Global politics and local impacts on educational policy

Philosophers of education have traditionally pushed debates, and brought ontological and epistemological as well as axiological topics to our contemporary debates in societies around the world. In 2019, we have lost two great professors of philosophy whose work influenced and shaped their fields and the educational discourse. Both were very well known in their countries and internationally. Tullio Gregory, the Italian philosopher who kept philosophy at the centre of contemporary reflection, passed away earlier this year at the age of 90. On the other side of the world, Professor Jawaid Bhutto, Sindhi intellectual and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Sindh, Pakistan, was killed in Washington, DC, at the age of 64. The Policy Futures in Education editorial team wishes to pay homage to these two great thinkers, whose work has influenced the philosophical and educational world.

Alongside the above events, reflecting on how 2019 has begun more generally one notes the turmoil unfurling across politics, society and education (see for instance prior editorial Arndt & Tesar, 2018). For a number of years, universities, NGOs and think tanks have been issuing research reports, pedagogical tools and resources focused on education, wellbeing and social ideas that are aimed at improving schools and education, reducing the impact of governments’ policies and substituting the function of state-funded and run organisations. While the range of ideas they have produced is broad, we are yet to see the systematic impact on inequities in the education system of this recent shift. Indigenous colonised populations are still struggling from past injustices, and their communities struggle with chronic underachievement in education and fail to achieve university entrance or, once at university, to succeed in their studies at the same rate as their white peers.

We cannot discuss this shift in educational discourse without acknowledging the current socio-political turmoil that is visible across the world and is disseminated to us daily through the media. With staggering strength and perhaps unseen intensity, the news channels and social media are flooded with shorter or longer stories of inequalities, disasters and tragedies from the West and the rest of the world. It is troubling to hear the narratives of growing threats of war conflicts between two nuclear power nations –India and Pakistan – over the contested region of Kashmir. The whole world is watching President Trump’s attempts to bring North Korea’s leader into a (productive) dialogue; and then live on screens the whole world watches as the two leaders, perhaps not unlike two kids in kindergarten, leave the summit with frowning faces and not communicating with anyone. The failed summit is also a reminder of how one of these leaders is threatening to use weapons while the other is trying desperately to develop a nuclear arsenal. The post-election situation in Venezuela remains dire, a threat to democracy and a fair and socially just government. Worldwide there is the growth of far right, non-democratic forces, often most notably in countries that suffered the most under them 80 or so years ago. Anti-Semitism and xenophobia, once not allowed in public discourse, are becoming the new normality. It seems that towards the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the world is in trouble, and some people do look up to the educational policies that we have, and wonder how they may help us deal with such troubled times in the long term.

As Policy Futures in Education has discussed in the past (Tesar and Arndt, 2017), we live in the time of the Anthropocene, which means building our new relationship with the planet but it also has a strong influence on our educational futures. All of these events paint a very bleak picture in politics, society, ecology and education. The discrepancy between the reality and the ideal, and the gap between communities and different groups of citizens – social inequality – is deepening.

Concerns in academic conferences and publishing

In academia and in the field of academic publishing, the aggressive behaviour of predatory journals and publishers is more and more present. They thrive on the university culture of publish or perish, which pushes academics to research and publish in all tertiary institutions, including those where staff are designated as ‘teaching only’, and those that do not provide the necessary support for research development. More and more journals are promising to publish anything, fast (and for a fee), bypassing the rigorous peer review process (Peters and Tesar, 2015). Similarly, there are also conferences that are set up as events, less to advance research culture and disseminate knowledge, and more to create surplus and profit for the organisers. Journal editors receive a lot of plagiarised works in the educational sector (as the editor recently shared, one example, paradoxically, was an article focused on ethics). These increasing demands on both academics and teachers create a new pedagogical space where knowledge and the dissemination of new practices call for new ways of academic citizenship. We cannot be solving these new problems with old pedagogy. There are concerns in some institutions that those who teach and research in areas of teacher education, particularly professors, have not entered a classroom with children in years, or talked with teachers in depth. Moreover, many studies drawing global conclusions are based on local issues, trying to extrapolate common ways forward from a localised problem and site of study.

It seems that towards the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we are no closer to agreeing how we can identify the key problems and issues that education currently faces (and thus we are not able to suggest suitable solutions). We are too far entrenched in our individual paradigms and pedagogies, disciplines and fields, truths and ideas about what is right and correct. We can sometimes agree on a principle – but even that in the post-truth world can become problematic. This year’s largest educational conference in the world, the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, to be held in Toronto, is themed ‘Leveraging Education Research in a “Post-Truth” Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence’. It cites philosopher Hannah Arendt (1951) who argued:

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.

A post-truth world is a world that brings a number of challenges for educational policy. Who are educationalists, intellectuals, thinkers – all of those who care about education – and what do they do (and know)? Protecting the basic educational values and processes that we thought we had already negotiated and agreed upon, and rethinking some of our arrogant beliefs. We may all recall the policy suggestion from President Trump a couple of years back regarding how teachers should carry weapons to protect themselves, and their students, from the enemy. Protection from the enemy outside, and from the enemy within.

Académie Française

We do not need to paint only a bleak and dark picture. There is also a good story for education, with respect to the Académie Française, which since 1635 has had the duty to be an official authority on the question of language, and is charged with producing an official dictionary (albeit serves only an advisory ruling, not binding). The Académie Française has recently changed its position which prohibited the feminisation of job titles and now supports ‘all developments in the language aimed at recognising the place women have in society today’ (Henley, 2019). In one of the more intriguing turns of this year, an old and conservative institution is creating a fresh outlook and approach, perhaps offering a crack where a particular policy can appear. As such, amid stories in the post-truth educational and policy landscape, there do seem to be good stories offering a [small] route forward. It is thus, perhaps, that in 2019, it’s time to start defending education and education policy, and to seek and to amplify positive stories.