocols for testing new drugs, opinion polling, and stock market decision-making. But determinism and vagaries of nature eventually eroded, and the ability to “see that the world might be regular and not subject to universal laws of nature” (Hacking, 1986), came only after the development of nineteenth century statistics and quantification. The emergence of an “avalanche of numbers” at the beginning of the nineteenth century began an epistemological shift that changed the way Americans and Europeans thought about people, bringing in new forms of social control. As society became increasingly statistical, new types of laws came into being—analogous to the laws of nature—but now pertaining to people. These new laws were expressed in terms of probability. They carried with them the connotations of normalcy and of deviations from the norm. The cardinal concept of the psychology of the Enlightenment had been, simply, human nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was being replaced by something different: “normal people.”
The laws of chance, unlike the preceding laws of nature, emerged from gathering statistics on large populations. Risk began to order reality in a calculable form. By the nineteenth century, risk was in common usage among an insurance industry concerned with the prediction of, and insurance against, future risks (Garland, 2003). “Until the 1850s no company would underwrite a policy covering windstorm or theft. By the end of the century specialized insurance business for industrial and commercial risks had been established” (Outreville, 1998: 21). Risk eventually developed with the opportunistic reasoning associated with banking, and investments, meaning the mathematical estimation of the probable consequences of investment decisions for borrowers and lenders. Over time, the calculation of risk probabilities “derived from statistical models based on aggregate populations” (Garland, 2003) extended to numerous areas of social and commercial life throughout the twentieth century (Adams, 1995). The Employment Liability Assurance Corporation was created in England to cover the civil responsibility of employers. In 1889, the Mercantile Accident Insurance Company of Glasgow issued the first theft insurance contract (Outreville, 1998). Railways and other mechanically driven machinery increased the chance of bodily injury and loss of property, for which insurance offered relief. The first automobile insurance policy was written in 1888 “as an extension of the forms used for the protection of owners of horse drawn carriages” (Outreville, 1998: 21). By the end of the twentieth century, automobile insurance began its expansive and rapid history of growth. Once insurance was present, potential problems were addressed for those at risk for those circumstances. Risk thinking brings the future into the present and makes it calculable (Rose, 1999), and creates the belief in the transformability of a radically indeterminate world into a manageable one (Reddy, 1996).
The politics of risk and education
Before presenting the several theories of risk, I want to discuss the politics of risk that has played a central role in education at a variety of contexts and levels. Following the assumption that one important role of schools is to prepare students for college and/or the labor market, there is a significant amount of risk involved in pursing education for that purpose. Jobs and related financial compensation present uncertainty. Some will find jobs with high compensation while others will not. One never knows if an adequate number of jobs will exist in one’s field, at the time one is ready to take them. Some college graduates hope that earning an advanced degree will improve job prospects and pay, but uncertainty still reigns.
Risk has long plagued schools’ attempts to manage student health and safety. Educating students about the “high risk activities” of sex, drugs, and alcohol use is fraught with controversy because it may be too risky to teach about responsible drinking or using contraceptive options, since some fear that education encourages behavior. At least one program, Reducing the Risk (RISK), attempts to manage uncertainty around sexual behavior through abstinence-only health education pedagogy. Concerns about school safety have led many to assert that schools themselves are sources of risk. Shootings, reports of bullying, and different forms of violence have led to many new security measures. The overall poor quality of school lunches is said to contribute to increased risk of developing health problems such as obesity. Media reports claim that schools are a “minefield of health hazards” and among the most “dangerous places.” Additionally, packing children together while providing them little physical activity is said to contribute to health problems, although health experts offer “lots of suggestions on things we all can do to minimize risks” for children in schools (Healy, 2011).
