Philosophy of education,dialogue and academic life in Aotearoa-New Zealand

Abstract

This collaborative paper reflects on academic life in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Drawing on our different personal histories, we examine the dominant influence of neoliberal ideas in shaping tertiary education reform, explore the importance of identity and worldview in structuring academic experience, and discuss the role of philosophy of education in the contemporary university.

Introduction

This paper is the product of collaboration between two scholars interested in the philosophy of education, and its role in the contemporary academy. We (Georgina and Peter) work across a number of boundaries – geography, gender, ethnicity, research background, and academic seniority – all of which impact on our thinking about the challenges of academic life today, and possibilities for the future. Our first paper (Roberts and Stewart, 2014) problematised contemporary discourses of academic rationality that have their roots in a narrowly economistic construction of possibilities for human knowing and being. In this second paper, we draw upon a range of personal experiences to portray the impact of neoliberal discourses on life in the university, affirm the value of intercultural dialogue, and explore the potential of philosophy of education in creating possible alternative academic futures.

Neoliberal ideas have been dominant in shaping reforms in the tertiary sector over the last two decades or more. The broad shifts have been from a focus on structural and economic changes in the 1984–1990 period, to the corporatisation and marketisation of key social policy domains (including education) from 1990 to 1999, to the so-called ‘Third Way’ era of 1999–2008, and thereafter to the current phase of reform under a National government. Neoliberalism has shown itself to be a malleable, adaptable ideology, capable of surviving and indeed flourishing under both centre-left and centre-right governments (see further, Harvey, 2005). The Aotearoa in New Zealand experience demonstrates that we are better to speak of multiple neoliberalisms, each with their own distinctive features, but with some underlying ideas in common.

In our previous paper, our principal concern was with the policy changes themselves, the ideas implied by them, and the possibility of alternative ways of viewing tertiary education by incorporating elements of Taoism and Māori philosophy. We want to build on that discussion here, but with a more direct focus on what it means to live in the academy, particularly as philosophers of education, in a neoliberal world. We employ structured dialogue both as a way of doing philosophy collaboratively, and in the form of the article, with a section below attributed to each author. Dialogue implies different perspectives, in which identity and ethos matter (Roth, 2007). Dialogue helps us keep in play the productive tension created by the differences between us and the various interests we represent. In the next section, Peter provides a personal commentary on changes he has seen and experienced in the university.

Academic life in neoliberal times

Peter: When I took up my first academic position as a Junior Lecturer at the University of Waikato in February 1988, universities in Aotearoa, New Zealand were on the cusp of a new era in their development. Sweeping changes to economic policy had already been introduced, led by Roger Douglas as Minister of Finance in the fourth Labour government, but universities to that point had been left largely untouched. The University Grants Committee played an important buffering role between universities and government, and institutions exercised considerable autonomy over their academic affairs. The ethos of competition was by no means completely absent from universities at the time, but it was far less prominent than it is now. As I recall, institutions devoted relatively little money and energy to marketing themselves, and the ‘branding’ culture that is now taken for granted was largely absent.

The Hawke Report (Department of Education, 1988) and the Learning for Life policy documents that followed (Department of Education, 1989a, 1989b) provided the first hints of what was to come in the decade ahead, with some notable changes in the language and substance of tertiary education policy. The very notion of speaking of ‘tertiary education policy’, now the norm when discussing the post-school sector, was comparatively novel. The Hawke Report referred to ‘Post Compulsory Education and Training’, reflecting a move toward a more ‘seamless’ approach and the breaking down of perceived differences and barriers between universities, polytechnics and other tertiary institutions: one recommendation noted ‘distinctions between education and training should be avoided’ (p. 8). The ‘Introduction to the Report’ set the tone for what was to follow, with reference to becoming ‘more responsive to clients’, seeking both ‘efficiency and equity’ in public sector activities, and achieving ‘the right mixture of devolution and accountability, and the right balance of local initiative and national uniformity’ (Department of Education, 1988: 4–5).

