The future of Policy Futures in Education

It is a very humbling and exciting experience for any scholar to become Editor-in-Chief of a journal that has reached its 14th volume and boasts eight published issues per year, and to be part of and supported by the major publishing house – SAGE. In the past 13 volumes, this journal has flourished and gone from strength to strength under the editorship of Michael A. Peters. It is our sincere hope that with the continuous support of the editorial board and associate editors, Policy Futures in Education will continue to challenge contemporary conditions in education and academia, and make an important contribution to policy research.

What has become clear in the past 13 volumes of this journal is that policies govern our being in this world. They remain a defining set of agreed principles by governing bodies that guide our decision-making to achieve particular outcomes that are supposed to better our existence and conditions in this world. In the education sector these policies fulfil particular intentions, and are performed by the governing bodies at local, national and international levels. Striving for change and the greater good, policies also attract much criticism and interest from various parties. In other words, policies are important to public institutions, to the private sector, as well as to individuals. The education sector is permeated with policies that govern both institutions and subjects. There is a strong connection, perhaps stronger than just in an etymological sense, between policy and the words polis, police and politics. Regulations and surveillance have impacted the way that they are resisted by different groups, as well as how they allow for performances in productive spaces, and grant particular rights or programmes. Policies guide us to particular desired outcomes.

In this sense, in this editorial I would like to argue the point of multiple ways of thinking and interrogating the concerns around policy through the notion of power in relation to policy, from both the well-known work of Foucault, and the less well-known work of Havel. Foucault’s (1980) work on power and its relationship with institutions are well used in policy studies. The Foucauldian question of ‘how’ can lead research and critique of the contemporary conditions, and it could guide the examination of techniques and instruments that are indispensable to the way government agencies conduct themselves in policy developments. Foucault has gifted us the idea that the traditional model of a juridical power construct claims that power belongs to someone, as it can be possessed by a class, people or an institution (Lemke, 2002). Within this concept someone or an institution at the top of the hierarchy possesses the power, which is subsequently forced and distributed towards the bottom. Such a distribution of power is therefore punitive, dark, repressive, and usually takes the form of orders and pressure. Foucault (1991) argues that historically the way power was utilised, for example in prisons, or in our case in education, was to punish prisoners and to discipline bodies. He rejects this traditional model of power of the individual and group, and introduces it in a new form. Foucault argues for a disciplinary type of power, where power is exercised, and not possessed by any particular group or institution. Foucault’s key point was that power is not only repressive, but productive in nature, and that power produces knowledge and subjectivities. The understanding of this productive nature of power then means that power cannot be studied on its own. Power thus needs to be analysed as linked to institutions, political contexts, ideologies and the government, as the mechanisms of ‘visibility’ (Arac, 1994). The aim is thus to allow policy to be examined in particular ways. However, this is not the only way to approach the study of policy. Over the years, Foucauldian studies of policy have attracted much interest, but also resistance, and there are many ways to research policy. As this journal has demonstrated over the past 13 years, many of these ways involve examinations of the way power, through its repressive and productive forces, shapes the context within which policies are created and enacted.

Havel’s thinking around power relations can further us to think around and analyse Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power. Havel based his thinking in writing about the communist system in former Czechoslovakia, or what he referred to as ‘the post-totalitarian system’. Havel’s (1985) concern is with a shift within the power relations of post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, where he distinguished its nature from how power operated in a traditional dictatorship. Power in the post-totalitarian society was still central to the executive committee of the Communist Party, but the way it operated in the public and private domain had changed. It meant that if citizens wanted to live a comfortable life without repercussions they had to accept living within a lie and to publicly conform with the system and its requirements (Havel, 1989). Unlike in the totalitarian system, citizens’ private lives remained undisturbed by the system as long as the private matters did not cross into the public sphere. So the power relations in the post-totalitarian system were bound by a social contract under which, if citizens supported the prescribed rules and publicly demonstrated their support of the regime, ideology and the leading party, there would be no repression towards them, and their private lives would remain untouched. And so citizens publicly declared their support for the regime, for example, with marches down the main square in May Day parades with their teachers, holding pro-regime banners, and waving and cheering to the members of the Communist Party standing on the stage above. This was a Havelian take on the performance of policy.