But the politics of risk have played out most notably in the various national education policies that have skillfully used risk to reorganize education to fit the needs of the American economy. The 1983 A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reforms scared the public by constructing public schools as sites of crisis, thus can be seen as a market-oriented educational reform movement. A Nation at Risk shifted educational policy from achieving educational equity to notions of school excellence and preventing risky personal behavior in students. Decades later, Obama’s Race to the Top targeted “high need” students, defined as those “at risk of educational failure …” Most recently, former New York City School Superintendent Joel Klein and former Secretary of Defense Condoleezza Rice (Klein and Rice , 2012) co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force which released a report blaming public schools for the nation's economic problems and endangering national security. Rice's “clarion call to the nation” (p.xiv) claimed that “educational failure puts the United States future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk” (p. 4).
Schools no less sheepishly deploy the “at risk” label to manage unruly student populations. Educational experts such as psychologists, counselors, social workers, special educators, and speech specialists evaluate and assess students at all levels to determine possible risks of learning deficits, developmental delays, autism, hyperactivity, depression and learning disabilities. Some refer to anticipated negative trajectories and outcomes; others use the term to refer to youth currently experiencing emotional, behavioral, educational and psychological challenges (Nakkula and Toshalis, 2006). In both cases, the term implies a dimension of identity, that is, “at-risk youth.” As Ian Hacking (1986: 223) writes: “Counting [populations] is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be. People spontaneously come to fit their categories.” The logical extension is the (usually unstated) concern that at-risk students, without intervention, will drop out and turn to drugs, crime, and violent behavior. Reducing at-risk populations, in theory, reduces their impact on society and ensures safety and security. Nadesan (2009: 39) points out, in the wake of the 2007 shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech, “psychiatric authorities are under increased public scrutiny for their role in protecting public safety through the identification and monitoring of risky individuals.”
One approach to this topic comes in the form of theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between at-risk students and their schools. Most of this work suggests how local and state policy can address at-risk student populations. Scholarship varies here, but almost always involves identifying the characteristics of the at-risk student. For example, Palmo and Palmo (1989: 45) write: The at-risk youth is a representative of the family and symbolizes the severity of the difficulties within the family unit. The greater the difficulties demonstrated by the youth, the larger the number of issues that need attention within the family. Although there are examples of at-risk youth with pathologies that do not provide an honest picture of the family’s difficulties, in most instances the youth’s behaviors are an accurate barometer of the family’s stability. The culture appears to center around attitudes, interests, a style of life, and a scattering of unorganized beliefs and superstitions so unformalized that they may be transmitted without explanation, argument, or detailed exposition. Deliberate teaching is not a normal or necessary part of the adult role in such cultural groups, and neither the skills not the language peculiar to teaching are developed and maintained. (Beretier and Engelmann, 1966) Children from educated families are exposed to print at an early age. Their parents read to them, encourage their early “reading and scribble writing,” develop their language skills through conversation and their thinking skills through questioning. Through their own reading and attention to their children’s school activities, these parents demonstrate that they value learning. All this happens naturally in many homes. But “at risk” children most often come from disadvantaged undereducated homes, and they do not acquire the pre-literacy skills developed by more fortunate children. As a result, they begin their schooling behind, and may never catch up. (Darling, 1992)
But of the “politics of risk” educational discourses are thinkable because they co-existence among the larger body of risk discourses. Public education has been criticized since its inception, and for hundreds of years children in and out of school were singled out for having severe problems, but risk conspicuously advanced to a pejorative in education—as a category of understanding—during the same historical juncture (see Spink et al., 2007) that very public and significant intensifications of probabilistic predictions about the future were occurring in many domains. Efforts were being made in many fields, not the least of which was education, to transform uncertainty into calculated risks. It was those efforts, along with major environmental catastrophes, that caught Ulrich Beck’s critical eye.
The theories of risk
The natural sciences have always favored a theoretical approach to risk that defines and calculates, whereas the social sciences take a sociocultural paradigm that examines how risks are socially constructed. Put simply, science views risk as an objective entity whereas social science—including psychology—views the ways that institutional practices shape how we perceive risk. In general, social science—and especially sociology—have put forth three seminal theories of risk: (1) the risk society, as theorized by German sociologist Ulrich Beck and British sociologist Anthony Giddens; (2) the cultural approach, most commonly associated with Mary Douglas; and (3) the governmentality approach rooted in Michel Foucault’s brief writings on the topic.
