Category Archives: history

Education, social control, and subversion


Posted by Terry

Thinking about the role of the University today and our current project to develop a public sociology web site, I was reminded of a blog post I did about 3 years ago in March 2006 (http://eduspaces.net/terry/weblog/9030.html) which I have reproduced below.

Recently there has been some very interesting  discussion about the  purposes of education on Harold Jarche’s blog  Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars and a related post by Christopher Sessum, Competing Paradigms and Educational Reform. This has got me thinking once more about the complex relationship between the State and the education system and the ambivalent position of the teacher.

Personally I tend to favour the term ‘discourse’ rather than paradigm. Discourses are processes. Discourses are not monolithic and coherent. They are made up of overlaying and intersecting ideas that are often in competition, and connect many different forms of knowledge and truth claims. There are usually different agendas in play promoted by competing power brokers and power seekers. They form the intersections of political, economic, ideological and ‘scientific’ interests and activities. Particular  ‘discursive formations’ have recognisable boundaries within which, for a while a least, they cohere.  Discourses only gain purchase on the real world and become effective through ‘practices’. Discourses feed into government policy. This leads, in the case of educational policy, to a number of practices that implement  the policy through laws and regulations and funding procedures.  And at the end of the day it is schools, colleges, universities and their staff and students that one way or another implement the discourse informed education policies.

An example of this is the development of the educational discourse that culminated in the Butler Education Act of 1944 in the UK.  A variety of interlocking and overlapping ideologies and ‘sciences’ informed this discourse based on a variety of different related interests and institutions including educational ideas of the time, the dominant political ideology of the time, Keynesian economic theories and policies, the interests of key sectors of the economy, the psychologist Cyril Burt’s theories on IQ, and a number of other moral and philanthropic ideas. The practical implementation of this educational discourse, via the enactment of the Butler Education Act, was the so-called tripartite secondary education system, selection by the 11+ exam with its IQ testing component, and the creation of three different types of schools that corresponded with three innately different sorts of pupils and the perceived needs of three different sectors of the post WWII labour market. How neat!!.  Each type of school had a different curriculum suited to the supposed different abilities of the students and for their destined location in the labour market. In some respects the different curricula produced, ‘constructed’, three different types of students as specified by the practical implementation of the educational discourse thus showing the discourse to be ‘correct’ – an example of that well known social phenomenon, the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

The above story follows from a more general feature of the link between state education, economic structure and labour market requirements.  In the UK the development of the state education system was intimately linked to the gradual extension of the vote to all working men and the needs of the developing labour market in a rapidly expanding capitalist industrial economy. State education served the needs of the economy not just in terms of the skills required but also the political system – to produce ‘docile bodies’ that accept the distribution of power, the status quo, as legitimate. Political socialisation and social control were key components of state education right from the start. The extension of education to the masses was viewed with deep suspicion by the ‘natural’  and traditional ruling class.  The controlling aspect was seem as crucial to those that begrudgingly conceded that they were having to ‘educate our masters’ – the Duke of Wellington I think. Education has always had the dual role of both enabling and controlling and has always been a double-edged sword. Teaching individuals how to read so they can read the Bible and employers’ instructions always risked the possibility that they would also read subversive pamphlets if available. Whatever the other contradictions and tensions in education today I think this fundamental one between the enabling agenda and the controlling agenda is still very much in evidence. And it makes its presence felt in every bit of curriculum development and in every lecture theatre, tutorial room and classroom.

It is this double edged and contradictory nature of education that gives teachers and educators some opportunities to subvert  the dominant educational discourse. We teach the content of our disciplines and we police students’ conformity to the structures, procedures and expectations of  the institution. But we also help develop the critical and metacognitive skills that can let the genie out of the bottle. Once learning skills have been mastered and students develop a critical awareness of the constructed and provisional nature of much knowledge, then the focus, objectives, content of the learning beyond the institution can be chosen by individuals and communities they are part of.

Radically inclined teachers have a difficult task. We want to help our students achieve in the context of the dominant paradigm as described by Chris, learn the content, pass the exams, reproduce what is required in their assessment essays. This is driven by our desire to help students perform well in assessment and achieve their goals. However, the critical and autonomous learning skills we help students obtain can begin to develop their capacity for personal effectiveness and becoming critical citizens. This is how teachers can both live in and with the dominant paradigm at the same time as subverting it. The paradox is there is no conspiracy here; teaching and learning within the dominant educational discourse, preparing students for the fast changing knowledge and networked society, nurtures in its bosom the seeds of its own critique and subversion.