Havel’s work on power in Power of the Powerless was written in the late 1970s, but circulated only as a samizdat publication until it was published in the West in 1985. Havel’s texts remained unpublished in Czechoslovakia, as he belonged to the group of ‘forbidden’ writers whose work existed only in the form of samizdats – the underground, illegal, unofficial publications that were self-made, copied and distributed. Being in possession of or circulating samizdat publications was a dangerous act that could result in detention or even imprisonment. Havel’s text targets the post-totalitarian context, a ‘depressing novelty’ (Keane, 1985: 8), where no person is without guilt, and all citizens are subjected to complex and permanent forms of surveillance and self-surveillance. Keane (1985), a Havel scholar and biographer, further notes that ‘public opposition of any kind is always regarded by the State authorities as seditious, which is also why “dissidents” are to be found not only amongst the intellectuals, but also in every café, street queue, factory and church’ (p.8). Havel’s work thus acknowledges dissidents, those who allow their personal beliefs and practices to cross from the private to the public realm, as subjects within a victim/supporter framework. Perhaps to think about Havel’s perception of such citizens might also include the subjectivity of rebel, as I have argued elsewhere (Tesar, 2014).

Havel’s analysis of the post-totalitarian context touches upon every aspect of human life within the system, including politics, censorship, education and childhoods. He analyses the shift in power relations and the way the post-totalitarian mechanisms operate in a ‘fresh and challenging way’ (Lukes, 1985: 11). These mechanisms interact within more anonymous, selective and calculated power relations than in the totalitarian system in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s. Keane (1985) notes that Havel identifies the main difference between the totalitarian and post-totalitarian system in that:

… no longer do these regimes strive to control fully the bodies and souls of their subjects, to embrace everything in depth, to bring everyone together so as to produce a single will, crystallized in the Caesarist leader. Contemporary totalitarianism demands precisely the opposite of its populations: passivity, opportunism, mediocrity, cynicism, an exclusive concern with cultivating such ‘private’ concerns as career and family life. The regime of ‘real socialism’ is content with the regulation and control of apparent behaviour; so long as its subjects conform and only disagree silently, they are probably safe. (p.8)

Living in such a system encourages, and even forces, the withdrawal from the public sphere into the private spaces of life. Czech dissident and thinker Benda (1991) imagines that these private spaces should create ‘parallel polis’, which provide alternative experiences for citizens. Benda applies this idea of parallel polis in various contexts including parallel education systems, childhoods and discourses of knowledges. Benda’s parallel polis is a significant concept as it recognises life outside the public domain, and contributes to the theorisation of the tension between private and public discourses. A political system, in which the construct of parallel polis seems to be the only way to explore alternative knowledges, led Vohryzek to refer to this system as a period of ‘perpetuum silentium’ (Vohryzek, 1985: 200). The notion of the parallel polis creates a possibility for small groups of citizens to act upon events in a radically different way from other citizens in the public domain. However, as Lukes (1985) claims, we should consider that dissidents ‘are few and isolated just because they speak aloud, and reflect upon, what everyone thinks’ (p.18).

The idea of parallel polis is developed within the lines of Havel’s philosophy, where complex power relations penetrate the whole society and shape the way citizens work and live, and children learn. Within these power relations the focus is not on how one political or social group uses power over the other group, but rather on how the power relations produce the dynamics between these groups. As the possibility of a parallel polis demonstrates, it is also less about the directly oppressive nature of power, but about power being harnessed and exploited to create spaces of resistance through subjugated knowledges. Havel then isolates ideology as an essential mechanism of power, as it gives it a purpose, it provides its identity, and connects power to rules and structures. Ideology was something that all citizens, including children, experienced as an inseparable influence on their everyday life. Furthermore, Kusý (1985) refers to the notion of ideology as a binding element in power relations, which functions as an ‘as if’ phenomenon:

In its entire spirit and thrust, real socialism is an ideology als ob, an ideology of as if: those who preach it behave as if the ideological kingdom of real socialism existed in ‘what we have here now!’ as if they had, in all earnestness, convinced the nation of its existence; the nation behaves as if it believed it, as if it were convinced that it lived in accordance with this ideologically real socialism. (p.164)

In Havel’s analyses of these complex power relations, every citizen or group of people had access to power in the post-totalitarian society. He does not necessarily deny the traditional, top-down model of power, as Foucault (1982) tends to, as he notes how some citizens are considered to be powerful and others powerless. The dissidents (citizens who opted to live outside of the dominant, public discourse, allegedly outside the reach of ideology) were powerless when faced with the machinery of post-totalitarianism. Havel is very cautious about the use of the term dissident (which would perhaps create dichotomous categories such as ‘us’ and ‘them’), and rather considers them as those who made the shift from the private to the public sphere. For dissidents, power takes on a different form, structure and flavour than it does, for example, for a member of the Communist Party who is a published writer (however, it is important to acknowledge the multiple subjectivities even within these categories). Dissidents exploit the fluid and free nature of power that they harness and have access to. This ‘power of the powerless’ creates the possibility to provide pressure and to produce an anomaly in the greyness of everyday life. I do not argue the perspectives of either the powerful or the powerless; my focus in this editorial is on citizens’ relations with policy within both public and private domains, that are at the same time a part of the system and outside of it, being neither powerful nor powerlessness, but experiencing and immersed in the tension in between.

