Abstract
Introduction and chapter descriptions
This book is based principally on the author’s rich lifelong experience working in New Zealand higher education. The issues raised are nevertheless made relevant to a much wider range of comparable situations beyond the author’s immediate context of discussion. Highlighted in the introductory chapter are key observations on the themes and motifs which are followed through thoroughly in the book.
The treating of higher education as a business undertaking, as is appropriately observed early in the book, draws attention to the way time and money are commonly set aside for institutional branding and marketing, while the system itself is constantly subject to repeated drives “to extract ever-greater efficiencies” as part of maximizing “quantifiable outputs relative to inputs” (p. 2). As part of such an arrangement, academics are put into a situation where they are obliged to be “entrepreneurial” in the way they are forced to prioritize research that is more likely to attract funding from external sources. Readers are told that the book will focus on the way performativity is both an expression and outcome of a neoliberal and managerial mindset. Readers are also alerted to the fact that this emphasis on performativity results in distorted notions of what “worthwhile” research means, not least given the oppressiveness of work environments so fashioned. In seeking to discuss the ways in which top-down policy making can lead to such oppressive outcomes, the author suggests that philosophy can potentially provide an answer to the problems created by performativity, and this is reflected in the way the book is structured. The first four chapters focus on policy while the last three turn their focus to philosophy.
Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 1 problematizes the culture of reliance on numbers and big data now ever present in discussions concerning education, whereas the author argues that what matters most in education or for that matter in human life itself, needs to be found in their immeasurable aspects. In instances which are now more common than desirable where questions of truth are subservient to questions of “what sells” (p. 8), economic goals are seen to dominate education agendas, giving rise to the dictum or mantra “perform, produce, and prosper” (p. 16). Drawing on Jean-Francios Lyotard’s famous work, The Postmodern Condition, the author highlights the way evidence-based calibrations of performance and rankings can become an obsessive aspect of a culture which routinely priorities scientific evidential knowledge over narrative knowledge. In the meantime, the ends of higher education are seen as becoming “functional rather than idealistic” (p. 11), concerned mainly with “improvements in efficiency and performance” rather than truth and justice (p. 12). Part of this impetus towards efficiency, according to the author, is the growth of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses, which are distributed widely “beyond” the Professor—via online platforms’ (p. 13). Although MOOCs may be part of the efforts of universities to democratize education, they may also be “shop windows” for them to compete in the marketplace (p. 14).
Chapter 2 follows up on the “stark realities” presented by this emphasis on performance highlighted in the introductory chapter. The author describes how the Performance-based Research Fund or PBRF, used in the author’s case in New Zealand universities, deploys language that reduces research to a series of “outputs” in machine like fashion. As part of the author’s discussion on what he refers to as “a form of academic dystopia” (p. 23), the author again refers to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which provides an almost prophetic if also dystopic account of the drastic changes that would take place in social, economic, and educational life as a result of policy initiatives which placed unnecessary emphases on performativity and measurement. In the face of these drastic changes, the nature of knowledge itself would undergo fundamental shifts, becoming at once commercialized as well as “a key force of production” in postmodern societies given to a technoscientific orientation (p. 24). Knowledge then becomes a commodified form that is hardly distinguishable from information. Reconstrued thus as information, “knowledge can be traded and exchanged” (p. 31). Meanwhile, university faculty members are subject to the pressures of conforming to PBRF assessment, which is a systematized and standardized means of measuring research output, applied alongside “the widespread use of journal rankings and citation indices” (p. 31).
Chapter 3 then traces how the internet has changed the nature of academic communication over the last two decades as has the use of performance-based funding systems to measure research output, where metrics and measurements of “impact” are given attention and credence by both decision makers and even the academic community itself. The author notes that “the language of ‘impact’ may encourage some academics to be more strategic in their scholarly efforts,” leading them to become more conscious of journal rankings and citation indices (p. 53). As print journals are said to be increasingly expensive to purchase, the internet is seen as having facilitated what has turned out to be a smooth and seamless transition to digital publication. Web-based publication, according to the author, opens the prospect of academic works being updated regularly, while making scholarly dialog ever the “more immediate and more sustained” (p. 50), even though the time-honored peer reviewing process is one that the author acknowledges to be “imperfect” (p. 49). The latter process relies heavily on “a sense of trust in the fairness and competence of other scholars” and the “goodwill, understanding, and actions of editors” (p. 49). As such, it is to be admitted that editors may “deliberately or unconsciously select reviewers who are likely to be hostile” to a manuscript and “looking for reasons to reject a paper rather than reasons to accept it” (p. 49).