Or is this a rationalisation of collaboration? 


Anthropology: On Becoming Modern


Posted by Terry

In today’ edition of Science there is a section on human social evolution with 2 articles both suggesting a link between human social evolution and cultural development which is relatively autonomous with respect to biological evolution. One of them, Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior, claims that growing population density can account for the first appearance of ‘modern’ behaviour without appealing to genetic changes or changes in cognitive capacities. In particular this can account for the emergence of specialist cultural areas. Frankly I thought this was an idea Adam Smith came up with in the 18th century and Durkheim in the late 19thcentury. I will need to read these articles to see if they add anything to our existing sociological understanding of these matters. The earlier historical context may well be interesting but I suspect it would be a fairly unproblematic and minor extension of existing sociological knowledge.

Anthropology: On Becoming Modern (Ruth Mace)

Unlike other animals, humans cooperate with nonrelatives in coordinated actions, decorate their bodies, build complex artefacts(useful or otherwise), talk, and divide themselves into linguistic groups. To understand the evolutionary basis of such behaviors, anthropologists must consider not only issues connected to social evolution in animals, but also the implications of the possible coevolutionof genes and culture. Two articles in this issue examine aspects of human social evolution: On page 1293, Bowles(1) investigates the origins of altruism toward one’s own social group, while on page 1298, Powell et al. (2) study the emergence of cultural complexity. Based on empirical evidence and modeling, both studies suggest that the demographic structure of our ancestral populations determined how social evolution proceeded.

Link to articles via Leeds Uni login

Friday 5th June ‘Science in Action’ on BBC World service [summary and ‘listen again’]
“We humans pride ourselves on our culture. Our tools, our ideas and innovations, and our art. They’re all passed on within our societies, and help shape who we are. These so called ‘modern human behaviours’ appeared suddenly around 90 thousand years ago, but at different times in different geographical areas. Something must have been happening to prompt the change – but exactly what has been a mystery. Jon Stewart meets researchers who think they have solved the problem”. [podcast]


Hijacking the future (and the past)


Posted by Terry

On the day that I read the first essay (Modernity and the Planes of Historicity) in Koselleck’s Futures Past, I also discovered a book by Susan George, published last year, Hijacking America. In Koselleck’s essay he makes the point that, during the emergence and consolidation of the new European Nation States and their governments, ‘ownership’ of the future was wrested by the State out of the hands of the religious authorities. The religious conception of the future was “the certainty that the Last Judgement would enforce a simple alternative between Good and Evil through the establishment of a single principle of behaviour”. From this time on the State and its rational prognostications calculate the possibilities of different futures and became responsible for the future. Part of this take-over consisted in the State repressing alternative religious and political predictions and claims about the future (rather as had the Roman Catholic Church previously – heresy was now delimited by the State rather than the Church). It is at this point, on the cusp of modernity, that the previous age could be seen as and labelled ‘medieval’. Grotius, in 1625, considered that the wish to fulfil predictions was one of the causes of unjust wars. According to Koselleck, “The facility with which anticipations of devout Christians, or predictions of all kinds, could be transformed into political action had disappeared by 1650”.

Which brings me to Susan George’s book. According to the publisher’s blurb  the “American secular and religious right has made its “long march through the institutions” and changed the way Americans think. […] A broad alliance of neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and the religious right successfully manufactured a new common sense, assaulted Enlightenment values and targeted the top of society where culture is created and legitimized”.

Perhaps a clue here is the reference to an assault on Enlightenment values. Perhaps under the conditions of late modernity, when, according to Zygmunt Bauman, State based politics and power have become decoupled, the State has lost its monopoly hold on the future, and this is manifesting itself in the USA as a new ‘medievalism’. The predictions of some Christians, accompanied by freeloaders, carpet baggers and opportunists, are again being transformed into political action, defining heresy, and constructing the grounds of, from a secular viewpoint, unjust wars. The Christian Right in America have gone a long way in reclaiming the past through the successful promotion of Creationism (in its recent guise as intelligent design) through the education and political systems. Perhaps it is now in the business of reclaiming the future for its apocalyptic prophesy.