As we moved into the 1990s, with the newly elected National government intent on radical reform in the major social policy areas (health, education and welfare), life in Aotearoa universities started to change quite dramatically. All critical education policy analysts are familiar with the idea of ‘performativity’ (Lyotard, 1984), but the way this becomes built into academic life differs from one institution to another. One element of performativity in practice was the increasing number of compliance measures put in place through the first half of the 1990s: the growing number of forms to be completed, boxes to be ticked, and measurements that had to be taken to ensure that we were doing our jobs. Those of us occupying university positions at the time were witnesses to an important mismatch between the theory of neoliberalism and its practical application in institutional contexts. The logic of performativity demanded improvements in efficiency, and neoliberals were committed to the idea of leaner bureaucracies, but in practice these goals were heavily compromised. The university became a more bureaucratic institution in the 1990s than it had ever been before, and ‘efficiency’ gains were patchy and inconsistent. Our academic lives were dominated not just by teaching and research but by ‘busy work’ of all kinds, and as we moved through that decade this became more and more oppressive. It not only ate into the time that could be spent on other tasks but also, I think, gradually changed the way we thought about ourselves as academics (Peters and Marshall, 1996; Peters and Roberts, 1999).

The ontological shift to which I am referring here can perhaps best be explained by the differences between a culture of suspicion and accountability, and one of trust and responsibility. The 1990s cemented the view that academics could not quite be trusted. Accountability became intimately linked with the broader process of increasing surveillance over everyday lives. Academics, it was assumed, needed to be monitored and managed. Over time, subtly but surely, academics began ‘watching themselves’; all that was needed was a set of procedures to periodically check that their own internal monitoring was consistent with the systems and procedures of the institution. We did not need to know anything about Foucault’s notion of governmentality to sense that a fundamental process of transformation was underway here. Systems of accountability rely on procedures and rules, and hierarchies of institutional power. Responsibility emerges more organically; it is connected with a sense of commitment. Accountability denies the messiness of human relations; responsibility must grapple with those complexities. In being responsible we affirm ourselves as ethical beings, not merely as obedient technicians or competent professionals. Accountability positions our sense of obligation in a formal structure, where what we do is governed by what is, in one way or another, prescribed for us by others. Responsibility, as the partner of trust, is exemplified not just by what is visible and public but also by what we do when no one else is aware of our actions. Responsibility can be shared, and our sense of why we wish to be responsible will also be developed in a social context where our views are shaped by others. But responsibility ultimately must come from within. As we exercise responsibility, we will often find ourselves in uncomfortable positions: survival in the contemporary academy almost always involves compromises of some kind. But it is precisely when living in an academic environment built on the principles of trust and responsibility that the question of what compromises are acceptable can best be considered and debated. (For a range of views on accountability, see Ching, 2012; Hoecht, 2006; Huisman and Currie, 2004; Suspitsyna, 2010; Trow, 1996; Vidovich and Slee, 2001.)

With the transition to a Labour-led government in 1999, the compromises and tensions of academic life were played out on a larger policy canvas. There was at first a sense of considerable hope as the new government quickly established a Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (TEAC) comprising, among others, several senior academics with experience and expertise directly relevant to the tertiary education sector. This was in marked contrast with the 1990s, with National’s Tertiary Education Review process (Ministry of Education, 1997, 1998) being driven largely by officials. The four reports produced by the TEAC group (Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c) were, by comparison with the Tertiary Education Review documents, comprehensive, carefully structured, and better informed by research, with appropriate attention to international trends in the sector. Gone was the mantra of choice, choice and more choice; in its place was the notion of tertiary education contributing to Aotearoa’s growth as a ‘knowledge society and economy’ (Ministry of Education, 2002, 2006). This central focus on knowledge was accompanied by a commitment to creating a ‘shared vision’ for tertiary education, with a significant ‘steering’ role for the government. Within a few years, the ‘more market’ 1990s had been replaced by the ‘Third Way’ approach to tertiary education that was intended to be both socially just and in step with the economic realities of the 21st century.