The next chapter, Chapter 4, then critiques the way prevailing discourses link the quality of tertiary education with productivity, choice, and competition, as part of the promotion of wellbeing. Wellbeing is linked reductively to efficiency, productivity, and prosperity and is seen to be influenced in this particularized way by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) so-called “Better Life” initiative. In this inverted way, wellbeing is ironically used as a means to (supposedly) improve economic performance and legitimate regularized lifestyles which are ultimately structured by neoliberal global capitalist ideologies. Meanwhile, maladies like managerialism, marketization, not to mention academic entrepreneurialism, are sustained and tolerated—all in the name or guise of advancing a knowledge economy and society.
Turning to philosophy of education in Chapter 5, the author makes a point of noting that this is as underappreciated an area of study (especially among institutional leaders) as its noticeable omission in tertiary education policy documents and in teacher education programs. In societies dominated by neoliberal ideologies, the area suffers greatly in the fewness of university positions advertised, and in its perceived “lack of exchange value in the market” (p. 79). The author argues that philosophy of education needs to be appreciated “in the light of broader social, economic, and educational changes” (p. 78) and should not only be seen as a disciplinary area of university study but as a way of life that can be promoted, especially among younger educators being mentored into the profession.
Chapter 6 turns the book’s focus onto the work of famed critical educator Paulo Freire as a way of imagining an alternative to the dominant if dehumanizing ideologies described in the earlier chapters. The chapter starts with a careful examination of what might be meant by critical pedagogy before duly attending to important aspects of Freire’s work including concerns with humanization and dehumanization, hope, praxis, liberation, and problem posing education. Important attributes that run through Freire’s work are discussed, with particular reference to the need to understand that humans are incomplete beings who themselves will “never know completely, or finally, or absolutely” (p. 91), just as “knowledge and knowing [too] are necessarily incomplete” (p. 92).
In Chapter 7, the final chapter, the author provides a storied account of his own struggles and successes given the challenges outlined in the first six chapters. Engaging with issues relating to philosophy of education means that scholars like the author are said to have to live with a kind of “restlessness” in the face of various aspects of dehumanization that come with rampant competition, managerialism, and measurement. Such a form of “restlessness” is one that challenges as well as motivates educational philosophers to pose problems and questions which need addressing, on an ongoing basis.
Observations and comments
The author’s observation that younger scholars may know little else apart from managerialism in their professional lives is candid but at the same time sobering if not saddening. The thought that a callous response like “of course knowledge is ‘bought’ and ‘sold’” might be viewed in resigned manner (“so what?”) is equally thought-provoking (p. 1), as would be the way the so-called “impact” of scholarly knowledge is widely assessed using “quantitative measures of academic performance” to which it is “ill-suited” (p. 50). The strength of the author’s candid discussion of the less savory aspects of academic measurement lies in the way readers may feel a sense of outrage, for example, when it is made known that “one’s intellectual worth” may well be calculated “in terms of dollars generated” (p. 52). Yet, despite the depth of the author’s concerns with managerialism, marketization, and other aspects of regularization and oppression, readers are allowed to weigh these concerns against observations of how the still small voice of knowledge in its “traditional, humanistic sense” (p. 15) or “humanistic knowledge,” is yet to be “entirely extinguished,” despite being “under attack or devalued or ignored” (p. 16).
A welcome aspect of the book’s approach to philosophy of education is its characteristically accessible and unintimidating way in which the subject is treated. Philosophy itself is treated not just as a domain of scholarly activity but a way of life that gives priority to the “need to keep inquiring [and] keep probing” (p. 3). People committed to such a way of living will “value knowledge and education not for the income they can generate” and appreciate that “what matters most in education, and in human life more generally, is immeasurable” (p. 3). The ups and downs as well as ebbs and flows in interest in philosophy of education are traced with a sensitivity and sense of involvement of a writer who is wholly dedicated and committed to the area. This comes across especially clearly in Chapter 5 of the book.
Another particularly powerful part of the book is the final chapter where the author tells his own story in a manner that is both down to earth and humanizing in effect and affect. It is a story that illustrates perfectly how philosophy and pedagogy interact at significant points in the life of a university academic, attesting to how both areas of study and practice can work in combination to bring about interesting educational outcomes for both the storyteller and people around him. Thus, in virtually and practically every page of the book, readers will come across perceptions and observations which would only come from someone who has worked for a long time in the tertiary education sector. These are acute perceptions and observations which are authenticated by the author’s own situated story, told in Chapter 7.
Overall, readers will find this book to be a refreshingly thought-provoking read for it way it represents some of the colder and inescapably uglier realities of tertiary education carried out within a neoliberal order of hegemony.
ORCID iD
Glenn Toh https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7106-6283