Education Policy E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
- Sprache: Englisch
Education Policy sees 12 philosophers of education critique current and recent UK educational policies relating to higher education and faith-based education, assessment, the teaching of reading, vocational and civic education, teacher education, the influence of Europe and the idea of the 'Big Society'. * Twelve philosophers of education subject elements of current and recent UK educational policy to critique * Forthright and critical, the contributors are unafraid to challenge current orthodoxies * Offers thought-provoking insights into modern education policy * Wide-ranging topics cover higher education and faith-based education, assessment, the teaching of reading, vocational and civic education, teacher education, the influence of Europe and the idea of the 'Big Society'
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Seitenzahl: 422
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series
Title page
Copyright page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1: The Role of Policy in Philosophy of Education: An Argument and an Illustration
I
II
Powerful Knowledge
Aims
2: Alluring Ideas: Cherry Picking Policy from Around the World
The Growth of Policy Borrowing, International Data and Seductive Political ‘Solutions’
The Origins of Contemporary Policy Borrowing
Types of Policy Borrowing
What Philosophy of Education Can Bring to the Discourse of Policy Borrowing
Conclusion
3: ‘The Only Answer is Innovation …’: Europe, Policy and the Big Society
Introduction
From the Lisbon Strategy to Innovation Union
The Big Society
Conclusion
4: A New Dawn for Faith-Based Education? Opportunities for Religious Organisations in the UK's New School System
Religious Organisations and School Management
Religious Organisations and the Curriculum
A Proposal
Non-Confessional Faith-Based Curricula
5: A Monstrous Regimen of Synthetic Phonics: Fantasies of Research-Based Teaching ‘Methods’ versus Real Teaching
Introduction
Phonemes and Beyond
The Skill of Teaching Synthetic Phonics as Part of an Effective Teaching Technology?
Harming Pupils Who are Beyond the Beginning Stage of Reading?
6: The Future of Teacher Education
Introduction
Contexts for Engagement and Influence: Teacher Education Policies in the UK
The Relevance of Philosophy for Policy Formation
Philosophy and Teacher Education Policy and Practice: Examples from the PPfTE Initiative
The Modesty of Philosophy
Conclusion
7: Two Concepts of Assessment
Introduction
Knowing Other Minds
The Right/Wrong Scenario
Prescriptive and Expansive Modes of Assessment
8: Vocational and Civic Education: Whither British Policy?
Introduction: The Current Crisis in British VET
An Outline of the Relationship between Education and Training
A Brief Review of British VET Policy
The Decline of Apprenticeship and the Rise of Neets
The Leitch Review (2006) and the Wolf Report (2011)
Towards a Radical Policy for English VET
The Connection between VET and Schooling
What We do and What Our Neighbours Do
9: Education under the Heel of Caesar: Reading UK Higher Education Reform through Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Introduction
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
The White Paper: Students at the Heart of the System
Pax Goveana
10: Improving the Student Experience
Policy Proposals to Improve Student Experience
Some Obvious Criticisms
Without Contraries is no Progression
Economies of Experience
How to Improve the Student Experience
11: University Futures
Introduction
The Language of Economics
The Market
Language and Recovery
12: What Lessons Can We Learn?
I
II
Index
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.
Titles in the series include:
This edition first published 2013
Originally published as Volume 46, Issue 4 of The Journal of Philosophy of Education
Chapters © 2013 The Authors
Editorial organization © 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Education policy : philosophical critique / edited by Richard Smith.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-68058-2 (pbk.)
1. Education and state–Philosophy. I. Smith, Richard (Richard D.) editor of compilation.
LC71.E324 2013
379–dc23
2013017205
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Anselm Kiefer, Twilight of the West (Abendland), 1989, lead sheet, synthetic polymer paint, ash, plaster, cement, earth, varnish on canvas and wood, 400 × 380 × 12 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1989. © Anselm Kiefer.
Cover design by Design Deluxe.
Notes on Contributors
Michael Hand
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Email: [email protected]
W. A. Hart
120 Ballinlea Road, Armoy, Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland BT53 8TY, UK
Email: [email protected]
Naomi Hodgson
Centre for Philosophy, London University Institute of Education, London WC1H 0AL, UK, and Laboratory for Education and Society, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Email: [email protected]
Gerard Lum
Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, UK
Email: [email protected]
Alis Oancea
University of Oxford Department of Education, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK
Email: [email protected]
Janet Orchard
Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Helen Wodehouse Building, 35 Berkeley Square, Clifton BS8 1JA, UK
Email: [email protected]
Elizabeth Staddon
Centre for Learning and Academic Development, G7 Watson Building, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Email: [email protected]
Paul Standish
Centre for Philosophy, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H0AL, UK
Email: [email protected]
John White
Institute of Education, London University, London WC1H 0AL, UK
Email: [email protected]
Christopher Winch
Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, Waterloo Bridge Road, London SE1 9NH, UK
Email: [email protected]
Carrie Winstanley
Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PU, UK
Email: [email protected]
Introduction
Richard Smith
Education as a public activity is inescapably political. There are different and competing views about what constitutes the good life, about human nature, about justice and equality, about what is worth learning and why, and about the purposes of education in relation to these. Accordingly it is entirely proper in a democracy that education policy should be created by the people's elected representatives in parliament, even if the thought that it would be good to keep politics out of education from time to time holds its attractions.