Adapted from the policy framework employed by Tony Blair and his ‘New Labour’ government in Britain, Aotearoa’s version of Third Way politics exemplified the contradictions that were already being experienced by individual academics. On the one hand, there was a commitment to greater inclusiveness in tertiary education policy and a recognition that the market did not have all the answers. On the other hand, some of the fundamental principles of the 1990s’ reforms in the sector were retained and in fact pushed in new directions. With initiatives such as the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), for example, competition within and between universities intensified. ‘Knowledge’ became, more than ever, a commodity and was traded aggressively, both within and beyond Aotearoa. The Third Way was supposed to be neither the ‘Old Left’ of the past, nor the ‘New Right’ of more recent times (cf. Giddens, 1998, 2000). But the theoretical negotiation of a positive marriage between aspects of globalisation and some of the key tenets of social democracy was found wanting in practice. As a political doctrine, the Third Way, in Aotearoa as in Britain, arguably became simply another version of neoliberalism: neoliberalism with a ‘softer’ face (Codd, 2002; Roberts and Peters, 2008).

Under the first two terms of the National government elected in 2008, there has been a return to a more nakedly neoliberal agenda in tertiary education. There has been a narrowing of focus, with priority being given to the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). There has been a strong push to make tertiary education more ‘relevant’ to the demands of employers and industry. This thinking has been applied in relation to both research and teaching. The arts and humanities have been systematically devalued, and the last two Tertiary Education Strategy documents have comparatively little to say about the social benefits of tertiary education (Ministry of Education, 2009; New Zealand Government, 2014). The central neoliberal principle of individuals being driven by self-interest is once more to the fore, and the concept of tertiary education serving the ‘public good’ is now largely absent from contemporary policy discourse. The drive to make tertiary education institutions ever more ‘efficient’, and to maximise economic returns on the government’s investment in the sector, has been a constant refrain. The world economic crisis has been used to justify expecting institutions to do more with less (Ministry of Education, 2009). More attention than ever before has been paid to ‘performance’, and international economic competitiveness is now the key goal for all reform in the sector.

What bearing do these changes have on the daily lives of academics? It is important not to overstate or misconstrue the role of policy in shaping the thoughts and actions of individual teachers and researchers. Ministers have sometimes indicated quite openly that they will, if necessary, direct institutions in what should be taught. In 2012, for example, Steven Joyce, a senior minister in the National government, indicated that he would be ‘more than willing’ to be ‘more directive’ with the University of Auckland to ensure the institution would ‘respond to what the market wants’. What was needed, he asserted, was more students in Engineering, and he would, if need be, ‘tell them [the University of Auckland] how many they should enrol for each department’ (Collins, 2012). But even under such unusually intrusive conditions, spaces for ‘subversive’ academic activity remain. No minister can determine, in detail, how academics teach: how they prepare; how they interpret, apply, critique and convey ideas; how they interact with students. Similarly, no matter how oppressive a suite of managerialist practices may be in a given institution, there is often some scope to ‘push back’ against the demands placed upon us. Resistance is often most effective when it is subtle, perhaps barely noticed by those wedded to a neoliberal view of the world. Yet, that same subtlety can also apply to the influence of neoliberal ideas on us. We may not notice it at the time, but our language can begin to alter. Our conceptions of why we engage in key activities can change, as can our relations with others. The culture of a tertiary education environment can shift, and often dramatically so, with few outward signals that this has occurred.

A good example is in the way the PBRF has shaped research and researchers. Performance-based research funding schemes have had a significant impact on academic life not just in Aotearoa, but also in Australia and the United Kingdom, among other places (compare, Bence and Oppenheim, 2005; Elton, 2000; Seddon et al., 2012; Smith and Jesson, 2005; Yokoyama, 2006). The intensification of a competitive ethos engendered by the PBRF has already been noted, but also important is the marked shift toward a new instrumentalism in research. The PBRF may offer a relatively expansive interpretation of what ‘outputs’ can be included as part of an evidence portfolio, but the point is that the language of outputs is itself restrictive. If something is to count – to matter – in the PBRF, it must be measurable. Under the PBRF, academics end up reducing their activities as researchers to the limits imposed by itemised lists, denying the complexity, the messiness, the richness of lived research cultures. Management of the PBRF requires a substantial associated bureaucratic apparatus in the Tertiary Education Commission, together with specialist advisors and the like in universities. Few academics would deny the need to periodically assess their work as researchers; after all, this is partly what they are paid from the public purse to do. But the PBRF has become a relentless machine, encouraging academics always to ask themselves what, in committing to a particular research task, it is ‘worth’ in terms of performance-based research funding. We end up focusing on performance, not on knowledge or research relationships or the integration of research with teaching. In the process, academics themselves become more machine-like in their activities, under constant pressure to produce more outputs, or to enhance the ‘quality’ of their outputs. The PBRF acts as an impediment to the slow, reflective work that is often necessary for the development of a worthwhile research programme. It forces us all into the logic of fixed, regular cycles of performance measurement. Reading and dialogue, important elements of any well-lived research life, end up becoming superfluous to requirements. The PBRF pits one university against another, in a manner that seems bizarre for such a small country, and it fosters both individualism and conformity. With two full rounds and a partial round of the quality evaluation exercise having now been completed, the PBRF tells us little that we did not already know. It is an expensive, time-consuming exercise that is experienced by many academics as utterly dehumanising. (See further, Roberts, 2013.)