For Havel, substantial changes in the power relations within post-totalitarian society justify the shift from the traditional terminology associated with communism in the Eastern Bloc, such as totalitarianism or dictatorship. Havel’s (1985) concern with these traditional terms is that they detract from the meaning of power relations, as they focus only on a description of the traditional dictatorship. These dictatorship-like models of governance are usually connected with the cult of leaders, local lives, cultures and experiences, and are not dependent on any particular ideology. On the other hand, post-totalitarianism is bound by an extremely multifaceted ‘network of manipulatory instruments’ (p.24) that is supported by a ‘precise, logical, structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology’ (p.25), that responds to the scientific model of post-totalitarian society discussed earlier. Havel (1985) further explains that the post-totalitarian system:

… offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. (p.25)

According to Havel (1985) the traditional features of the dictatorship-like system, such as the ‘revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence’ (p.26) disappeared in post-totalitarianism. The post-totalitarian system operated like a business with its investments. The system itself needed to rationalize and evolve. Post-totalitarianism was effective in controlling and disciplining citizens, as everything, including factories and shops, was state owned and centrally planned, removing any economic profit for the individual citizens (Turek, 1999). This aspect of self-reflection and self-transformation of the system is an important feature of the post-totalitarian society. The system possessed, as Havel (1985) argued, an ‘unprecedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself’ (p.26). This was particularly visible in the investment in the prison systems, police, state security agents and the bureaucracy of the state. Havel noted that the post-totalitarian system had become ‘simply another form of the consumer and industrial society’ (p.27). This capacity to act like a business that invests in certain projects aimed at controlling citizens was a pre-requisite for the new post-totalitarian system. While it still had some of the totalitarian features, this shift in power represented how it had evolved and now behaved in a different mode. There seems to be a striking resemblance between Havel’s take on the post-totalitarian system and the current neoliberal system.

It is Havel’s thinking about power, ideology and citizens that may lead us to a different way of thinking around policy, and research on policy. Havel’s citizens – described as victims, supporters and rebels all at the very same time – are powerful metaphors that could fit within our current thinking around policy and policies in education. The future of policy in education could perhaps be different, and this journal has provided substantial contributions to it. We hope that it will continue to do so. In this sense, let us be reminded of why this journal is called Policy Futures in Education, as our SAGE website claims:

Why policy futures in education? The shift of gravity in politics and public policy has moved beyond the post-war welfare state settlement with its institutionalised compromise between the demands of capital and labour. Neoliberalism, with an emphasis on privatisation of public assets and services, has dominated Anglo-American politics over the last 20 years and continues to exert a strong influence on Third Way politics and policies. Globalisation, underwritten by developments in telecommunications and information technologies and the ideology of ‘free trade’ agreements, has continued apace, promoting a form of world economic integration. There has been a progressive automation of the tertiary sector and a shift to service-oriented industries, which has accompanied the rise of the ‘knowledge economy’. At the same time, state education at all levels is now open to competition from non-traditional providers, as evidenced by the recent GATS agreement, and teachers’ work has been reconceptualised. National governments, under the banners of ‘choice’ and ‘diversity’, are experimenting with new forms of schools and education that are based on customised responses to individual needs. The Labour Government in the United Kingdom, for instance, has talked of the ‘end of the comprehensive era’ – the end of mass schooling as we know it, and seeks to develop a range of specialist schools. All of these factors and trends, in their complex interaction, have increased the significance of education both as one of the leading services of the future and as one of the few governmental means through which issues of social inclusion, social cohesion, national culture and identity, and citizenship can be addressed. Policy Futures in Education intends to highlight these policy issues and to address the question of educational futures in all its policy aspects.

In this sense, in the years ahead the focus for Policy Futures in Education remains its international and futures orientation. It is continuously committed to promoting debate in education among university academics, practising policy analysts in government and local government, national and international policy advisors, politicians, members of policy think-tanks and world policy agencies. We are keen to maintain the journal’s strong interdisciplinary and experimental focus, and encourage innovative thinking around policy from multiple perspectives and actors. We want it to be relevant to the present, while also acknowledging its history and being open to its future. The current refugee crises in Europe, concern about children’s rights and poverty around the world, the challenges in the educational policy in the US, are just some of the pressing concerns that we are very keen to explore in the coming 14:2 volumes.

In Auckland, January 2016