The risk society
The sociological grand narrative of an emergent risk society links modernization (or “detraditionalization”) with a constellation of humanly produced risks that have led to radical transformations in social structures, thinking, and politics. Giddens characterizes this thinking as distinct property of modernity, having emerged as a consequence of the Enlightenment, the product of the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance. But it was Beck who was responsible for bringing the concept of risk into prominence, claiming that if risk itself is not objectively omnipresent, then the perception of risk intruding upon our lives and the things we value necessitates prophylactic action. Beck described two forms of danger. The first of these are “natural hazards” such as droughts, earthquakes, and flooding that were common to pre-industrial societies and unavoidable acts of nature. The second form of danger are those humanly created “manufactured risks” such as nuclear power and environmental pollution that are the effects of contemporary capitalist development in the realms of business, science, technology, and medicine. Natural hazards are localized, but manufactured risks are global, unpredictable, and resist regulation.
For Beck (1992), modernity was an age of industrial progress in a relatively stable, knowable and scientifically calculable world. Existence was based around distribution of wealth and class-based identities, with nation-states in control of their own territories, believing in social progress and that science produced beneficial knowledge. Modernity’s self-destructive tendencies forced an emergence of a second modernity in the latter period of the twentieth century organized around the production and distribution of global risks (Beck, 1999). Beck’s risk society is marked by the attempt to limit, manage and navigate through a series of hazards, anxieties, uncertainties and incalculable dangers posed by modernization. Individuals try to control their own riskiness by using expert knowledge, and faith in prediction models remains more or less intact. Nevertheless, the miserable failure of risk management at the Fukushima Daiichi Japanese nuclear plant inevitably chips away at the trust in expert systems, and certainly confirms Beck’s belief that modernity has become a problem for itself.
Giddens (1991) claims that the risks modern society faces outstrip the tools and technologies used to assess and tame them, producing a “runaway world” of “dislocation” and multiple uncertainties. Globalization disrupts traditional and regional bonds; solidarities of class, family, and nation give way to a multiplicity of lifestyles. New alliances form between old class opponents who express concern in the form of new social movements rather than traditional channels. Battles rage over the adverse consequences of everyday technologies and other scientific information. This major structural shift in society pushes individuals in a position where identity is their task. In Beck’s risk society individuals no longer rely on old social categories to provide meaning: “Life loses its self-evident quality; the social ‘instinct’ substitute which supports and guides it is caught up in the grinding mills of what needs to be thought out and decided” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 7).
Beck and Giddens characterize the risk society in terms of reflexivity, albeit with slightly different meanings. For Giddens (1991), the “reflexive project of the self” involves an increase in the level of awareness of risk and uncertainty, and the attempt to colonize the near and distant future leads to individual self-confrontation. Individuals, in a continuous process of self-monitoring and self-surveillance, become pushed to negotiate their place and identity. Reflexivity is the individual response to risk society’s uncertainty. 3 Beck shares many of Giddens’ concerns, but Beck emphasizes the notion of reflexive modernization as the overriding diagnostic category of our time. Reflexive modernity is the unforeseen consequences of modernity’s victory. Beck (1999) recognizes that knowledge plays an important role in reflexive modernity. However, since risk is the unintended consequences of industrial modernization, the “medium” of reflexive modernization is “reflexive unawareness.” Beck states, “unawareness can be known or not known, concrete or theoretical, unwillingness to know or inability to know” (Beck, 1999: 121).