The discussion thus far has addressed aspects of academic experience in a neoliberal world but it has done so in a rather ‘general’ way. In the remaining sections of the paper, we focus on two examples of more specific forms of experience. First, Georgina continues with a personal commentary and reflection on some of the challenges of working in the university for a Māori academic. Second, we both consider how philosophers of education have fared under neoliberalism and what the future might hold for our field.

A Māori academic: worldviews, identities and university life

Georgina: As a Māori lecturer working in my tribal area, I feel connected to, and responsible for, the students whom I teach: many are second-chance learners and/or first-in-family university students, who often enrol under special conditions and achieve at marginal levels. Crucially, completing a teaching degree is transformative for the lives and families of such students, allowing the students to build stable, relatively well-paid careers as platforms for financial security. Although over 50, I am in my first five years teaching in a large university, but based at a small satellite campus focused on initial teacher education, in a region with a high Māori population. As a research-active academic at a satellite campus, I experience difficulties in finding out about the university work environment, and building an academic career. These difficulties intensify my interest in understanding the nature of academic life, even as it undergoes rapid and wide-ranging changes, with staff reductions increasing anxiety about the future of our positions, and open-access academic publishing raising doubts about the feasibility of our future research publications, not to mention the current PBRF system, to name two current concerns.

Working in isolation from colleagues in my own institution as well as others, I am particularly mindful of impediments to communication with other academics. Today technology provides us with practically unlimited contact with others: this is taken for granted, and a central plank of neoliberalism and globalisation. Email has become the primary means by which we communicate with our academic colleagues, as well as those in the administration and support systems of our institutions – internally, nationally and globally. Email has certainly made communication easier than ever before. Whether or not the ease and ubiquity of email has improved the standard of communication, however, is much more in doubt. The invariable use of email has ethical implications, over and above its logistical and practical impacts. Academics routinely receive 50 or more emails per day, which take considerable time to read and process. Many such messages are completely irrelevant, such as bulk postings about, for example, the status of buildings unknown to us. It is also unfortunately common to receive long, involved email messages on matters that may be more effectively dealt with by telephone or personal conversation – even when sender and receiver work in close proximity to each other. Over-reliance on email carries a number of risks; for example, sensitive information is easily sent to unintended recipients, and it is easy to miss vital information transmitted only by email. The contemporary university runs on email, and while there are grounds for saying this is inevitable, how any technology is put to use inevitably reflects how we understand ourselves as individuals and as institutions. The dominance of email in the contemporary university is typical of neoliberalism and its perverse effects on human lives: more information, less understanding; more communication, less dialogue.

As a relative newcomer, it helps me to make sense of academic life by comparing it with secondary teaching. In the secondary school sector, collegiality among teachers is vital. Within the school, collegiality plays an important role in mentoring new teachers, as well as supporting each other daily to manage the myriad and sometimes severe challenges presented by working with large numbers of teenagers. Collegiality between teachers in different secondary schools is the basis of professional networks, including subject associations, which maintain standards of best practice. Collegiality between Māori teachers is of a higher order: united by a shared perspective, much can be assumed, without need for discussion. But space for collegiality between secondary teachers has been under severe threat in recent decades, caused in large part by the introduction of market ideas under the neoliberal influence on educational policy, as described in the above section. For university academics, collegiality plays out differently at some levels of practice, but there are parallels in terms of professional networks. Collegiality in the university at large can be thought of as an intellectual solidarity that unites academics from different traditions. Regardless of their differences, as with teachers, Māori academics share an extra level of collegiality – recognition of a distinctive perspective on work and life, which acts as a uniting tradition or identity.

