Abstract
As Kupfer says in her introduction, this book is about power over education and power in education, and how these affect today’s societies. Kupfer recalls Young’s Knowledge and Control (1971), where knowledge is evaluated in terms of its power to ‘enable people to participate in society’ (p. 2). This is a key theme of the book: that social transformation is enabled as ‘workers and intellectuals become conscious and develop counter discourses’ (p. 5). It is a theme that reminds us of Freire, whose ideas permeate each chapter: that it is not so much what we think or say, but what we do that is the measure of our learning.
This sleeves-rolled-up approach to learning is disturbingly at odds with Arendt’s view, succinctly examined in a chapter by Veck, that ‘the essence of … educational activity [is] to cherish and protect … the child against the world’, and that ‘the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that burst upon it with each new generation’ (p. 17). Veck grapples with this cotton-wool view of education, which can perhaps best be understood in the context of Arendt’s despairing vision of mid 20th-century Europe, where ‘the essential structure of all civilisations is at breaking point’ and ‘can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors’ (quoted in Clark, 2016, p. 7). Veck focuses attention on schools as sites of power – a more telling and enabling view.
Why do people – and specifically young people – collude in their own oppression? As this book brilliantly makes clear, answers to this question take us variously to Bourdieu and Foucault, and before them to Weber, Marx and Engels. Central to these accounts is the notion of belief: it is because we have internalised a view of ourselves instilled by a dominant hegemony that we go along with our oppression; we may not exactly like a view of ourselves as second rate, but somehow or other it seems right and proper. The culture that surrounds and defines us, and the education that the culture has fashioned to collude with its message reinforce in us a sense of subjection – that fundamentally we are all, more or less, members of Marx’s lumpenproletariat. This is bad, hopeless news!
It is a major strength of this book that this oppressive potential of education is so carefully analysed. In the chapters by Mayo, Williamson and Hodgson, we are offered a counterblast to the doom-and-gloom scenarios of Foucault et al. Foucault and his contemporaries carried out a ruthless analysis of our subjection, including an unsparing account of the way education – formal and informal – colludes to instil in us a dismal sense of ourselves, somewhat like headless dead sardines in the tin our cultures have made for us. But this is not where the story ends. Mayo appeals to Gramsci, emphasising the role of education to ‘foster among learners the consciousness, skills, knowledge and attitudes to operate effectively in the system with a view to collectively transforming it’ (p. 53), and Williamson takes us into the strange world of programming, arguing that we need to enable learners to get to grips with the power of the algorithm, with its ‘Do this, then do this, then do this, then do this … the result you desire will follow’ (p. 68). The contemporary site for this operation of power is the computer. Williamson strikingly shows that all of us – young and old – need to grasp how it is done, and what the risks and opportunities are of this new kind of programming.
Hodgson takes us back to Foucault for an analysis of the ‘how’ of power: ‘the ways in which discourses and practices constitute a mode of governmentality and thus a particular mode of subjectivation’ (p. 90). Her chapter ends with a crucially important reminder: things do not stay the same. ‘Shift, revise, rethink, adapt …’ (p.104) – these are the verbs that we need to have constantly to hand as we think about knowledge and power, so that research makes meaningful and relevant contributions to economic and social benefit.
By this stage in the book, a profound analysis and critique has been put forward of the relationships between power and education. This analysis is now applied specifically to gender (Ivinson), race (Chadderton) and language (Tarabini) – categories by which disadvantage has normally been understood. Chadderton’s argument is characteristic of the major strengths of these chapters. She shows how ‘new regimes of surveillance in UK secondary schools are having as their effect that certain groups are marginalised to the extent of being beyond the protection of the law’ (p. 133). She makes the claim that ‘in the case of the war on terror, it is Muslims or those who appear to be of Arab or Middle Eastern heritage who are “recognised” as less-than-human’ (p. 133). This is shocking, but these chapters are intended to shock. Their arguments are presented with meticulous care; there is no resisting their disturbing impact.
The final part of the book shifts the key. Motta and then Cole take us away from the European scene to look at emancipatory epistemologies in South America. They show us that the struggle goes on – that the agenda spelt out by Freire is far from being complete. They remind us of the immensely powerful potential of subversion. Policymakers may aim to harness education, educators and learners to the interests of the global market, but there are countercultural energies at work to recover and celebrate the people’s learning. There is an alternative education, characterised by ‘communal, co-operative and democratic living and learning … in an environment of freedom and of active participation of the children in their own learning’ (p. 208).