Numerous critiques of the risk society have challenged much of Beck’s analysis on several grounds: the distinction between traditional and nontraditional societies; that globalization straight-jackets nation-states; that temporary risks are entirely new; that structural instead of neoliberal agendas force modernity; the supposed under-regulated form of risk management; the transition from a class society to a risk society; the social and class bias of the reflexive identity, are all points open to debate. Matten (2004: 372) suggests, “Beck’s ideas are more of a provocative and conceptual nature rather than empirical proof of certain social changes.” Undoubtedly, institutions organized in relation to fear, risk assessment and provision of security characterize Western culture. In his analysis of Beck, Wilkinson (2010: 47) argues that Beck’s interest in risk is shaped by his conviction that modern individuals, capitalist markets and nation-states must change their practices and “engage in a project of planetary survival for a common good of humanity across the globe.”
Cultural theory
A cultural theory approach to risk maintains that risk is always a social invention, the intersection of values, beliefs, and perceptions. British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s “risk culture” has influentially developed a connection between group membership and one’s world view, on the one hand, and the perception of risk on the other (Douglas, 1982). Prior to thinking about the materiality of risk, individuals encounter threats with prior beliefs and assumptions (Mythen, 2008), suggesting that, in contrast to Beck’s thesis, there are no actual increases in risks in contemporary times, nor are risks “out there” as an objective reality. People perceive risks; their worry about becoming victims of crime, or cancer, or nuclear fallout are expressions of personal views about the event’s (dis)utility as well as its probability (Garland, 2003). They are making emotionally laden value judgments as well as cognitive claims.
For Douglas, culturally constructed perceived risks are responses to problems within the social organization of a specific society and selected for how useful they are to the social system. What is perceived as dangerous, and how much risk to accept, is a function of one’s cultural adherence and social learning. Such a framework helps understand how those seemingly “irrational” choices are shaped by the social context (Tansey and O’Riordan, 1999), much like Durkheim’s analysis of suicide.
Culture theory draws on Durkheim’s interest in the role of social organizations controlling cognition and cultural categories. As each social organization is maintained by a cultural bias covering the whole cognitive and axiological content, it is also sustained by a particular set of risks (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983; Kermisch, 2012). More precisely, “the question is not which dangers are most alarming but which explanations of misfortune are likely to function most effectively” in the different kinds of social organizations—that is, which explanations of misfortune are the most effective in maintaining the social organization (Douglas, 1985: 59). Risks are selected to serve a function in the social system, whether tribal or twenty-first century preventive or moral panics. Risks reinforce a group’s social cohesion and distinctions between insiders and outsiders. What one society sees as a significant risk, another may disregard altogether. The process by which an object is considered “out of place” is fundamentally cultural. “There is no such thing as absolute dirt,” Douglas (1966: 2) famously said to Lord Chesterfield about the separation of purity and pollution, which she considered the most fundamental conceptual distinction in our thinking. “It is in the eye of the beholder.” In other words, things are not considered dirty in and of themselves, but because of where they stand in a system of categories, which can include people and non-human classes, animate or inanimate objects (Bialostok and Whitman, 2012).
Douglas’s account posits that risks are responses to problems within the social organization of a specific society. As social solidarity weakens, threats of disaster also serve as resources for building social order and defending social boundaries. Rejecting the universality of risk, or psychology as an explanatory view of risk, all modes of assessment are biased by the social assumptions they make, and risk perception is determined by society and culture. Societies reveal their deepest values in the priorities they set among physical and symbolic risks.
Governmentality
Risk was never central to Foucault’s project, but scholars have since broadened his governmentality thesis to accommodate the ways in which the language of risk is being used to shape and regulate economic, social, and personal activities. Risk provides a point of entry for an investigation of the post-social strategies for governing conduct (Rose, 1999: 98). Foucault asserted that in contrast to earlier periods of civilization when power was routinely expressed through the direct will of sovereign monarchs, contemporary governmentality operates as both a set of organized practices and a guiding rationale. It accords a crucial role to “action at a distance”—that is, to mechanisms that shape the conduct of diverse actors. Contemporary Western power filtrates through the matrix of governmental apparatuses within administrative structures and populations. Hacking’s Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability provide genealogical studies that—in contrast to historical sociologies—locate risk as part of a particular style of thinking born during the nineteenth century (Ewald, 1991). This style entailed new ways of understanding and acting upon misfortune in terms of risk (Rose, 1999). Risk thinking brought the future into the present and made it calculable, using statistical intelligibility “that the collective laws of large numbers seemed to provide” (Rose, 1999: 99).