A Māori identity provides another source of traditions – besides those of the West – on which to draw for ethical and philosophical insight and strength in these troubled times. I view Māori philosophy as a liminal domain, between te ao Māori (the traditional Māori world) and the contemporary globalised milieu. Philosophical liminality has been called the ‘leading edge’ of culture, giving humanity openness to the future (Moody-Adams, 1997). This liminality is part of the epistemological benefit of indigeneity, connected to ethical and cognitive advantages that accrue to bilingualism and biculturalism: the positive pole of the cultural binary that underpins the national identity of Aotearoa (Bell, 2004; Salmond, 1985).

Only if there is ‘a’ worldview is there the possibility of multiple worldviews, which is another way of expressing epistemological diversity (Kearney, 1984). The worldview concept may rest in part on a particular balance between the two great modes of human thinking, which can be labelled as ‘measurement’ and ‘metaphor’ (Stewart, 2014a). Indigenous and Western worldviews do not equate to one or other of these two modes of thought: rather, each worldview is characterised by a particular relationship and balance between the two modes. This idea helps in considering today’s intellectual life, as described above, where it is clear that the ‘measurement’ mode of thinking is becoming increasingly dominant, which is one way to understand the promotion of the STEM subjects, and the concomitant relegation of the humanities. The exact details of the models we use are less important than the notion of Māori identity underpinned by Māori worldviews. What counts for intercultural dialogue is openness to another tradition that has, in Pākehā terms, always been here, and is still here.

My interest in the worldview idea goes beyond a political statement of identity: the claim to a right and space to exist. A Māori philosophy of education ventures to describe both worldviews in terms that are mutually intelligible. Clarifying the importance of logic in both modes of thought is one example of this effort. From a Māori perspective, a mind–body dualism is embedded in the Western tradition, but alien to indigenous traditions, including our own. Yet binaries seem to constitute a basic cognitive strategy, which humans use to organise our ideas, and develop our intellectual and social skills. Calls to ‘overcome the dualities’ are common, but often seem to confuse poor use of binaries (such as racism, sexism, the ‘bell curve’ idea, the history of IQ testing, etc.) with being the fault of binaries themselves (Gould, 1997). Since binaries are so prevalent in Māori education research, it seems reasonable to try to adopt a positive attitude toward them.

Te ao Māori – the traditional Māori worldview – offers an alternative form of binary in its model of the cosmos, described by Anne Salmond (1978) as structured by a series of cosmic/symbolic dipoles, or pou, including tapu/noa, ao/pō, ora/mate, etc. The pae, which is the zone of human life and moral agency, sits at the centre of each pou. Mana tangata was the ability to keep these binaries in a state of balance, or utu, through appeasing the gods, ngā atua Māori. This model provides an alternative cognitive strategy for creating binaries, by which the individual of the culture may learn to make judgements: a strategy that does not split the individual subject into two parts, then pit those parts against each other, as does the mind–body dualism of Western or Enlightenment thinking (these labels are used as identity names, and are therefore capitalised). It seems likely that such ideas form the detailed content of the characteristics of holism associated with indigenous traditions such as Māori (Stewart, 2014b).

Inherent in the idea of Māori philosophy is the need to re-examine the entire history and philosophy of education from a Māori point of view (an ‘immanent critique’ – see e.g. Young, 1989). This is a large undertaking that will take time and collective effort, yet one that remains politically contested; always vulnerable to suppression of one form or another, including from within. In addition to older reasons, this vulnerability arises in part because Māori educational initiatives have benefited from ‘choice theory’ under neoliberalism, which has supported the growth of the Māori-medium sub-sector (as well as other school types based on religion, language or ethnicity). These benefits are paradoxical, since the central tenets of neoliberalism stand in flagrant opposition to the ethos of te ao Māori. Such paradoxes seem inherent within Māori academic life: perhaps paradox unavoidably accompanies identity binaries.