That thought, however, is made more tempting, in the UK at least, by a number of tendencies, several of which have their counterparts elsewhere in the world. First, a profound cynicism increasingly colours people's view of politicians and their motives. In the UK this cynicism was fuelled by the recent scandal in which members of parliament of all colours were discovered to have claimed expenses that ranged from the technically illegitimate to the outrageous, giving rise to the suspicion that they had entered politics less in order to serve than, in a phrase commonly used at the time, to ‘fill their boots’. Some mitigation may be urged on account of the complexity of the regulations applying to parliamentary expenses and the readiness with which many Members of Parliament repaid money claimed when they discovered their mistakes, but this was a powerful blow to public willingness to take politicians and policy at face value.
Second, the readiness with which policies have been ‘borrowed’ from other countries—as if school systems from 1990s Sweden could be transferred unproblematically to present-day inner cities of the UK, or mathematics programmes that had proved their worth in Korea would automatically do the same in Devon—has suggested to some that the UK policy-making process is now characterised by a deep unwillingness to listen to advice from within, whether from teachers, researchers or anyone else: as if the entire UK ‘educational establishment’, as it is sometimes described, had been written off as a potential source of professional knowledge and advice. And this ‘policy tourism’ (see Carrie Winstanley, Chapter 2) is encouraged by international evaluations such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) which lend themselves to the supposition that features of particular national systems can be imported like foreign cars: as if education policy could require little more than reading off ‘what works’ from various league tables and adopting it without much further thought on the part of those charged with making policy.
Third—and again a tendency not confined to any one political party in the UK—there has been a steady dismantling of the complex checks and balances by which power used to be diffused in education, in favour of concentration of power in the centre. In the case of schools, for example, the power of central government in determining curriculum content and in managing systems of school inspection used to be balanced by, among other bodies, local education authorities, which had their own inspectors and advisers. Recent governments, however, have sponsored the growth of Academy Schools, now numbering nearly half of all secondary schools, which are answerable only to the Secretary of State, and the role of local authorities has been steadily diminished. Where the term ‘policy’ was once naturally taken to include the policies of particularly schools (see John White, Chapter 1) it is thus now more readily applied to government policy, extending to ever more detail. It was famously declared over 60 years ago by a UK Minister of State for Education that ‘Minister knows nowt about curriculum’. In contrast with this principled agnosticism central government now largely determines the content of the curriculum (and sometimes the way in which it is taught: see Andrew Davis, Chapter 5, and Michael Hand, Chapter 4, for different views on some of the implications here); even more than that, individual Ministers are prone to making curriculum recommendations (most recently that primary children should learn ‘times tables’ by heart, and should have the option to study Latin: Mail Online, 2012) on the basis of little more than personal taste and instinct.
Fourth, such pronouncements may of course actually have other functions than to indicate the direction of policy. When for example Michael Gove, the current Minister for Education, proposed a return to differentiated examinations for 16-year-olds, with the academically able taking traditional and now long-discontinued ‘O’-level style examinations, it was widely reported that this was to be understood less as a firm shift in education policy than as a bid for the support of the Conservative right wing as he positioned himself for a possible attempt to secure the party leadership. He was, it was said, ‘on manoeuvres’ (Education for Everyone, 2012). Similar confusions of policy with what might be called political game-playing have been detected in other areas, as when the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, appeared to propose removal of housing benefit from unemployed 25-year-olds, thus offering them little prospect but to live with their parents. This too was construed as an attempt to win favour with his party's less liberal elements since there was no prospect of the measure being passed into law in the lifetime of the current parliament. Of course both Gove and Cameron may well have been signalling genuine policy initiatives: the interesting point is that ‘going on manoeuvres’ has become so common that even experienced commentators cannot readily distinguish it from policy-making. This does nothing to reassure the wider public that the policy announcements that they hear or read about are based on serious thought, let alone evidence, about education or the wellbeing of the country as a whole.