Contemporary theorists of governmentality claim that the current language of risk has been widely adopted as a primary technique of government. Risk can be conceptualized as a form of disciplinary power, working through and upon the individual, constituting him/her as an object of knowledge. When behaviors and actions are labeled a “risk” then efforts are made to conduct people so that they in turn conduct themselves along a select course of action and toward a particular set of goals. Mitchell Dean (1999: 206) writes, echoing aspects of Douglas: There is no such thing as risk in reality. Risk is a way—or rather a set of different ways—of ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form … the significance of risk does not lie in risk in itself but with what risk gets attached to … risk [should be] analyzed as a component of assemblages of practices, techniques and rationalities concerned with how we govern … In the “governmental” account, risk is a calculative rationality that is tethered to assorted techniques of regulation, management, and shaping of human conduct in the service ends and with definite, but to some extent unforeseen, effects. While Beck and Douglas are inclined to explain the public prominence and cultural preoccupation with risk as a response to social processes of individualization, governmentality theorists identify the language of risk as actively involved in promoting the process. The new forms of subjectivity and types of social relationships that are coordinated through risk-based government are understood to be geared towards promoting the ethic of “individual responsibility” and “freedom of choice” across society.
Neoliberalism and risk
As a political rationality, welfare policies were structured to encourage national growth and well-being through the promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk (Rose and Miller, 1992). But the last decades of the twentieth century bore witness to an intense transformation in the ways rationality of welfare and, in turn, risk, were perceived. In the late 1970s, global trade shocked American companies out of a complacent prosperity. By the 1980s, many companies claimed they could no longer afford to offer the guarantees they once had (Hacker, 2008). With individualism on the rise, job security and health insurance benefits began to fade. Claims were made that by socializing the risks faced by individuals and households, the welfare state necessarily reduced incentives to pursue risky opportunities. Neoliberal reforms shifted risks from government and business to workers and consumers (Quiggin, 2007).
Neoliberalism began as a transnational political project aiming to remake the nexus of market, state, and citizenship (Wacquant, 2009). Heads and senior executives of transnational firms and multinational organizations, high-ranking politicians, and cultural-technical experts replaced Keynesian economics which favored the individual with market-friendly policies that stressed economic deregulation and welfare state devolution. “Thatcherism” in the United Kingdom, “Reaganism” in the United States, “economic rationalism” in Australia all more or less argued that reductions in welfare benefits would reduce welfare dependence.iv Accompanying neoliberalism’s economic agenda is a necessary cultural trope that provided a “vocabulary of motive” (Mills, 1940) built on the model of the entrepreneur to invade all spheres of personal and public life. As Gordon (1991: 41) puts it, the whole ensemble of individual life is to be structured as the pursuit of a range of different enterprises, a person’s relation to all his or her activities, and indeed to his or her self, is to be given the ethos and structure of the enterprise form. I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. “I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.” “I’m homeless, the government must house me.” They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. (Thatcher, 1987)
The advancement and translation of new social policies to workplaces and a multitude of other institutions such as schools shifted thinking to primarily value enterprise and activity as signs of psychological health and well-being. A moralization of risk enabled the rational (calculating) individual to become individually responsible and take prudent risk-taking measures rather than be a burden on others (O’Malley, 1996). Personal risk-management became an everyday affair. Technologies of consumption exacerbated anxieties about one’s own future and that of loved ones, encouraged us to subdue these risks and “tame fate” by purchasing insurance designed especially for us and our individual situation (Rose, 1999). With the duty to oneself to be well (Greco, 1993), protection against risk through investing in security has become part of the responsibilities of each active individual.