A Māori identity, then, provides an alternative ethos to that of neoliberalism, yet is one in which the ground is permanently vulnerable to being taken over by the direct or indirect effects of neoliberal policies. Māori and neoliberalism provide different worldviews on which we can construct an academic identity, although both will inevitably be hybridised – with each other, and with other forms of Western and non-Western academic identity. A Māori academic is inevitably concerned with critiquing the status quo, and since a meaningful critique requires an adequate understanding of its target, there is a natural (although not always easy) alliance between Māori academics and critical Western scholars – with Māori academics also claiming the latter label for ourselves, since few of us claim to be ‘pure’ Māori. Alliances between scholars of divergent academic identities are discussed further in the next section.

Philosophy of education, dialogue and university futures

The previous sections examined the influence of neoliberal ideas on academic life, considered from different perspectives, Western and Māori. What are the implications of these influences for philosophy of education? The divisions between philosophy of education and other domains of enquiry, including the other ‘disciplinary’ areas in educational studies – history, sociology and psychology – have never been rigidly defined. But lines between these bodies of scholarly work have perhaps become even more blurred than ever over the last quarter of a century. In this section, we explore what philosophy of education has to offer, and its future prospects in the university generally, in the light of the observations made above.

Philosophy of education occupies an ambivalent position in the contemporary academic world (Roberts, 2015). On the one hand, our field has suffered greatly under neoliberalism. In most faculties and colleges of education, philosophy of education, along with other ‘disciplinary’ areas of educational study, has been marginalised. Within Aotearoa, when those recognised as philosophers of education leave their institutions, they are often not replaced, and few university positions are being advertised specifically in philosophy of education. Those who regard themselves at heart as philosophers of education must increasingly find their way into university employment via positions advertised in other areas (e.g. Māori education, early childhood education, technology education, and so on). Teacher education programmes seldom devote space to the philosophical study of education, with many regarding it as unnecessary in an already crowded curriculum. The reduction of initial teacher education degrees from four years to three under ‘market pressures’ in the late 1990s has served only to exacerbate the already evident tendency to diminish the value of philosophy of education. Philosophy of education seems, in some respects, to be out of step with the times.

At the same time, philosophy of education has continued to grow and develop as a field, despite the continuing influence of neoliberal and instrumentalist thinking on institutional life. Over the last decade, organisations such as the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) have gone from strength to strength. PESA’s journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, is flourishing (helped in no small part by the tremendous intellectual energy of the Executive Editor, Michael A Peters). The membership of PESA has grown substantially, both in terms of the number of people who have joined, and the countries from which they have come. The increasing diversity in philosophical traditions, themes and perspectives exhibited in PESA conferences over recent years has contributed to a richer, more complex conversation and has advanced our field in important new ways. PESA is not alone among philosophy of education organisations in experiencing these contradictory fortunes: the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) has also enjoyed strong interest in its annual conference, at the same time as the number of positions in philosophy of education in the United Kingdom has declined.

With the non-replacement of retiring or departing colleagues, the administrative, teaching and supervision loads for those who remain have increased markedly. An integrated programme of study in philosophy of education, with courses at each level in the university system, is now a rarity. This does not mean that philosophy of education is no longer taught, but where it does appear it is often in other guises, within courses of study in curriculum, policy, pedagogy, and so on. This arrangement can have advantages, allowing students to gain a deeper understanding of their specialist area through studying selected thinkers from the philosophy of education. But the downside of such a situation must not be underestimated. Philosophy of education, when considered no longer ‘relevant’ in a neoliberal world, is taught on a ‘hit and miss’ basis. There is less certainty and continuity in the development of philosophical knowledge in education across the different stages of study. As a result, students can enter courses at master’s level with little grasp of the history of philosophy of education as a field of enquiry. Ideas and theoretical orientations that are currently fashionable can be embraced without a strong sense of the role of earlier traditions in allowing new bodies of work to gain currency. For example, students will sometimes read work, and only read work, that positions itself against analytic philosophy of education, while knowing very little about that which is being critiqued. This is an example of how reducing the emphasis on philosophy of education works against effective critique of the status quo, as noted in the previous section.