Fifth, it is sometimes suspected that what passes for policy—here to speak only of education—conceals a different kind of manoeuvring, which is the securing by politicians of lucrative opportunities for themselves and their associates in the fields in which they might have been supposed to be serving the public good. Examples can be found, again, from both ends of the political spectrum. Michael Barber, whose career includes time as Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards during the Labour premiership of Tony Blair, is at present the Chief Education Advisor to Pearson plc, generally described as the world's largest learning company and the world's largest book publisher. His other post-political appointments include head of the global education practice at the management consultancy McKinsey. The serving Minister of State for Education, it has emerged, has met regularly with his ex-employer, Rupert Murdoch (New Statesman, 2011), whose News Corp has an interest in various educational initiatives. In neither case, it must be emphasised, is there any evidence of impropriety, and of course it is natural for an experienced professional to continue working in a field in which he or she is knowledgeable and experienced. It might be wished, nevertheless, that more was done to protect education policy from the darker forces of cynicism, and when government is in the process of legislating to enable ‘for profit’ providers to set up in higher education, or when profit-making schools seem likely to become more than theoretical possibilities (New Statesman, 2012), the need to demonstrate that policy is uncontaminated by any form of opportunism is especially acute.
In The Predator State (2008) James K. Galbraith, writing about moves in the USA to privatise Social Security and to organise Medicare for the benefit of drug companies, takes issue with the familiar neoliberal claim that such initiatives are essentially manifestations of a political policy of rolling back the over-weening state. They are, he insists, rather ‘the systematic abuse of public institutions for private profit or, equivalently, the systematic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients’ (p. xix). While we may not have quite reached this state of affairs in the UK, Galbraith's thesis is a reminder of how easily in a globalised world policies rapidly cross national boundaries. As Sophie Ward (Chapter 9) writes, predation tends to pose as benign, universal common sense, from the pax Romana, violently imposed by Rome on its subject peoples, to the present day. It does this most successfully in our own time of course by speaking the language of ‘the market’, which it has done so relentlessly that this can seem to be the only legitimate language in which to speak about serious matters like politics and policies. It serves, as Galbraith notes, in large part ‘as a device for corralling the opposition, restricting the flow of thought, shrinking the sphere of admissible debate’ (ibid., p. xvii). Political alienation is then bred of the inability to find words for what needs to be said: for the intrinsic value of education, the emancipation of the human spirit, the widening of horizons, the cultivation of generous sensibility, the idea of the university (Staddon and Standish, Chapter 10), vocational education that is genuinely educational (Winch, Chapter 8).
An earlier Special Issue of this Journal (2008) titled Evidence-based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy? examined the many different ways in which educational research can lead to or affect policy. The demand that such policy should be evidence-based seems now to be more muted than in recent years, perhaps as a result of increasing disenchantment with the usefulness for policy of educational research itself. Education policy still stands in need of analysis and discussion, however, and this is the theme of this book. Our contributors, being philosophers, attempt—to borrow words from Galbraith (above)—to keep open the flow of thought and widen the sphere of admissible debate.
References
Education for Everyone (2012) Gove on Manoeuvres, 26 June. Online at: http://educevery.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/gove-on-manoeuvres/
Galbraith, J. K. (2008) The Predator State (New York, Free Press).
Mail Online (2012) Gove on a Mission to Restore Times Tables: Primary Schools Told to Return to Traditional Values, 10 June. Online at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157152/Gove-mission-restore-times-tables-Primary-schools-told-return-traditional-values.html
New Statesman (2011) What Gove's Meetings with Murdoch Tell Us: Is News Corp Looking to Set Up its Own Free Schools? (The Staggers blog, 27 July). Online at: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/07/murdoch-news-education
New Statesman (2012) Gove Reveals Plan for Profit-Making Schools: Education Secretary Declares that Free Schools ‘Could’ Become For-Profit (The Staggers blog, 29 May). Online at: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/staggers/2012/05/gove-reveals-plan-profit-making-schools
1
The Role of Policy in Philosophy of Education: An Argument and an Illustration
John White
Most of this chapter is a critique of a recent piece of British government policy-making: The Framework for the National Curriculum: A Report by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review (DfE, December 2011). But to set this in historical context, I begin with a discussion of the role of philosophy of education in UK policy-making since the 1960s.
I
This essay is a contribution to a Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (JOPE) on educational policy. That there is such a Special Issue may well not seem remarkable, no more remarkable than the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain's creation of the policy-orientated Impact series in 1999. The last three Special Issues have been on a range of subjects: methods of philosophising about education, the ethics of teaching, philosophy for children. Educational policy may seem to be a topic on all fours with these: that is, no more than a specialised interest that some, but not others, in our community share.
1960–1985
In earlier decades, the idea that educational policy could be a minority interest within our field would have made far less sense. To see this, we have to go back to the 1960s. My account is about the UK, but may have resonance in other countries.
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