Risk continues to proliferate through private “security” markets that offer us burglar alarms, gated communities, monitors for sleeping children, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, and severe disaster home weather kits. Lifestyle maximization, coupled with a logic in which someone must be held to blame for any event that threatens an individual’s quality of life, generates a relentless imperative of risk management not simply in relation to contracting for insurance, but also through daily lifestyle management, choices about where to live and shop, what to eat and drink, stress management, exercise, and so forth (Rose, 1999). Children’s recreational lifestyles are managed through safety experts and architects who design playgrounds with wood chips and rubber matting, and climbing equipment to prevent entrapments, falls, and crashes. The bacterial infestation of seemingly injury proof indoor play areas is considered a safety risk. But then, so is the preoccupation of safety that “has stripped childhood of independence and risk taking…” (Rosin, 2014). None of this is necessarily wrong or bad, but it is useful to appreciate the infinite contexts in which risk thinking flourishes.
Education, risk, and neoliberalism
For the past three decades, education has been a key site in the neoliberalization of social policy but further, operated as a technology of neoliberal government (Peters, 2009). Linking neoliberal economics to education policy tends to reduce government’s economic inputs into costly and “risky” education (Webb and Gulson, 2011). Education at all levels has been reshaped “to become the arm of national economic policy, defined both as the problem (in failing to provide a multi-skilled flexible workforce) and the solution (by upgrading skills and creating a source of national export earnings)” (Blackmore, 2000: 134). The 1998 report “A nation still at risk” outlines a “risk management regime for the US education system” (Peters, 2011) that describes “ten break-through changes for the 21st century,” including the now familiar “national academic standards,” “standards-based assessment” and “tough accountability systems,” alongside “school choice,” charter schools, deregulated teacher force, differential teacher pay systems and “essential academic skills.” (Peters, 2011). Similarly, “Race to the top,” although originating in the United States, is part of a neoliberal thrust toward the commodification of all realms of experience (Lipman, 2011).
If the role of education was ever to develop political, social, and ethical citizens (Spring, 2013), the ascendancy of neoliberalism has produced a fundamental shift toward the unrepentant promotion of knowledge to contribute to economic productivity (Peters, 2011). As an ideological project, neoliberalism redefines what it means to teach and learn, and participate in schooling. Olssen and Peters (2011: 42) write, “The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of an emphasis on measured outputs.” Neoliberal mentalities have linked even progressive education so that risk taking is not only a pedagogical tool, but also a highly charged test of character (Bialostok, 2012; Bialostok and Kamberelis, 2010, 2012). Carter (2009: 230) makes a similar claim: There is no doubt that many of us would believe our promotion of learner-centered pedagogies as a best practice within the humanist and progressive tradition of education rather than as culturally insensitive fodder for the global knowledge economy. But we need to recognize that there is more to it, and that neoliberal global discourses on education and knowledge economy have co-opted humanistic vision of active learning within democratic and collaborative environments to its own purposes of human capital development.
This issue of Policy Futures in Education was completed more than a year prior to the sudden and unexpected death of Ulrich Beck. I was a doctoral student when a colleague enthusiastically talked about Beck's risk society. Enmeshed in my own dissertation, I remained marginally interested. Five years of subsequent reading shifted my entire research agenda. While my own risk paradigm aligns more closely with neo-Foucauldian perspectives, I owe much of my career to Beck's thinking. In order to properly summarize Beck's theory in the introduction to Education and the Risk Society (Bialostok, Whitman, and Bradley, 2012), I poured over his ouvre, reveling at his brilliance, creativity, and social passion. How many scholars actually change the way we think about the world, and introduce language that we simply cannot write without?
With this in mind we gratefully dedicate this special issue to Ulrick Bech.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.