The troubling of earlier traditions has always been a feature of philosophical enquiry in education. There has, of course, never been a single method or theoretical orientation that has prevailed among philosophers of education, but some broad trends can be identified. In the 1960s and 1970s detailed analysis of key concepts such as ‘education’ and ‘indoctrination’ was common. In the 1980s, Marxist, feminist and indigenous critiques of analytic philosophy gained momentum, and ‘post’ discourses (post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, and so on) began to assert themselves. Through the 1990s and into the 21st century, the range of perspectives making their presence felt in philosophy of education has increased significantly. For some, the lack of a ‘single perspective on the philosophy of education’ (Wilson, 2003: 280) is seen as cause for concern; another way to look at such diversity, however, is to see it as a sign of a field in good intellectual health (Roberts, 2015).

Philosophers of education have contributed a great deal already to the critique of developments in social and economic policy within and beyond Aotearoa, and there is no end in sight for this task. Philosophers of education are, needless to say, not alone in having much to offer here, and finding kindred spirits in other fields, not just within education but also elsewhere – sociology, politics, anthropology, cultural studies, and so on – is important in building an academic culture where constructive critique cannot be ignored. There is no ‘pure’ space in the academy, free of the influence of neoliberal ideas. As philosophers of education, we cannot avoid becoming, in some respects, neoliberal academic subjects. To continue to hold a university position at all demands compliance with regimes of performativity and accountability. And while the difficulty of analysing changes while swept up in them should not be underestimated, neither should the capacity for unsettling ourselves and others through critical reflection, dialogue and social action.

Dialogue is fundamental in human communication, but becomes acutely important in a globalised world, characterised by inter-disciplinarity and interculturalism (Besley and Peters, 2012). To some, including the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and the Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, dialogue is a key part of what makes us human (Freire, 1972; Hvolbek, 2013; Shields, 2007). In this paper, dialogue is understood not merely as a synonym for conversation, but as ethical engagement with another moral agent. This is a philosophical concept of dialogue, which assumes difference, and celebrates the productivity of working across differences (Jones and Jenkins, 2008). Thought of in this way, dialogue demands our ethical response to, and responsibility for, our interlocutor (Hoskins, 2012). This deeper concept of dialogue supports a notion of academic identity based on being interested in ideas, and implies mutual exchanges that are central in intellectual friendships, as the basis for academic kinship and community (Lazaroiu, 2014). We can capitalise on the affordances of digital communications for expanded dialogical opportunities, such as using email and Skype to build and maintain academic collaborations and friendships across geographical, institutional and other boundaries.

Conclusion

To be a philosopher of education in neoliberal times is no easy task, and in examining what the future holds for our field, it is important to be as honest as possible about the realities of daily working life. Regardless of differences in theoretical orientation, philosophers of education in Aotearoa have been largely united in their disquiet over the neoliberal restructuring of universities. Here we can see the value of a certain kind of intellectual solidarity, and an ongoing task for philosophy of education. We do not need to see ourselves as analytic philosophers of education to appreciate the importance of analysis – not just of concepts but also of policies and practices. Irrespective of the perspective one brings to bear in addressing educational questions, the ability to deconstruct ideas, and to place them in their broader intellectual contexts, is vital.

Neoliberalism can be justifiably considered as a worldview, with an underlying ontology, epistemology and ethos. The economistic philosophy underpinning neoliberalism centres on two key ideas about the nature of human knowing and being. The first key idea is that knowledge is a private good, the worth of which can be measured in economic terms; the second is that human beings are fundamentally in competition with each other at all levels, both individually and collectively. Understood in these terms, it is clear that collegiality among academics works as a buffer against the incursion of neoliberal ideas into our professional lives. Academic collegiality runs counter to the competitive ethos of the contemporary university. A sense of shared purpose in working together to advance and strengthen critique against the commodification of knowledge is antithetical to the logic of the funding policy that pays our salaries.

Philosophy of education often attracts scholars who are critical of the status quo, creating a potential shared space for both Māori and non-Māori academics. Philosophy of education is capable of shifting the grounds of debate in response to the changes in the academic landscape. Like neoliberalism and Māori culture, philosophy of education is in this sense a pragmatic tradition. Its contribution to the academy of the future will rely heavily on a commitment to difference, interculturalism and dialogue. Dialogue is holistic and politicised, involving the emotions as well as the intellect. Dialogue is inclusive: it speaks back to the individualism that pervades the contemporary neoliberal academy. This simple yet profound concept of dialogue therefore encapsulates the essence of education, of collegiality, and a critical, philosophical way of life in the academy.