Abstract
In this volume, Simon Boxley brings together a number of his essays that will be of interest to critical pedagogues and those working within the Marxist tradition generally. Even as the volume focuses on schooling by and large, one leaves each essay realizing that there is so much more at stake. While some of the chapters are more accessible than others, Boxley’s analyses are always insightful and thought-provoking, his arguments cogent, and many of his examples are importantly jarring.
As regards such examples, I think of his discussion in Chapter 5 addressing the absurdity of the expansion of the testing and accountability regime into pre-school. The important points here are that the capitalist state does not invest in education from altruism and that the testing regime has precious little to do with benefitting children. Capitalist schooling is about the development of human capital. As Boxley rightly puts it, the “value [of the capacity to labour] has come to be measured by standardized testing arrangements in schools, operating as proxies for employability, and accounting for returns on the state's investment” (p. 137).
Chapter 1 – in which Boxley discusses the new technologies designed to drive the standards movement – primes the reader for Chapter 5 as well as other chapters because of the foundational work done. Thus, Chapter 1 may also be the most important, even as the basic premise of the chapter has been widely discussed. While Boxley frames the chapter within a Marxian extrapolation of the logic of capital, the chapter takes a decidedly Foucauldian bent related to governmentalities. One of the technologies that Boxley identifies is “the brutal truth of the regulative mechanisms of school self-evaluation” (p. 12). This, he explains, “resides in the deep penetration of the logic of capital into the operation of pedagogical enterprise” (p. 12). I would point out that such regulation is made possible by several other technologies identified by Ben Baez (2014) including information, statistics, databases, economy, and accountability. As Baez argues at one point: In the society of the statistic, it may be that to make any politically significant claim, we must resort to the database. The database allows us to dispense once and for all with the distinction between knowledge and information, for in the database, and perhaps because of it, knowledge as sets of organized statements that are transmitted systematically is becoming inseparable from its mode of communication, and today it may be impossible to make legitimate knowledge claims without the database…knowledge is being transformed into quantities of information, which then transforms relations between and among myriad institutions and individuals, all of which are being converted into data (pp. 79–80).
While one can hope that some of these essays might draw the interest of educational policy-makers more broadly, that would require that they suspend their ideological commitments, commitments that have simply become common sense for far too many people, a point that Boxley makes in Chapter 4. One of the ways that the dominant ideology functions is through, as Althusser (2014) argued, “the denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology” (p. 265). In this chapter, Boxley provides a number of cogent examples, provided by policy-makers in the UK, of how this phenomenon manifests itself. In a scheme to restructure schooling along market principles of competition, the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, proclaimed, this “is not about ideology. It’s an evidence-based, practical solution built on by successive governments…the new ideologues are the enemies of reform, the ones who put doctrine ahead of pupils’ interests” (p. 112).
Nevertheless, there are what should be incontrovertible policy implications. The most important aspects of Chapter 2, for example, are the very practical lists of principles for policy-makers generally and teacher educators specifically. A good example of the “green” policy implications of this essay is that schools should provide “free nutritious school food, prepared onsite with the use of locally sourced organic produce where possible” (p. 55). It is unfortunate that nourishment for poor children and other obvious things such as increased funding for education, smaller class sizes, and a rich and varied curriculum have, in fact, become “radical” ideas in our contemporary neoliberal moment.
Such radicality is the crux of Chapter 3. Here Boxley waxes quite poetic, building on the fact that critical educational studies must be somewhat covert so as not to be rendered “unmarketable.” Thus, critical educational studies and its students occupy a “world that lingers in the darkness where lovers and conspirators meet” (p. 95). Less poetically from my own experience in the US context, critical education studies are frequently smuggled in innocently as “policy studies.”
As the volume is a collection of stand-alone essays, one can come and go as one pleases. The chapters are organized chronologically as originally published. On the one hand, perhaps more thought could have been put into the organization. There are any number of connections among essays and some speak to each other in fairly straightforward ways. Here I think the volume could have benefitted from an explicit attempt to bring this forward, either through an introduction or some other mechanism such as short segues from one essay to the next. The foreword and afterword, by Bill Ayers and Peter McLaren, respectively, do this to some degree, but not as well or thoroughly as Boxley himself could have done. And that, of course, is not really the job of a foreword or afterword.
On the other hand, although not planned, to my mind, the volume actually does build in a very interesting way toward the final chapter. In this chapter (6), Boxley argues that we must “extend to all of the material universe and to all living things a sacred character, but without any requirement for categories such as god” (p. 147). (Here a nice connection could be made back to the discussion of ecosocialism in Chapter 2.) For Boxley, this is a socialist position that requires political development. I agree. However, part of Boxley’s point here is that such a project must take precedence over those seeking to co-opt religion to a socialist project. Strategically, it is probably better to view this as a “both/and” as opposed to an “either/or,” for many Christians (Boxley’s primary example) do attend to a Socialist Christ and are unlikely to accept no god at all. But, getting back to my original point, each of the essays prior to this one helps to set the many building blocks of Marxism (especially in Chapter 1) and Marxist analysis that make Boxley’s basic claim to what is needed for a just society much more obvious.
This volume will be an important read for doctoral students in social theory, philosophy of education, and policy studies. Boxley digs into some less familiar works, reminding us of Lenin, Lunacharsky, and Bogdanov, for example. Adding to this Boxley’s focused skill in engaging a Marxist analysis throughout, his essays should become important sources for scholars working in this area.